Thread by @biblioracle

I'm pretty sure I first mailed a story to the New Yorker sometime in 1991, being the sort of clueless young a-hole who thought that's what you do after you talk about it in your undergraduate fiction workshop. That process lasted until 1993 when I gave up on such things.

But! I just fired something into the NYer slush for the first time in over 25 years because I was pleased with what I'd done and even though I shall never hear from them (they only get in touch if they want to publish), one thing writers must do is submit their work.

Part of me thought I'd given up on trying to publish fiction, even though I continue to write it. Maybe this is the first step back. It's a fictionalized version of the apparent spiritual crisis of a prominent public intellectual whose biography resembles that of David Brooks.

I'll be submitting the story elsewhere too, but this felt like an important symbolic step for some reason, to reclaim some of the spirit that naive idiot of 25+ years ago, who wrote fiction because it was fun and didn't worry about what he could sell because who cared about that?

I've had much more success and made much more money publishing things other than fiction, but I'm trying to get back in touch with the kid who wanted to write fiction as a way to practice the magic of those who had given him such pleasure as a reader and wished to join the club.

I sometimes miss that naive idiot who would fix the typos on his college workshop story and then send it to the New Yorker. I mean, I'm glad I'm not him anymore, but I'd like to stop talking myself out of writing fiction because I'm worried about where it could be published.

I had great fun writing the story I sent to the New Yorker. I'm reminding myself that's what matters, and if I'm persistent, I can probably find a publication that likes it too. Not the New Yorker, most likely, but somewhere.

It's a really fun story, though. I tickle myself just thinking about some of the jokes, and then there's a turn that I didn't know was coming, and how awesome is that when it happens?

Something odd is happening with me writing fiction. After finishing the David Brooks story, this morning I was inspired to start on a close 3rd person story from the POV of someone a lot like Megyn Kelly in the moments before she has to apologize on air. 1500 words in an hour.

And if that wasn't enough, another 500 words from the POV of someone a lot like George Conway explaining to the world what's going on with his marriage to a counselor to a President he thinks is endangering the entire world.

I might be accidentally writing a story collection from the POV's of famous media people living in Trump's America. I can't imagine a big readership for them (though they're pretty entertaining, if I do say so myself), but my brain clearly needs to work on this stuff.

Just remembered I published a story from the close 3rd POV of Bristol Palin years ago. Maybe this stuff is my calling. Kind of a stupid calling, but what are you going to do? charlestoncitypaper.com/charleston/aur…

I can't believe I forgot about that☝️story. It's good! Why do we forget the good ones?