Writing Caterpillars/You and Me

Writer’s Thought for the Week: There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it's going to be a butterfly. ~ Buckminster Fuller 

Have you ever written a “caterpillar”?  I have.

Four years ago I wrote a humorous essay about a dental appointment during which I felt treated me like a much older person than I was. I targeted the essay for the “Back Page” section of the Smithsonian magazine. I submitted it, but never received a response. I followed up so I knew they received it. Submitting to Smithsonian, I knew I was aiming high, but I like to do that. I can always lower expectations if it’s not accepted.

Next I tried a local nonfiction writing contest. No luck there either.

I found You & Me, an online magazine that publishes medical essays, mostly humorous from the samples I read on their web site. According to their guidelines, my piece was too short so I did not submit it.

My critique group and I agreed that most of the essay was good, but the ending was flat. Before my next dental appointment, I rehearsed a speech to enlighten the staff on how older but not yet ancient people consider certain remarks condescending in case more such remarks were uttered. But I never received my “cue” at the next appointment so I never delivered my speech and this was nonfiction, so I could not ethically fabricate a different ending.

After that, the essay sat untouched inside my computer for several years. Prime beef may improve with age; untouched writing does not.

A few weeks ago, a fellow writer mentioned her success being published in You & Me and urged me to try it. I figured out I could pumped up my ending by including my thoughts as I rehearsed my speech on the way to my followup appointment. By adding other details, I increased the word length so it now met the low end of the required word range for You & Me. My e-mail query, submitted last Tuesday, received a positive response the next day. I submitted my essay that afternoon and received an acceptance and an agreement this weekend. I electronically signed the agreement this afternoon (Monday). I don’t know when it will be published, but I should receive a check with two to three weeks.

This isn’t the first time I breathed (wrote?) new life into an old piece. Some of my classmates were late bloomers; some of my writing is, too. My point is we all need to save our writing orphans that never found a home or were never finished. Who knows when the muse will deliver a new angle that will please a publisher?

You & Me publishes only nonfiction about the human aspects of dealing with medical issues. The preferred word length is 1,000 to 3,000 and they pay on acceptance.