Salut, Salon

Ever since I created My Parents Are Dead: What Now?, I’ve been writing more about the loss of my parents and how difficult it is to untangle their estate. I’m honored that Salon featured a personal essay of mine today: “My parents are dead—can I afford avocado toast now?”

On the homepage and everything! (I’m fairly certain everything they publish gets its moment on the homepage, but let’s pretend I’m special, just for the fun of it.)

Writing and pitching essays is so different from writing and publishing fiction. I came of age in the heyday of blogs and wrote plenty of my own. (I am eternally grateful Xanga has been obliterated from the internet so no one can witness my teenage musings.) Writing personal essays is like a combination of blogging and the copywriting I do for my day job. I linger over my fiction much more than I do essays.

And then there’s the publication process. Professional freelancers typically pitch ideas to editors and only write the essay or article once an editor takes them up on it. Since I have a full-time job, I prefer to write the essay beforehand and then pitch as if it were only an idea—that way if an editor does bite, I won’t get caught without time to write it.

And the timeline is so much faster for essays! I pitched this to Salon last Tuesday, and they published it four days later. They fast-tracked it because my draft was already written and polished, but still—if this were a short story, I’d be waiting months for a response, and then another few months until publication. Amazing what can happen when editors and writers are actually paid.

Anyway, I’m hoping to pitch more dead parents-related essays in an effort to get eyeballs on the website. The more people who find it, the more people I can hopefully help.