A Quick Answer

I have been freelancing short pieces--devotions, articles, short stories, etc--for many years now. In June of 2009, I attended a writers' conference where I sat in a workshop on freelance / article writing. I came home from that workshop determined to try my hand at it. I made my first submission in July of that year and got my first paying contract in the fall of the same year, and I've been doing it ever since. As a child I loved to go fishing with my dad and it feels a little like fishing to me: I cast my submission out in the waters of the unknown world of magazines and sometimes I reel in a catch. :) 

In all those years of sending out submissions, only a few times have I had a quick positive response. Oh, I've gotten a handful of quick negative responses where the editor fires back a "no thank you", "it's not a good fit for our magazine", or "we aren't accepting submissions right now" to me but out of what is fast becoming hundreds of published pieces (in other words, hundreds of times editors or magazines have said yes to my submissions) I can count on one hand the times those yeses have come quickly. Usually, I don't get a response for weeks and sometimes even months. 

One of those quick yeses happened yesterday. 

Two days ago, I saw a post on a Facebook page that is for people who live or have lived in my hometown of Bluefield, WV. The post had a picture of a prescription written by a doctor for an ice cream cone. The man posting it said that back in 1957, when he was five, he had been playing outside and ran into a yellow jackets' nest and gotten stung multiple times. His mother took him to the doctor who after checking him out decided all he needed was an ice cream cone to feel better. So the doctor wrote him a prescription for it and even gave him the dime he would need to buy it. 

That kind doctor, as it turned out, was my dad. 

A story this sweet just drives me to my keyboard to peck out a heartwarming human-interest article about it, esp if the doctor was my own sweet father. And that's exactly what I did. I whipped up a 750 word article and sent it along with some pictures to "Blue Ridge Country Magazine" and then I made supper for my family and went to bed. When I woke up the next morning, I had a "yes" waiting for me in my inbox. It will be published in spring or early summer of '24. 

I was able to let my almost 95 year old, still healthy father know and look forward to sending him a copy of the article when it comes out.