DATE: June 13, 8:21am
SUBJECT: Re: You have a website!
Dear Mr. Strickland,
I wasn’t expecting you to email back the first time, and I definitely wasn’t expecting to hear from you twice. This just made my day.
The interview didn’t go so well, unfortunately. I didn’t make it past the first round, which kind of sucks because it was an assistant editor position with a well-known children’s publisher.
I’ve gone on a handful of interviews within the past year, and I never make it very far in the process. For one, even though I know so much about children’s books, that knowledge leaves my brain as soon as I sit down and I just start blabbering. The other issue is that most interviewers don’t think I have enough experience, which isn’t wrong. For two years, I’ve been an editorial assistant at an adult nonfiction imprint. I spend my days reading manuscripts about plagues and genocides and dictators, among other topics. Working on a book about the Satanic Panic doesn’t clearly translate to working with children’s authors who could be the next Rick Riordan. At least that’s what I’m told during interviews.
Anyway, that’s my life career-wise. You said you were on assignment. If you’re not an author anymore, what do you do?
Sincerely,
Lily G.
FROM: Lily G. <[email protected]>
TO: N.R. Strickland <[email protected]>
DATE: June 13, 8:26am
SUBJECT: Re: You have a website!
Dear Mr. Strickland,
Please let me apologize for my last email. It was so presumptuous. I’m sure you don’t care to hear about my career problems. You don’t even have to respond. In fact, I hope you don’t, because it will save me a ton of embarrassment.
The email made me sound really ungrateful. I’m not, I swear. I have a job at one of the most well-known North American publishers. And I know how hard it is to break into publishing, especially if you’re Black. I applied to hundreds of positions for a year and got nowhere, until a distant, loopy connection through my mom’s church scored me an internship with my boss. Her assistant quit three weeks into my internship and she didn’t want to be bothered with another interview process, so she hired me. I got this job through dumb luck and timing.
I am grateful. The work is important. It’s just not the work I want to be doing, and reading that tough and depressing material every day is starting to get to me. Most days I don’t leave the office until after 7pm. I go to sleep dreaming about epidemics and assassinations.
I’m only 25 and there’s plenty of time for me to follow my dream to edit children’s books. I know that. I just keep thinking that this would be easier to get through if my boss was at least a semidecent person.
Sincerely,
Lily G.
FROM: Lily G. <[email protected]>
TO: N.R. Strickland <[email protected]>
DATE: June 13, 8:27am
SUBJECT: Re: You have a website!
Dear Mr. Strickland,
SORRY. I apologized about oversharing and then overshared even more, because treating emails like taxicab confessionals is something I do now, apparently! It felt safe to share because you don’t really know me, and it’s not like we’ll ever meet. Once I started writing, it was hard to stop.
I’m aware that I’ve made things incredibly awkward. I hope you’ve decided to stop checking your emails indefinitely, and my cringeworthy musings can be left unread in your inbox forever.
Sincerely,
Lily
FROM: N.R. Strickland <[email protected]>
TO: Lily G. <[email protected]>
DATE: July 15, 9:32pm
SUBJECT: Re: You have a website!
Lily—
Cringeworthy is the shitty short stories I used to submit during creative writing workshop. Your emails about your career aren’t nearly as bad. You haven’t made things awkward and you don’t have to apologize. The subject matter you currently edit does sound bleak, though. I’d want to leave that job too.
Here’s a story that will make you feel better. When I was at university, my literary agent （who wasn’t my literary agent back then, just my flatmate）， encouraged me to go to a novel-pitching conference. I’d been working on Elves for over a year in my creative writing courses, and my professors seemed to like what I was doing, so I scrounged together the conference attendance fee. I printed out copies of the first few chapters and pitched Elves to at least thirty editors, and no one was interested. I was told that adult fantasy wasn’t selling, which I didn’t think made sense because Game of Thrones was the biggest show on television. A few editors asked, “But the elves are Black?” It was an enormous waste of money. Right when I decided to leave, a man walked up to me and said he’d overheard my pitch. He was working at a small press that specifically published fantasy and science fiction. He said Elves sounded right up their alley. That’s how I got my chance.