The Magic of Tuesday Acceptance Letters

Tuesdays are the best and worst day of my week. I leave the house at 8:30 a.m. and don’t get home until 9:30 p.m. I tutor all day and teach at night, ending the day with my favorite group of students. By the time I get home, I’m exhausted, hungry, and off-the-wall hyper.

This Tuesday, I got home, made myself a cup of chamomile tea and curled up on the couch to watch This Old House. After watching a foundation poured and inspected, my husband and I found ourselves in a classic millennial situation: sitting out the couch with Mac Books on our laps, focused more on screens than each other. I would have rather had the cat on my lap than my computer, but he was unwilling to grace me with his presence.

I looked up from my screen, watching the cat bat his noisy ball around the living room. Glancing over at my husband, I said, “You know, for the past two Tuesdays, I’ve gotten good writing news.”

“Thats good,” he said lifting his eyes away from Facebook Messenger.

“Two weeks ago, I found out I was a finalist for that contest. Last week, I got a story accepted for an anthology. I didn’t get any rejections today, but there wasn’t any good news either.”

He shrugged. “No rejections is still pretty good.”

Our attention shifted back to our screens. An email notification popped up on mine, informing me I had a new message from Foliate Oak Literary Magazine.

“Crap,” I muttered as I opened the message, expecting a rejection.

Then I jumped out of my seat. “Wait, I just got an acceptance!”

“You spoke to soon,” he said closing his lap top.

After a doing a proper happy dance and playing the the cat, I took my laptop to the kitchen table to withdraw the story from the other places I had sent it, update my bio and find a decent photo of myself. I only accomplished two of those three things before I went to bed, but I was happy and confident that there was a point to my obsession with submissions. It was worth all the hard work. I had found a home for another one of my stray stories.