The other day I received a rejection that began "Hey there Thomas." Am I now sending my work to teenagers?
The few times I covered tennis tournaments, I enjoyed chatting with the Japanese journalists, who were there for one reason: to cover Kei Nishikori. As soon as he lost, they were sent home. You'd come in one day and their work stations would be empty.
So I felt sorry for them yesterday as I watched their man go down in straight sets. But then I thought: At least they got to stay till the end.
A recent article takes travel writers to task for not alerting their readers to ISIS. But how can you blame travel writers for their failure to identify a terrorist group when they've not given any indication that we've been in an economic crisis for the last seven years?
Yesterday I put a cover letter, a proposal, some clips, and a self-addressed stamped envelope into a manila envelope. I was out of practice, so the SASE kept missing the entrance, and when everything was finally inside I reached in to make sure nothing was folded over and almost got a paper cut. But somehow the whole procedure felt very good.
Yesterday morning there appeared in my inbox the name of a man who is the editor of a magazine to which I had sent an essay through Submittable. For a brief instant I imagined that the editor had read it and been so taken by it that he had decided to respond in person. Opening the email, I discovered that it was a mass message requesting donations for his publication.
I was a bit taken aback Sunday when I saw Russell Banks, in the New York Times Book Review, mention travel books as his "guilty pleasure." Especially when he included "classics from Herodotus to Burton to Kapuscinski" - none of whom is exactly beach reading. Can't travel get any respect? I wondered. But then he redeemed himself, and the genre, by adding that his guilt may be because "serious travel is difficult and dangerous, and it's so easy and safe to stay home and read about it instead."