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Back in June, I submitted an essay to Newsweek for their My Turn column. The submission guidelines stated I would be notified only if my essay was picked and if my essay wasn’t selected after two months I was free to submit the material elsewhere.

Well, I wasn’t selected. And given the essays that did appear in the My Turn column from June until now I was up against some pretty good writers. One essay was even done by Kirk Douglas. Kirk Douglas! Spartacus! How am I supposed to compete with that? I might as well be asked to play a game of Clue against Peter Falk…

Anyway, most of the essays, if not all of them, were and are personal in nature. In fact, a lot more personal than what I wrote, complaining about the light speed technological advancement of cell phones. The most recent My Turn essay is written by a medic in the military and he writes about what it feels like when one of his patients, namely a fellow soldier, doesn’t make it.

Oh man. FORGET the cell phone. I can’t compete with life stories like that. Anything I write that’s more personal than the cell phone thing would either come out sad and pathetic or bitter and resentful. And nobody wants to read that kind of stuff. I certainly don’t.

I’m also an extremely private person, to a point. Yeah, I’m yammering away here on the Internet and I publish my stories online for all the world to see but I’m still a private person. Many of you who know me beyond the moniker that graces the top of this blog, know that already. (Although I have learned that despite the very public forum that is the Internet, you can still exist in total obscurity.) So, finding a personal topic to write about, without feeling like I’m exposing my soul to the world and having that naked experience Brian referred to in one of his previous posts, is difficult.

I’m not going to give up trying with this My Turn thing tho’. If they publish your essay, you get paid $1000. (SOLD!). So, I’m going to try to come up with another topic to write about and in the meantime find another publication to submit that cell phone essay to.