Now that I’m freelancing again, I’m taking a long, hard look at my pitching etiquette and trawling through past emails that were unsuccessful. The activity acts as a kind of temporary salve or panacea for what’s happening right now, when all I can think about are stories around/about the coronavirus and global doom and how people aren’t staying indoors. (If you came here for content on that, I did just publish an essay on Literary Hub around fragmentation and writing in times of political and biological anxiety.)
So that’s what this post contains: speculative pitches and ideas that went unanswered or just didn’t work out. These were developed in a time before this mess and are all, in my opinion, pretty bad — with the exception of, maybe, the egg-freezing story. (I’d still like to write about that, so if anyone knows of any interested editors...)
And by the way: the porn VR headset mentioned in one of my pitches ended up raising over USD 13K on Indiegogo (and it seems the founder quickly tweaked their marketing campaign to be more inclusive/less male-gazey).
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Dear (editor at long-running counter-culture magazine),
Great, thanks for your quick response. I’ll send fuller pitches later in the week.
I am also currently in early stages of research for a story that I think would be of interest to you. I am reaching out to contacts to see if there used to be a giftschrank (German for "poison cabinet"), a locked room/cellar/area that held banned books, in the New York Public Library. This story, I imagine, might run during banned books week in September. I am still in early stages of research for this, but I will reach out with details once I investigate a little more.
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How about this pitch: Flower ladies who stand by the side of the road singing and wailing (first wives). A playboy who cut off his finger as an act of shame and a desperate plea for forgiveness. A political marriage between a penicillin scion and a woman who once sat on the knee of a Japanese soldier at three years old and witnessed him shooting the peacocks in her garden.
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Dear (editor at major glossy magazine conglomerate),
Hope you are well.
I recently came across an Indiegogo campaign for a virtual reality headset that is engineered for pornography and video games.
Intrigued, I read the description, which had accompanying videos and images, and was disappointed to find that the women depicted were framed in degrading, overtly sexualized ways, groomed specifically for the male gaze. (There's even a shot of a woman lying down provocatively, seen through the lens.)
The creator goes on to explain that all popular media devices gained traction because of male interactions with porn, but he fails to address female consumers. Is it really a better business model to create a porn-accessible device that alienates half the world?
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NOTES FOR PITCH:
pictures that haunt me
When i was about seven or eight and wishing for a younger brother or sister, my parents went into this photo booth
it was like snapchat, except it merged faces together instead of swapping them
the result was a really horrific, traumatic combination of my mother and father's faces. Me but not-me, an object that had suddenly come to life through means not biological but technical. Magical. Evil.
Second photo that haunts me: denny picture from death row writing scheme, which i later burned
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Thanks for reaching out! I’ll tell you a little more about the story I'm writing for (publication that shares a name with an ocean). It’s focused specifically on the history of the oyster pail, the iconic Chinese takeout container. There have been several stories written on the object already, but none that dig extensively into its leap from American storage bucket to symbol of Asian-American dining culture. So I'm looking to speak to takeout fanatics, restaurant owners, container manufacturers etc. I'm hoping the story will provide insight into the evolution of dining culture in America as well, as family style and casual dining surged in the early 19th century.
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Hi (editor at major clickbait site that rhymes with Muzzneed),
I recently came across a new restaurant called Colors, based in New York. Many of its staff are former employees of Windows on the World (displaced from their jobs at the World Trade Center) and the theme is a unison of nations. The restaurant is also gluten free and vegan.
I'd like to write a short piece describing a visit to the restaurant. The story will incorporate the background of the eatery, narratives of several workers and a general overview of what they're serving and how they're serving it. As the restaurant's uniqueness right now lies in its staff structure, I would mainly focus on the connective themes of ethnicities and histories. Ultimately, I want to draw out the meaningfulness in creating a place of community out of a narrative of tragedy, and to highlight the mission of the restaurant, which is to tackle racial discrimination.
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IDEAS FOR PITCHES:
Blueprint for floating graveyard
Ama pearl divers
Willem interview with Mo Yan
trauma by numbers
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I'm interested in the trend of egg-freezing/reproductive technology and how it's essentially controlled by big pharma companies and social context. This article, published in 2013, explains how companies stoke fear in women over the age of 30, relying on a centuries-old study that states that fertility rates drop significantly after the age of 35. These outdated statistics alone are enough to trigger anxiety in women, pressuring them into the option of egg-freezing, which is not only expensive but has a very low success rate. In Hong Kong, I believe the options are even more limited. In this article (which I have yet to confirm via government sources), it states that only married heterosexual couples/women are allowed to use their eggs (meaning clinics forbid same-sex couples or single women from attempting to fertilize frozen eggs).
In my research, I hope to uncover the possibilities of egg-freezing in Hong Kong and just how limited the process is, weaving in commentary about my own options (since I'm 30 and hoping to have children in the next decade, I am within the target age range of these facilities) and the ethics of restricting certain families or people from fertilizing their eggs. I don't know what the limitations are around the world/from country to country, but I do know that in Belgium, a woman can unfreeze/fertilize her eggs if she is single and regardless of her sexual orientation, but only if she is approved to be a single mother by an ethics committee (doctors, psychologists, social workers).