By-Line Blues

Professionally, I  have written lots of stuff.  Press releases.  Annual report paragraphs.  Brochures. Training video scripts.  Speeches.

Yet I have never once received an official by-line.  Instead, I was always an anonymous corporate voice.

Nameless. 

Faceless.   

A phantom.     

Do you remember that scene in the movie Rudy where the guys discuss how the only way to be listed as a player for Notre Dame football is to be involved in just one snap of the ball?  It didn't matter how well the practice squad guys performed or how many injuries they sustained - without that one snap, it was as though they never suited up a day in their lives. 

As a writer, I have always felt stuck on the practice squad. 

I know, I know.  Lots of great writers go unpublished.  It's a competitive world out there.  It doesn't make me invisible. 

blah blah blah

Tell that to my ego.

So imagine my excitement when Chicago Parent Magazine notified me that they were going to put one of my essays in their hard copy edition!  I was finally going to get that elusive by-line!  All of those years of diagramming sentences was finally paying off!

Yet being somewhat fatalistic, I am pretty certain that the magazine is going to change its mind or I'm going to be replaced with a sexy story on ergonomic diapers before all this actually transpires. 

In which case, you will still be able to find me here, crying in my Red Bull and depleting my Weight Watchers points by noon each day.

And I will always be so very grateful you showed up.

"I believe that writers, unless they consider themselves terribly exquisite, are at heart people who live by night, a little outside society, moving between delinquency and conformity."

- Guillermo Cabrera Infante