Acceptance

I'll have to start a new file. This time I got a letter from an editor and IT IS NOT A REJECTION! I wrote an essay entitled "Pimping" about the perversion of the Socratic method used in medical education. Pimping, in the context of medical education, means asking a student a question he has little if any chance of answering correctly in order for the teacher to establish his power over the student. I sent the original essay to Verbatim, The Language Quarterly, which is billed as offering "Language and linguistics for the layperson since 1974." Check out their website. You can read back issues online. There's some pretty clever stuff there. After about a month, I got an email from Erin McKean, the editor, who said she would like to accept the essay if I could shorten it from its original 1900+ words to less than 1500. That night, I pared it down to 1488 words and resubmitted it. She accepted the revision, and I signed the agreement to publish "Pimping" yesterday. Unlike a lot of literary magazines, Verbatim actually pays their contributors. I won't be retiring from radiology just yet, but Mary and I could have a couple nice dinners out, or maybe one really nice dinner with the proceeds.