Back in the days when my partners Sunny and Virginia and I sold stories to the confession* magazines on a pretty regular basis, we always knew the publishers would change details to suit their whims (or to protect the guilty, as the case might be). Characters’ names would always morph into something other than what we’d given them. Even dogs’ names would change. If we set the story in Nebraska, it might be Illinois in print. Because readers were led to believe that the stories were “true” and written by the people who lived them, the publishers made sure the protagonists were not identifiable.
In the normal run of things, you could expect a story to sit in an editor’s slush pile for up to a year before you received it back with a canned rejection slip. If you were lucky, you got a phone call from the assistant to the editor saying the magazine wished to buy your story. After we’d sold several, editors actually began to watch for our submissions, and we’d receive acceptances within a couple of months.
The publishers always changed our titles. That’s how they lured their readers–and the more salacious the better. The magazines sported headlines like “I was His Sex Slave” or “Kept Prisoner for Fourteen Years.” The titles usually promised way more than they delivered in the sex and scandal departments, but they ended up being well-crafted, entertaining and amazingly good reads. Many beginning writers have honed their skills on these markets. The submissions were often “morality plays” that taught a lesson or proved a point.
And these magazines were among the few places that actually paid money for short stories. While it was embarrassing to admit where we’d been published, we skipped, red-faced, all the way to the bank.
We called one of our early stories “Lost and Found.” It remains a favorite of mine, about a 39-year-old Wyoming widow who reclaims her life with the help of her friend’s 26-year-old nephew. He is conscripted to help her manage her ranch when her husband’s suicide leaves her bereft and struggling.
Sunny and I searched for just right combination of ages to make the tale believable. We drafted, redrafted and edited. We discussed and argued and plotted and schemed. At the beginning four of our friends, published writers and teachers, told us the story wouldn’t sell and suggested ways to change it. Taking their suggestions to heart, we revised and we sold.
When it finally appeared in True Confessions, all the characters’ names and locations had been changed. That we expected. The title became “My Hot Affair with a Teen Stud.” That we did not. Believe me.
After selling about ten of these stories, we started to devise story names that the magazines might actually use. We finally hit the jackpot with one of them: “My Daddy’s Death Brought Me Happiness.”
Kind of a sleazy title, wouldn’t you say? The plot concerned the dying wish of a father for his daughter to reunite with the rodeo-cowboy boyfriend he’d misjudged and forbidden her to see.
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June 25 was the twenty-first anniversary of my mother’s death, and I’ve been thinking for quite some time about what to write and what to call the post. I’d planned to time it to appear on that date but couldn’t quite come to grips with what to say. But I knew that it couldn’t be “My Mother’s Death Brought Me Happiness” without a bit of explanation.
Now it won’t be such a surprise or seem quite so shocking when that blog post appears, within the next few days. And it won’t be tacky or sleazy, I promise.
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*For those innocents who might not know what “confession magazines” are—or were—they used to be pretty readily available on drugstore and supermarket shelves, known by the titles True Love, True Confessions, True Romance . . . well, you get the idea. They seem to have disappeared from magazine racks in this area. Do they still exist in yours?
