There's an Alien in the DeLuca's Pool!!!

Rejected by Gossamer for Volume 8: Space

Hi! Today’s rejection is an idea I submitted to Gossamer for the Space Issue. Gossamer is a magazine “for people who also smoke weed.” I am not one of those people :( Weed gives me anxiety. So does pitching! So does everything (except for my fluoxetine prescription), which is what brings us here today…

From: Amelia
To: Gossamer Editors

Okay, I have a really weird pitch for "Space" about aliens and anxiety. Thought I could make this work within the High Minded format.

I am pretty sure my anxiety started when I was five years old. Around that time, Brittany, the older girl who lived down the block, told me a secret that an alien lived in The DeDeluca's pool. 

The DeLucas were my dad's next door neighbor; I could see down into their above ground pool from a few different windows on the east side of our house.

As soon as I left Brittany’s house that morning, I ran home, looked down into The DeLuca's pool from the upstairs bathroom, and holy fucking shit, she was right. 

Fast forward through all sorts of details I'll write about for Gossamer within the appropriate word count, including the pile of sunken leaves that took the shape of an aquatic E.T., to one of my earliest memories of anxiety-induced paranoia. After acting weird for at least two days, my dad finally got me to tell him what was wrong. I broke into tears and confessed that there was an alien in The DeLuca's pool. 

My dad told me something I've used as a tool to calm certain branches anxiety ever since, from my fear of aliens that have carried me all the way into adulthood (the whole space exploration/UFO sightings thing/colonizing Mars stuff is NOT exciting to me, it terrifies me, I think it's all a terrible idea!!!), to my confident suspicions that everyone hates me. 

His words of wisdom were this: "Say aliens were real, which they aren't, but say they were. Do you really think they would choose The DeLuca's above ground pool, of all places, to sit and hide?"

This was enough logic for me. It broke the spell of that particular anxiety's chokehold, made me laugh, and as an adult, has become been something I return to time and time again. My anxieties are merely mushy leaves at the bottom of the DeLuca's pool that have taken the shape of my most tangible fears. They are not real. 

...And if they were, don't you think they'd choose an underground pool in the South of France instead? 

I promise I will make the connection to the adult side of things and anxiety far more eloquently than I am right now. I'm writing this pitch from a café playing AWFUL MUSIC and it just ruined my momentum. 

Love,

Amelia

Technically, Gossamer didn’t reject this one, but I don’t think they wrote me back. In the world of writing, no news can mean bad news, which is fun!

I’m pretty sure I submitted the alien pitch after submissions were closed. It also appears that I didn’t follow up. But sometimes you’re glad to have silence after a pitch, because the problem with an ACCEPTED pitch is that then you have to write it.

IF I MAY BRAG FOR A MOMENT, Gossamer is founded by my cool ass friend Verena Von Pfetten (she co-writes This is Cute, a newsletter about cute stuff), and her friend David Weiner, who is so nice. Whether you also smoke weed or not, I can’t recommend this magazine enough. It’s BEAUTIFUL. Coffee table show-off material. Insane if you ever get the itch to IRL mood-board or collage. Delightful to read. I leave Gossamer out around my house so that people think more highly of me.

A couple of years ago, Verena asked me to write about summer sweaters for Volume 3. I was honored. Here it is:

See you next week!