I remember a coworker who’d been at the company longer than I had. He stopped in my office doorway and was all worried. “I have the cover story next month! It’s so much pressure! How do you do it?”

I resisted the urge to say “I stop complaining and sit my ass down and write.” But I did tell him something similar. It’s just a story, and if you worry it to death, it will be your last.

I don’t know why people get so hung up on whether something is a cover story or not. I’ve never been paid a bonus when one of my articles made the cover, so it’s just an ego thing. But saying you wrote the cover story sure sounds good.

It’s not silly, Paula. It’s what we do to validate our efforts, I think. I used to do something similar — I’d browse the issues and see who got the cover feature. Even if I had three articles in that magazine to someone else’s cover story, I had to resist letting it bother me. After a while, I realized cover stories weren’t really the do-all-end-all goal. Payment was. LOL

Good for you, Jake. I think the response itself, with her own words attached, were punishment enough. By being gracious, you underscored her lack of the same.

I have no idea why I did that – it’s not as if they accepted queries. The editors made the assignments, so it wasn’t as if seeing another writer catching up to me motivated me to send in more ideas. It was probably a way to placate a beginner’s insecurities: they wouldn’t assign me so many stories if I weren’t good. Whatever the reason, it motivated me to be thorough, dig deeper, and turn in clean copy that ran almost verbatim in most cases.

I know it was a silly thing to do. I don’t remember when I stopped doing it, but it may have been when the publisher replaced the entire (all female) editorial team with an all-male editorial team led by a former local sports writer who was in over his head. I gave the new guys a shot, but “fired” them after a few months of dealing with their new dysfunctional system.