A Million Little Delights: Personal Essays Free Tip Jar Option

WORD COUNT: 500–1,000 words
PAYMENT: $0.08 per word, based on the final edited word count. Payment is issued upon publication.

A Million Little Delights is seeking personal essays about the experiences, rituals, relationships, choices, discoveries, embarrassments, experiments, and small turning points that shape a life.

We love essays that begin somewhere specific. A Saturday morning ritual. A friendship that quietly changed. The hobby you became inexplicably obsessed with. The summer you spent saying yes to every invitation. The dress you couldn't throw away. The year you stopped hosting Thanksgiving. The neighborhood walk you've taken hundreds of times and suddenly saw differently.

We're less interested in essays that begin with a lesson the writer wants to teach and more interested in stories that discover what they mean along the way.

We want personality. Scenes. Details. A distinctive point of view. Humor is welcome. So are tenderness, uncertainty, contradiction, nostalgia, delight, and the occasional slightly unhinged personal experiment.

The spirit we're after:

I Started Taking Myself Out to Breakfast — an essay about becoming comfortable with your own company through the small ritual of going out for breakfast alone every Saturday morning.

Please use this as an example of the specificity, voice, and spirit we love—not as a story to pitch. This piece is already in development for an upcoming issue.

What we're looking for

Send us essays that make the personal interesting to someone who wasn't there.

Rather than pitching “an essay about learning to enjoy being alone,” tell us about the Saturday breakfasts.

Rather than “what friendship taught me about growing older,” tell us about the annual weekend trip four friends have somehow kept alive for fifteen years.

Rather than “why everyone should have hobbies,” tell us why you became obsessed with making miniature furniture at 34.

The small, peculiar details are often where the real story lives.

Above all, we're looking for writing that feels observant, alive, generous, and unmistakably yours. You don't need to have everything figured out by the final paragraph. We'd rather finish your essay feeling like we've experienced something alongside you than feeling like we've been given a lesson.

Surprise us with something only you could have written.