such is the way to just write is what I forget so very often. Too much thinking, not enough writing. When writing, just write. When not writing, think.
How can it be that even when I’m told that I’m doing a fine job I can’t shake the feeling that I’m not? Some sense of like I don’t even what to call it… I guess I want to do better or I strive or some such thing. Striving might be the word. Lack of feedback fucking hurts. So do my hands, again. My fingers. My knees. Joint pain. Brain pain. Barely slept last night because Penelope was sick. Thankfully her fever seems to have gone away entirely now. She’s a lot better. Also we have some fucking guy coming over today to look at the apartment, a prospective buyer. And that sucks. It really does. Not the buying part, at least that will offer us some certainty. Hopefully he’ll buy and we can stay and everything is hunky dory. But the fact that we’ve had to effectively cede our house to strangers every week so they can roam through and look and judge and consider. We’re part of the deal, too, us renters. A source of income for the prospective buyers.
Anyway, that’s all just rage. I need to focus on the task at hand which is my fiction writing. Specifically, getting my backlog sorted out and ready for other audiences: publishers, agents, people in general. What that has meant over the last week is going through my old files and pulling out the most complete, useful stories and putting them into my little tracker. I’ve got a few there that are complete and just need an extra person to review and offer edits before I go out and submit to competitions. That person has been Sama but I’m thinking I might get mum to help edit, too, now that she’s got the time.
Here’s where that tracker sits now:
- 3 stories published (but not for a very long time)
- 4 that are submitted and I'm waiting on responses to
- 1 that is ready for re-submission OR to be published on my blog
- 8 that are ready for review
- 8 more that need edits either after a review or because I think they do
- 12 that are unfinished
We’ve got a total of 93,662 words across 36 stories. It rpresents the majority of my fiction writing over the last 10 years not in terms of total volume so much as in terms of overall quality and readiness, or near-readiness, to publication.