Doing What I’m Doing

I’m just about done with the peacock afghan. I’m really depending on one annoying thing shaping up in the wash, but we shall see.

I got my story done and sent off–the fiction one–and my other story done and sent off–my non-fiction one. I went to Tractor Supply. I got my hair cut.

It’s been a pretty jam-packed couple of days.

A while back a pretty well-known author announced she was going to be writing a short story a month and then she was kind of shocked when one of them was rejected because apparently she’d never been rejected before. And I’ll admit, in my pettier moments, that I have laughed at this long and hard because, whoa boy, the people who will dole out writing advice without first having subjected themselves to the hard parts of writing.

But I have been a little jealous of her determination. I haven’t sold anything this year. Which means I, as of yet, have nothing coming out next year. Along with the submitting and being rejected, there’s a lot of waiting. A drawback to failed novel (though I’m not ready to call Ashland failed, but I have also failed as of yet to place it) writing is that writing a novel takes a lot of time and concentration and when you’re doing that, you’re obviously not writing short stories. And when you’re not writing short stories, you have nothing to put in the pipeline.

Most of the stories I wrote this year are going to run right here at the end of October. Is that a wise publishing strategy? I don’t fucking know.

But I’ll tell you what. I love it. It’s literally one of my favorite things that I do all year–tell you stories for Halloween.

So, you know, you have to strive and struggle in some ways, but in other ways, fuck it. Do what you love in a way that brings you happiness.