A few months ago, Dad asked me if I was still writing. I think he was trying to distract me from the whole world-on-fire situation, but it didn’t work: I immediately started crying. (I’ve been more than a little depressed, obviously.) I have not been writing. At all. The only writing I’ve done was at retreat last summer, when I finished a story I started at retreat the summer before. (The sections I read at retreat got positive reviews. I sent it to one very competitive market at the end of April. It got summarily rejected. And that’s that, for the moment, anyway.)
I go on retreat again at the end of the month. I have no idea what, if anything, I’ll work on. I haven’t been able to look at the novel. It’s too big, too hard, too much. Maybe I’ll work on an essay about my health. Maybe I’ll write fluffy fan-fic just to find joy in writing again. Maybe I won’t write anything and will just read and sleep. But I’m going, if for nothing else but to see my friends and spend a week in nature and away from life stress, work stress, and news. Because how can you create when the world’s on fire?
2015 is rapidly approaching, which means it’s time to start making New Year’s Resolutions. But what resolutions would your characters make? Most people pick the standard things like losing weight and exercising more, but dig deeper: if your characters could change something about themselves, what would they alter? Knowing what your characters dislike in themselves is important to understanding them — and those feelings will affect their interactions with others.
I sent out another flash fiction story this morning (fingers crossed!) and I realized I have quite a few stories out at different markets. I was logging my latest submission into the Grinder (it’s vital to have a tool for keeping track of these things) and saw that I currently have six flash fiction pieces out for consideration. Plus I sent out one October 1 that was rejected, so that means I’ve sent out seven submissions this month. That’s a total record for me — I’ve never had so many pieces out at once before. Admittedly, they aren’t new stories; all of them are pieces I wrote years ago and either never submitted or sent out once and gave up. Still, it’s exciting to have so many stories under consideration — in many ways, getting published is totally a numbers game, so the more you send out, the better your odds are of selling one (or more). And you can’t get published if you never send anything out.
Fellow writer 