Today is all about figuring out my weak spots as a writer.
The timeline given has 7 sections to think about:
- Ideas- I’m pretty darn good at this. I’m imaginative and creative.
- Rough Draft- no problems here generally, sometimes I’m lazy or spend too much time in research, but the storytelling part is easy and comes naturally for me. I like making shit up.
- First review- I enjoy the first reading of my work, while it’s still new. I like making little changes, moving things around, tinkering with the characters. This part sometimes makes me feel a little sad because I think “wow, you write like a little kid” but other times I love reading my own work. I feel proud the first time I read through and edit a short story. Novels are different, I apparently refuse to read my novel, and the rough draft has been done 4 years!
- Second/Third/Fourth drafts – I start getting a little bored, but I can do it. I might have to take a day or two off from a project and work on something else, but I got this.
- Proofreading and polishing – here things start to fall apart. I don’t feel like I have the skill sets and tools to even try proofreading my own work. Many of my projects dead stop right here.
- Sending out work – I have 12 “finished” but unpublished stories, I have 18 “works in progress”. I have 0 places I plan to send them. 0, nada, none, zilch. I have a page on which to write deadlines, but it is blank. I have a list of markets I should look into, but I never get around to it. I do have one piece that is scheduled for publication in September, so I do sometimes submit, but not often.
- Dealing with rejection and resubmitting – Yeah, not so much. I just cry.
That’s pretty clear. I don’t find places to submit, so I never have to finish proofreading and then submit. I don’t like rejection so I avoid it. Clearly, this is where I need to be focusing my attention. It seems a little counterintuitive, but maybe for the next little while I should stop writing for this Writer’s Boot Camp and start spending the time searching markets. That thought makes me feel a little sick.
Looking for calls and markets takes so much time, and so much reading and effort. And once I find a place I almost always want to start a new story. I never feel like any of the ones I already have done will work. This could be a stalling technique.
I guess I need to start adding “look for markets/submitting” to my daily tasks. This seriously might be where I give up on this whole thing. This doesn’t sound fun at all anymore.
I’ve only been working on this half an hour and I feel emotionally drained, about to cry just thinking about it. I’m going to feed the cats, take a break and then come back to this and start looking for story calls. Ick.
I found 12 possible magazines and anthologies to submit to in the next few months and put all the info in a spreadsheet.
Aside from this blog post, I haven’t done any actual writing today and I’m not going to. I just spend 1.5 hours reading calls and submission guidelines, that is enough for one day.
Tomorrow I will put them in order by deadline date. Then I’ll find something I already have finished and polish it up to submit or I’ll write something new to submit, but I’m doing these one at a time, trying to complete as many as possible.
Work time today was 2 hours
kittysarkozy.com 