Submissions Update

Thursday, May 8, 2008

When I said I actually wanted to get rejection letters, I didn't mean that I wanted them all to come at once. Really.

One more arrived this morning. I suppose it was one of my not-a-snowball's-chance-in-hell markets, but rejection is still rejection.

Prior to the mail arriving, I was already in a writing funk. I'm realizing how out of practice I am and I'm struggling getting started on a new project. I have something I really want to do, and I have no idea how to start it. I allow myself to write whatever when I freewrite, but when I settle in to officially work on the story, nothing comes out well. And thus, the funk.

Also, I sliced my finger open yesterday and it kinda hurts. (Note to self: sign up for the Central Market knife skills class already!)

I know that writing well requires practice and I am fully aware that not writing for close to four years puts me back at square one. I am also fully aware that really, the only way to even start improving is to just keep working at it. But I'm impatient and I want my writing level to be back where it was four years ago. And so I get into the funk and then I worry that my writing skills may never come back and then . . . double funk.

Any good funk-relief strategies out there? My first impulse is write through this but I wonder if that's the best strategy. What would you do? Write? Read? Take my notebook out to the springs and lounge in the sun?

Bad Day

Thursday, November 8, 2007

I spent a great day writing at the Green Muse on Tuesday. Unfortunately everything else in my life went to hell on Tuesday night. Okay, so not really to hell exactly, but immediately after writing, I went back over to the condo to find out that a pool of dirt had seeped back through the carpet after the cleaning. This was blamed on a dirty pad and so now I have to replace the padding and have the carpet cleaned again.

And of course, the bathroom project has gone over the estimated two days and the condo can't go on the market until it is finished.

And then I got home and found that my white cat had dug into my knitting bag, pulled out my Lopi Lace Scarf, and, in dragging it to the living room, had dropped half the stitches and broken the yarn. This scarf is cursed, I tell you.

So on Wednesday, I spent no time writing, and all my time calling back carpet cleaners, tracking down documents for the condo, and getting a thousand other chores done, that all somehow involve around the condo.

I was hoping today might be better. That I could get the condo stuff out of the way in the morning and spend the rest of the day focused on the story I started on Tuesday or, at the very least, fixing the story I want to get submitted this week. No such luck.

I got to the condo to meet the Salvation Army pick up people, with whom I was sending off my sofa, bookcases, entertainment center, and other heavy stuff. As they were backing their truck down the drive, one of the yard people came over and told me that they couldn't drive their truck down there. Um. Okay. One of the residents of the codo drives a huge truck that is regularly parked down that drive. I told him that they had to drive the truck down there because there was no way they were going to carry a queen-size sleeper sofa out my door and few hundred feet back to the street. He kept going at me about how it was against the rules, how they could ruin the trees, how someone was going to have to pay. . . and all the while, the truck is safely backing its way down the narrow drive and how exactly am I going to stop them without being run over? So I just shrugged and walked away.

Y'all, I am not normally that rude. But I am at the end of my rope. What the poor yard guy didn't realize is that I am already on my last nerve with the HOA because every time I tried to report my neighbor's noise violations, they refused to do anything about it, even while acknowledging that the noise was a problem. And because the minute it looked like my condo was going to go on the market, they began passing stipulations to keep me from renting it out. And so, on what should have been my last day of dealing with this stupid HOA, I was being chewed out over rules that are not universally enforced.

I am so annoyed. So writing today? Probably not. Sitting and fuming sounds a little more like it. Sorry for the vent, y'all. We'll return to our regularly scheduled snark and cheer shortly.