Stuck Again?
Heh, it would figure that I would post about goals and dreams and then… get stuck. Yeah, it happens. I don’t get idea block, I get too many ideas and they make it hard to focus. That is what usually happens when I’m stuck, anyway.
This time is a combination of too many ideas and just plain old self-pity/loathing. A bunch of rejections came in, every single one of them with the general message “close, but no thanks, please send more”. This is good on one level. I’m close! On the other hand, I’ve been there before. I don’t want to have a story come close, I want the story to sell. Close is just frustrating at this point. The other reason I’m stuck is because I wrote a story that failed. My writing brain was fighting me the whole process and then I made myself finish the story (and send it out, because I knew if I let anyone read it before I did I would never get the courage to mail it).
What did my first reader say? “Awesome setting but I don’t care about the characters or what is happening until page 11.” Ok, I could cut the first ten pages, but wait, it is only a 12 page story. Yeah. Sigh. So what I was trying to do didn’t go well. But hey, setting! Maybe some editor out there will love the feel of the story enough to ignore the rest. Who knows?
But inside I feel a bit down. I wrote a story last week that both my first readers thought was the best thing I’ve done yet. Then this week, I fail. It makes getting back on the horse tough. I’ve made myself start another story and gotten about a thousand words down, but I keep finding reasons to walk away from the keyboard. Like posting here. And doing house chores.
So I failed at the story I was trying to tell. So what? I need to pick myself up. It’s just a story. I still have the idea, I can always write a better version knowing what went wrong with the first one. Meanwhile, I have other projects that have deadlines (at least, the places I want to submit them close very soon, so it is kinda like a deadline). I can do this. Write, finish, mail. Fire and forget.
It’s going to be a scary day when I get up to 80 stories out. If the stars align, I could technically get 80 rejections in one day. Yeah. Scary.
(Flip side is that I could also make 80 sales in one day. I think one is about as likely as the other, so I should stop tilting at windmills and get writing, right?)