Coming to Life
It's been a while and I've been dormant for a long time. Life's too short for excuses, so let's just say I've wasted enough of it being asleep. I want to wake up now. I want to write.
And right now, I don't want to worry about not writing well. It's funny that Odyssey helped me to unblock my traditionally slow writing style. I wrote more stories in days than I did in years. But then it also delivered upon me the guilt of revision. Most of my stories, two years on, are still lying in a "to-be-revised" pile. I find revision very hard. But they bear on my mind. The critiques are excellent but my mind feels stuck on them like a Sudoku puzzle I can't solve (No surprise, I don't like Sudoku either).
So you know what, screw revision for now. It's not what I need right now. Unless a story is broken (as in unworkable), I'm going to send the bloody thing out. That's right, the Harlan Ellison route. What I need right now is circulation. I need to write new stories and send them out, probably just as I finish them. They can be rejected, that's fine. I just want to keep going and going. Stagnation feels awful.
When I get to that stage when I know I won't stop, we'll talk revision then.
And right now, I don't want to worry about not writing well. It's funny that Odyssey helped me to unblock my traditionally slow writing style. I wrote more stories in days than I did in years. But then it also delivered upon me the guilt of revision. Most of my stories, two years on, are still lying in a "to-be-revised" pile. I find revision very hard. But they bear on my mind. The critiques are excellent but my mind feels stuck on them like a Sudoku puzzle I can't solve (No surprise, I don't like Sudoku either).
So you know what, screw revision for now. It's not what I need right now. Unless a story is broken (as in unworkable), I'm going to send the bloody thing out. That's right, the Harlan Ellison route. What I need right now is circulation. I need to write new stories and send them out, probably just as I finish them. They can be rejected, that's fine. I just want to keep going and going. Stagnation feels awful.
When I get to that stage when I know I won't stop, we'll talk revision then.