Welp, even with my new fast-and-loose approach to blogging, last week got a bit much for me. I guess I’ll just have to make two posts this week to make up for it!
Apart from work busyness and getting sick last week, my third (and far more interesting) reason for not blogging was that I was up to my eyeballs in story feedback and editing, culminating in the submission last Thursday of my latest story, ‘Leaving Dreamland’, to the Rebuilding Tomorrow anthology. Cross your fingers, cross your toes, cross your eyes for me.
Whether I make it into the anthology or not, it does feel auspicious to have kicked off the new decade by completing and submitting my first fiction project before the end of January. I don’t want to read too much into this (gotta be kind to myself), but it’s a good start.
Even better, especially given how long it’s been between stories, is that I actually feel like I’ve grown as a writer rather than stagnating or, worse, going backwards. I took three new approaches to my writing for ‘Leaving Dreamland’, and I’m very happy with two of them and at least halfway happy with the third.
That growth hasn’t come from nowhere – hell, if the key to becoming a better writer was not to write then I’d be a bestseller by now! But even though I haven’t been writing, I’ve been regularly tuning into several great writing podcasts. It was both satisfying and deeply relieving to find, as I wrote ‘Leaving Dreamland’, that some of their advice and ideas have stuck with me.
Over my next few blog posts (which I am writing and uploading right now, because I hear having a buffer is a great way to not miss a week any time your week doesn’t go to plan…), I’ll talk about the three things I tried for the first time on this story, and how and why they worked for me as a writer.
Until next time!