So now I'm fired up with envy...what have I been doing?
I've been trying to commit to a daily writing habit - and did pretty well with that for a while getting a few streaks in where I was writing solidly for weeks at a time. Out of that came a short story called 'Did you mean: Reiki' which I submitted to The London Magazine in July only to be rejected in September. I sent it out again to Litro magazine afterwards, though I didn't get any kind of acknowledgement from them which makes me slightly concerned. I don't even know how long I'm supposed to wait for a response...
Whilst waiting on a response from 'Reiki' I worked on another short story which is still being edited. I can't quite get it right but I feel it's nearly there. I've moved on to writing a flash piece with the hopes of submitting that somewhere by the end of November, then I'll return to the short story, the break having hopefully done some good.
Hopefully, this pattern of work will mean I end up with a catalogue of stories that can be sent out until someone stupid enough, drunk enough or genuinely interested enough decides to print something. The need, as always at this point, is just to do more. Some days, most days, I just do a minimum of 20 minutes of writing. Other days I push it to an hour or so but it still doesn't feel enough. I can find ways of bettering my enjoyment of the process but that doesn't necessarily feel like it advances work in progress - that part feels like work. And it is work I guess. I need the dedication of treating it like work, without getting bogged down in the mentality of seeing it that way to the point where I don't enjoy it. Tricky.
I did also do my 'craft study' for which I have a little notion board. I've only really "completed" one category: description. I gathered a load of resources on writing great descriptions (web pages and podcasts) read through and summarised them all, and turned my summaries into a kind of cheat sheet of information. I then did a close reading of the opening of Tessa Hadley's story 'Bad Dream' and wrote a little essay talking about how the section successfully uses the kind of descriptive techniques I'd been looking at. It was a very helpful exercise and I would like to repeat it with other topics like dialogue, structure, point of view etc. It's just time and dedication.
But that's what's been happening between my silence and my envy.