Welcome to IWSG Day. The goal of this blog hop is to share
and encourage. Writers can express doubts and concerns without fear of
appearing foolish or weak. Those who have been through the fire can offer
assistance and guidance. It’s a haven for insecure writers of all kinds. IWSG
is the brainchild of our ninja leader Alex Cavanaugh. Thank
you to August co-hosts: Ronel Janse van Vuuren, Natalie Aguirre, Sarah - The Faux Fountain Pen, and Olga Godim! To read other contributors, click For a list
and links to all contributors, click here.
I’m not experienced enough to have an opinion on this month’s
question about the publishing industry, so today, you get just—me— surprising
myself.
I think I mentioned here that after writing four (frustratingly
unpublished) novels, so far, nothing has inspired me enough to consider
spending years devoted to a fifth.
This wasn’t so scary in April when I retired, because I
still had to make edits to my fourth manuscript. In late June, I started querying it.
Oye. Such an exercise in hair pulling. Current count, nine submissions, two rejections, many, many, many more to go and well, each time I'm working on a query it kind of feels like when I worked for a living, except for the lack of constant interruption, and, yeah, well, I’m not getting paid. For sure, querying isn’t creative.
But the human mind is a sneaky thing, and in between queries,
mine has been goading me.
“What? You’re not writing anything
new? Well, then here. Let’s throw you a storm. Let’s make your fireplace leak
and your little boat almost sink. Now, write a poem about it.”
“Um, okay?”
“Boring laps in the pool followed
by walks on the beach. That’s good for another poem.
“Really? Are you sure?”
“Yes. And by the way, repainting your
bedroom from Sherwood green to Chamois white? There’s definitely a poem in
that.”
“You think?”
“Yup.”
“Huh!”
“When you’re done, how
about a poem about hummingbirds?”
“Aha. Gotcha. I already wrote
that one.”
“Then what are you waiting for? Pull
that sucker up on your laptop and give it an overhaul!”
And so it goes. I even wrote a poem inspired by an old poem I
found on my hard drive. So while fiction has been non-existent over the last few
months, unsolicited poems have muscled their way in. I get lost in them,
spending as much time as it takes me to send out a query (and more!) tweaking one
single line.
How do you make yourself move forward when writing is a struggle?
