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Sent and Slept
Nov. 30th, 2014 01:07 pmSo I finally (Friday) sent off the short story I've been working on all month to the Accessing the Future anthology of disability-focused SF. That makes it my first submission in about five years (and ironically that one was an earlier, and very different, version of the same story). While I've written far more this year than in previous years, it's clear that I'm probably writing enough that I should be able to produce as a minimum a couple of stories most years (the ideas are there, the execution, not so much). I'm not quite sure why my submission rate is so low; or perhaps that should be I have suspicions why my submission rate is so low. Avoidance behavior. There has been a lot of avoidance behavior, an awful lot of avoidance behaviour; I have several gaming/military/alternate history projects that will happily swallow as much time as I can throw at them for the rest of my life. And I do know that I have definitely been using them that way until I was ready to write. But it took me a fortnight to polish layout on that story and get it sent, when realistically it was a couple of hours work. Okay putting the submission letter aside for a couple of days did result in an insight that completely changed the way I view the entire story - and that handily provided a handle on which to sell its virtues to the anthology, but still.... Am I so scared of rejection letters it cripples my ability to write?
Not helping on the writing front was this week's sleeping pattern which went something like:
Monday - 4 hours?
Tuesday - Um, nope
Wednesday - 4 hours?
Thursday - 6 hours?
Friday - Um, nope
Saturday - 16 hours (yes, 16)
Clearly stress over family stuff has a part to play in that, I'm not sure if submission stress played a part, but in some ways that's not too atypical apart from only managing 4 hours so often. Mostly if I can get to sleep I can sleep for longer than that. 16 hours as a catchup was a little excessive, but clearly what I needed (especially given my left foot had decided to randomly start aching and my left knee came out in sympathy - both fine this morning).
