Celebrating Life Getting in the Way

The last several of my blogs have been about Bullseye Editing - and I plan on the next several of them being about it too - but I've been interrupted.

One of my biggest goals of the year was to ensure that I continued to attempt to get published and sell. Ultimately, I'd like my writing to be my career, which means consistent pay and (hopefully) more than the fast food lunch I get once every month or so.

This last spring I received two short story rejections, one a fantasy about a djinn, and one stepping out of my comfort zone for a science fiction about a asteroid mining astronaut. They became two more rejections on a pile of my novel rejections. But, I'm nothing if not resilient.

Without a short story request pending, I set aside the short stories to work my novel, plugging away. When I picked it up in May, it was at 16,061 words. I just rolled 78,572 words Friday the ninth of October when I heard about another short story request. The prompt for this one was dragons.

DRAGONS!

I squealed, and immediately set aside my current WIP to see if I could roll 6-10,000 words for it. I did!!!

Twenty-one hours, 9,978 edited words later I have a new short story.

To be fair, my excitement for The Mined Miner and The Sandrunner felt similiar to my excitement for this piece. That little squeaky, "well you've done this before and gotten rejected," is most definitely going off. Its joining a new friend that keeps saying, "everyone's going to want to write about dragons, you'll have a lot more competition."

Still, as I send it out to beta readers I think again and again, "Yes. But I have to try."

So that's where I've been this week. In the trenches of creating, editing, researching, refining, verifying, and finally finishing a short story. Wish me luck with the beta readers, the submission, and of course with the battle with imposter syndrome. I wish you luck in your frightening endeavors too, friends.

Hopefully my third published short story will be journeying out in the world soon. :)