It can take me the better part of a month to polish a few thousand dull, lifeless words into a brilliant multi-faceted gem of staggering beauty. At which point, I’ll submit the story to my amazing writer’s group who will gasp in collective awe at my wondrous prose. Eyes welling with tears, they will fall at my feet, lamenting that the story I’d written has ended and begging me to bless them with more words to savor.

I will then snort myself awake, wipe the drool from my chin and blink my bloodshot eyes against the noonday sun streaming through my bedroom window.

Reality is a bitch.

So I stagger downstairs and make myself some breakfast (I don’t care what time you wake up, the first meal you eat is STILL breakfast!) then I crack my knuckles and open up my latest work in progress.

The first part of my narcissistic little dream is true: it can take me a month to write/rewrite/edit a short story. And it’s work. Hard work. Like tagging narwhals for science or re-enacting the first season of Sherlock in your living room with your cat, Benecat Cumpurrbatch, also for science (science is weird).

Once I’m done nurturing and growing my story, preening and pruning it to perfection, I have to send it out into the cold, cruel world. And just that one little action, clicking SEND on the email that will carry my story across cyberspace and time, is enough to fill my gut with snakes and make me want to crawl back into bed.  Because out there, my beautiful snowflake of a story is just mere slush clogging some over-caffeinated editor’s inbox.

Then comes the obsessive refreshing of my email over and over, during every waking moment and even in the middle of the night when I roll over and look at my phone for the time or to double check that I set my alarm for work because I’m obsessive about that now as well. Clicky, clicky, clicky on that little roundy arrow, like an old woman in orthopedic sandals feeding dollars into a slot machine while getting slowly hammered on complimentary Long Island Iced Teas. Only the old woman has better odds and I’m drinking a box of red wine straight from the spout. And after weeks of this routine I have a calloused clicky finger and my liver is sending me hate mail, but I finally, FINALLY, get a reply from the publication I submitted my story to. With trembling hand I open the email to read, “We appreciate your interest, but unfortunately we don’t think your story is a good fit for our blah blah blabbity blah . . . ” After the initial flattening weight of rejection eases up a bit, I take a long draw from my box of wine and send my story out to the next publication on my list.

No wonder I self-medicate with red wine.

And as awful as that whole process is, it’s eleventy bazillion times worse when you’re trying to find a home for your Novel. Your Baby. Your One True Hope That All This Writing Nonsense Will Pay Off One Day. That’s where I am right now. Two weeks ago I sent my novel off to what’s basically my dream publisher.

My finger hurts. And I’m out of wine.

 

And I’m gonna try and find an excuse to insert gifs of Loki into all my future posts. It’s my blog and I do what I want!