An Update on my Writing Life

What I've been working on in my writing practice in the past year.

One morning, as I stood in the shower, the hot water cascading down my back and the taste of toothpaste fresh in my mouth, I thought about what I wanted to do with all my built-up creative energy. Write, you idiot, said my internal voice. My internal voice is a jerk. I kept this directive in my head even after exiting the shower. I may or may not have remembered to wash my hair. That was the moment I decided to be a writer.

A quick update on the "What is Creativity" project

I'm continuing to work on my project exploring creativity. I'm reading and annotating Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert and compiling a list of other books I want to read. I'm reworking the interview process, so please bear with me there. More to come.

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A Year of Writing

I thought about why I hadn't been successful at writing before. I came to two conclusions:

1. I needed to do more writing.

2. I needed a community.

I wrote about finding a writing community previously. In summary, I did NaNoWriMo last October. While I no longer support the organization, I found a vibrant local community and a wonderful little Discord. I found more community on threads.

I wrote.

I've written about 75k words of an urban fantasy novel, four short stories, four flash fiction pieces, one soon-to-be-published creative nonfiction flash piece, the first few chapters of a near-future science fiction novel, and countless unfinished drafts and other dabblechas¹ of words and phrases.

I edited. I hired an editor. I edited more.

I submitted. I got rejected. I got rejected again, and again, and again, and again. I almost gave up, but I kept submitting. I changed my mindset. I have 27 rejections so far this year and one sparkling little acceptance.

Black Fox Literary magazine took me on as a volunteer first reader. I read about 12 flash fiction and short story pieces a month, and each one teaches me something new about writing.

What's next?

I keep writing—on my desk on my computer with a cup of tea, on my notes app when I'm sitting in the living room and suddenly have a great idea, or in my notebook when I want the feeling of writing by hand. I'm reading, learning, and observing. 

I've put my urban fantasy novel on permanent hiatus, and for November, I want to develop a regular writing practice. Untethered from the confines of NaNoWriMo, my local and online writing groups have embraced setting personal goals for the month of November. As for me, I will write 850 words each day. I’m not tied down to a specific project. Lately, I've been working on the outline for the near-future novel, but I have some short story ideas simmering as well.

As 2024 crawls to a close, I've shifted my writing slightly away from the speculative fiction I initially set out to write, and I've been doing more literary fiction and nonfiction. I'm embracing the shift instead of trying to keep myself inside my self-imposed boundaries.

I'll keep submitting, and I'll keep getting rejected. My acceptance hindered my rejection goal of 50 for the year—I had to withdraw that piece from about ten publication queues. I'm tracking my rejections on Substack Notes if you want to follow along.

I'm planning on updating this newsletter more regularly about my writing life. Let me know if this interests you or if there's anything about my process or writing you're curious about.

1. A dabblecha is a word my maternal grandmother, a songwriter and poet, invented that refers to a tiny bit of something too small to be labeled a dab. She used it in reference to tiny leftovers cluttering the fridge—too small for any sustenance.