Let's Wrap This One Up

Well, it is December 31st. I don’t know about you, but November zoomed past pretty quickly whereas December was almost nonexistent. How’d the last month of Q4 go for you? Were you able to check off some of those goals you set for yourself?

I did all right. Definitely not my strongest quarter, but that seems about appropriate for the way 2018 has gone as a whole. Some good ups, lots of impactful downs. That’s life.

What I am excited about, is I have 2019 in my sights. I really leaned into prepping for Q1 2019 and 2019 as a whole using Todoist. No, this isn’t sponsored. I’m actually not even wild about the app, but it’s working alright for now. Definitely some things I wish it did differently. Still, I’ve been able to organized my short, medium, and long term goals into projects. Now I have to get into the habit of actually using it.

With that out of the way, I wanted to share an experience I had. If you’ve been reading along, you know I had been working on a short story for a specific magazine. Unfortunately, the magazine decided to close their submission window 5 days early with very little warning. I found out about it the day submissions closed.

I’ll be honest; it was a gut punch. I’d been excited about the magazine, the short story, and had even convinced a few of my fellow writers to submit, too.

I reached out to them to see if I could still submit, and they told me they’d already purchased the stories they wanted.

Here’s where I’m feeling conflicted: is that normal? Is that something I should be expecting from magazines or publications? It’s their magazine, they choose their stories, but it still felt crummy. And it feels even crummier because I don’t know if I even have a leg to stand on to feel crummy about it.

The only reason I’m sharing what happened is because I want others to know that this may be something they run into. I didn’t, and it caught me off guard. I am in NO WAY putting the magazine on blast. They, as far as I believe, can do whatever they want. Other than the general feeling of crumminess, I can’t objectively or logically find fault with what they did.

So yeah, fair warning. Or maybe you all already knew that and I’m late to the party.

In other news: editing is so fucking hard. Holy shit.

I’ve been making my way through Rat, chapter by chapter, and it is absolutely a slog. Way more disheartening than the writing process. This is the first time I’m doing editing and revision as opposed to re-outlining or re-writing. I have never felt like more of a hack than I do when I am editing. I have never experienced this amount of loathing for my own writing as I do now. Getting a short story polished up and submitted has nothing on this progress.

Big oof.

Well, that’s all from me for now. Keep those goals close to your heart, try to work towards them as much as you can, and take care of yourselves. 2018 was rough, but we made it. Let’s take that big dick energy into 2019!