the meme's still working on me

"The Clockwork Pianist" (one of the works in progress from this meme) is now finished and winging its way off to its first market.

Also, unless katallen tells me it's all broken or something, I've finished "Blue Lace Agate" (which at the time I did the meme was still titled "The Ghoul Hunters") and made actual progress on "Draco campestris" (elisem knows just how exciting that is. I've only been working on the silly thing for what, two years? three?).

I'm going to spend this afternoon trying to rewire "A Night in Electric Squidland" so that it will light up and spin. Oh, and finding new targets for the two turnips rejected yesterday.

industrious mole

Today I have made four submissions, four queries, and one withdrawal, and started "A Night in Electric Squidland" over to the tune of 1,200 words. (This is the problem with the 'discovery draft' method of composition. Once you figure out what you're doing, you have to go back and rewrite the story so that it looks like it was what you meant to do all along.) I now have 17 stories out and circulating, with an 18th almost ready to go. I would be more impressed by myself if I were making sales, frankly, but you can't make sales if you don't make submissions, so I figure I'm doing my part. Seniority currently belongs to "Sundered," which is on its 13th submission, and I have a couple of stories that are on their first, poor sweet naïve little darlings.

Selling short stories is all about persistence and patience, and it gets easier the more stories you have out, because it's harder to obsess when you have seventeen ingenues than when you only have two. Also, volume helps in the process of desensitizing oneself to rejection letters, and one becomes less prone to trying to consult the illegible footnotes in the Rejectomancy Handbook.

Ego's a hard thing to handle as a writer. If you don't have sufficient ego, you won't submit at all. If you don't have a fairly sturdy ego, you'll cave in under the weight of your accumulating rejection letters (especially the ugly ones, and yes, MZB, I am looking at you, de mortuis notwithstanding). And if you don't have a well-armored ego, you will make the classic mistake of taking every rejection personally. But too much ego, and you become incapable of learning, and incapable of admitting that the editor may be right in what he or she says about why your story is not working. You have to stay aware of what your ego is trying to tell you, and you have to be careful about how you listen to it. Because it's all about the dynamic equilibrium, and if you don't stay vigilant, you're going to get stuck.

I keep reminding myself of something Alan Rickman said: "I do take my work seriously and the way to do that is not to take yourself too seriously."