Week 22 of 2019 – 20 May 2019 to 26 May 2019

Goals

Reading

• Goal – 101p / day, or 707 / week
• Achieved – 856/707 – Success!

Writing – I Remember

• Goal – 7 / week
• Achieved – 1/7 – Failure!

Writing – Small Projects (Fragments, short stories, etc)

• Goal – 28 minutes / week
• Achieved – 26 minutes/28 minutes – Failure!

Writing – Large Projects

• Goal – 35 minutes / week
• Achieved – 1 hour 37 minutes/35 minutes – Success!

Getting myself out there

• Short story reviews – One (Six total for the year)
• Submissions – Two (Ten total for the year)
• Rejections – One (Five total for the year)
• Acceptances – Zero (Zero total for the year)

Commentary

Overall, a week of success.  Let’s unpack why.

Reading went very well.  I didn’t read a thing on Saturday and Sunday, because I have a seven month old daughter and that is impossible, but all other days were quite fruitful there.  My to-read pile is ridiculous – I think fifteen books – and growing larger rather than shrinking.  Happily I think I bought zero books, though, so at least I am making some headway.  But there are, I am sure, books I own now that I will die before reading.

The short story rejection was unpleasant.  It’s a story I really like, and I just haven’t found a good home for it.  Alas, alas.  This time the rejection was from 3:AM Magazine, which is a prestige publication for me.  But it wasn’t to be.  I will continue to post this story about for a little while yet, and then if there are no acceptances at all I’ll put it on ice for a couple of months and see what fresh brings in, say, 2020.

I submitted two stories, Automatic/Typewriter Keys and Liberty Leading the People, to Meanjin this week.  I saw a call for submissions and so I did.  There’s really nothing much else to it than that.

I am running low on ‘submittable’ work, though, as I haven’t written a new short story in a while, and as can be seen, didn’t spend too much time working on short pieces this week.  That can be explained by my enthusiasm for the longer piece (see below), but it is obviously quite difficult to submit short stories when, ah, I don’t have any at hand!

I have gone completely away from the flash fiction concept because I realised I just didn’t like reading them.  So, why write them?  2,000 – 4,000 words seems more my wheelhouse.  The sub 1,000 word stories seem, at times, too ephemeral, needlessly quirky, needlessly experimental, flowery without purpose, and so on. I want a bit more time to breathe a story.

I wrote quite a bit on a new, novel(la)-length piece, and I’m pleased, so far, with how it is going.  I mentioned last week that I was cribbing from Roberto Bolaño to get me started, but it has moved sufficiently away from his writing that it’s off in new territory.  So, give me another couple of thousand words and I’ll start to remove the Bolaño ties at the start and then have my own distinct piece of writing.

I took the piece from basically 0 words at the start of the week, to just under 3,000, so it has enough meat there that I can start to see a shape.  I am attempting to do rushed-writing, so I substitute names of characters or ideas with TK and just keep on writing, with the intention of returning to them later at some stage.  There are, currently, 75 TKs in the document, which is frightening – but most of those are repeated names that I haven’t yet determined.

The primary talking point this week is, I think, my shift from pen and paper, to computer.  I love writing with my pen.  I use a Mitsubishi uni-ball eye blue micro pen.  I have for years.  The feel of the pen against a notepad immediately puts me in the right frame of mind for writing.  But.  I find it very difficult to look back at what I have written and continue on, and this is mostly because my hand writing is shocking and I spend just enough time trying to decipher my writing that my brain starts to switch to some kind of editing mode, and the creative drive diminishes.  And so I am writing in a Google Docs word document.  My main concern there is, I suppose, versioning and the history of the text, but I know that Google saves these things.  And, there’s something rather wonderful about having a stack of paper of my scribbling, and I definitely lose that using my computer.

But in the end, it meant I was able to write for 1 hour and 37 minutes which, while it isn’t what I want to end up doing, is much better than the usual 0 minutes.

Oh, and I only wrote one I Remember, which is terrible, but of all the areas to fail in, that one bothers me the least.

And that was my week of failure.

Each week I aim to provide an update on the Journal of Failure.  These reports are intended to provide an impetus for me to achieve as much as I should/more than I do, and also to provide a further ongoing record of my life, as it is.