I am back from a week in Port Macquarie. Did I miss anything? [1] .
July has been a total fizzer when it comes to getting stuff done, if I’m honest. No particular reason – a few unusual things got in the way but the main impediment was sheer slackness compounded by a dip in self-confidence. My crash-or-crash-through attempt to make the competition deadline at the end of June landed in the vicinity of a near-disaster. I made things worse for myself by submitting the resultant mess anyway. Ever since then I’ve felt bad about it – annoyed with myself that I couldn’t make the story come together in time, and somewhat embarrassed at my decision to submit. I have conspicuously failed to write anything much this month. [2]
But no personal failure should go unexamined, so I am taking away two lessons from the whole experience. First of all, it’s clear that I will use any excuse whatsoever to not write. The so-called blow to my ego, caused by submitting what would probably prove to be a reasonably coherent story if I could bring myself to look at it again, cannot be considered a reasonable motivation to do no productive work whatsoever for a month.
Casting my eye over my Steam statistics for some more compelling explanation, I notice that I have played rather a lot of Team Fortress and Tropico in July. Oho. Moreover, as my monthly book count will shortly attest, I did get a fair bit more reading in than I usually do. So, the lure of playing video games and reading books rather than working is strong, is it? Not exactly a revelation, but something that I do need to acknowledge and pay closer attention to. I might need to set myself a curfew or something – no computer games until after 10 pm or 1200 words or something. I’ll think about that one.
The second observation is that I cannot afford to show my work until I am satisfied that it is ready. The obvious risk is that I will resort to gratuitous displays of angst and melodrama at the unmitigated shame of exposing myself as a fraudulent hack, an impulse I need to overcome if I am to make a go of myself as a fraudulent hack or better.
Less obvious but still a compelling argument for the exercise of some discretion was this point raised at a recent CSFG discussion: that professional editors -of whom there are few enough overall and within Australia are a vanishingly small pool – tend to remember your name if you consistently send them crap. I would guess that if an editor feels that reading some or all of your piece has been a waste of their time, they will be less likely to respond favourably to seeing your name on a future submission.
It’s important not to overstate the point – I imagine most editors read a lot of things and don’t commit every detail to memory. But I know that if I were in a position of having to read a slush pile taller than my head, I would not respond with a kind smile to some semi-readable tosh.
There were positives from July too. I submitted a story for publication. The story was as ready as I could make it and works pretty well, I think. Also, I had two holidays, so I can’t really complain about that, can I?
Work in August is going to be insane. Squeezing in any writing at all is going to be a challenge. So that’s pretty much what I got to do now – challenge myself to step up and get my momentum back.
[1] Answer – a decent shower and a critical component in the coffee maker we took with us. A tragic story for another day)
[2] I have spent some time mulling over a couple of new stories, outlining them in my head. I’ve also continued to wrestle with the problematic plot of the novel, but without a decisive breakthrough as yet. I’ve done a couple of reviews and I am beta-reading various bits and pieces written by friends and associates. These things relate to writing without themselves being writing in any meaningful sense.