“2019 will be my springboard into 2020. I feel it.”
Year in Review: 2019
Year Statistics
I don’t want to waste time reminding everyone about how bad this year sucked. Let’s get into it.
As of December 30th, 2020, I spent 1273.75 hours toward writing. This is about 420 hours less than 2019 and about 250 less than 2018. Considering everything that’s happened, I’m surprised and pleased it’s this much.
Where did the hours go? They escaped from writing and reading. The good news is I spent more time editing than previous years, which was a soft goal from 2019.
While it was not the year I hoped it would be (was it for anyone?), good stuff did happen.
Year Successes
10 Year Anniversary of Writing 3 Pages Every Day!
I started taking a professional attitude toward writing when I was 16. I spent hours after school typing up my stories on a desktop that wasn’t connected to the internet. Writing was pure fun. Hundreds of pages of a novel that would never be finished sleeps in folders deep in my hard drive, transferred from flash drive to hard drive. Like a long daydream conjured into the world.
I wasn’t thinking of writing as a profession then, not consciously, but I already knew I would write for the rest of my life.
The man who kickstarted my drive to be a professional was Al Young. I met him at a summer arts camp; he taught the poetry discipline. I asked him tons of questions about writing as a pro. I asked, “Do you write every day, even if you’re not inspired?”
He replied, “Every day.”
Shortly after camp ended, I tried write every day. It was the first time I wrote even when I didn’t want to. It was like turning a rusty faucet. You had to put muscle into it, and sometimes only a trickle came out, and you had to wait for the words to filter down the page before you could let go. But it got easier every day.
Sometime that fall after the arts camp, I discovered and gorged myself on John Steinbeck’s work: Cannery Row, East of Eden, Grapes of Wrath. I fancied myself smart and had strong opinions of what great writing should be— full of elaborate description, wisdom, characters real enough to talk to— and his writing seemed like the very model of Great. How did he become a writer? I found a quote from a selection of his diaries, published in the Paris Review.
“Abandon the idea that you are ever going to finish. Lose track of the 400 pages and write just one page for each day, it helps. Then when it gets finished, you are always surprised.”
John Steinbeck
I thought, psh, I bet I can do two pages. If I can’t at least do two pages a day, I thought, then I’d never make it as a writer.
That was January 1st, 2011. I was a junior at the Oklahoma School for Science and Mathematics (OSSM), and my workload was immense: microbiology, mechanics, world literature, Japanese II, etc. OSSM has mandatory study time from 8:00pm to 10:00pm , or 7:00pm to 10:00pm if you’re on academic probation. But if you were a really good student, you’d study after lights out. My roommate studied; I wrote. We put construction paper shades over our desk lamps so no excess light would leak under the door, and we turned our pages gingerly so the hall monitors wouldn’t catch us. But if I didn’t write when I had no time, I wouldn’t do it when I had all the time in the world.
I made the whole year without skipping a single day. And I thought, Okay, let’s do it again. And I did it next year, and next….
In 2020, I struggled to keep up the habit. Anxiety, depression, and fear engulfed me in a swamp–sometimes I’d slip and choke; I focused on keeping a diary. I stayed up late, mind racing down the unlit careening What-if Highway, horrors flashing in my headlights, dragging pen over page. This year, those three pages were devoted to my whining about my job, how badly I want to write full time, how scared I was of getting sick, surviving, and living with severe side effects, and heckled myself for not getting more done during a global pandemic. I wrote in memo books smaller than my hand.
But I wrote. Breaking the habit was spiritually harder than keeping it. Writing longhand anchored me and made me pay attention to the world and what I thought about it. Staying off the computer kept me away from possible distractions, and it satisfied me to see my progress by finishing diary after diary.
What matters is the habit, of devotion, to sitting down at my desk, every day from 8:00pm to 11:00pm, sometimes to midnight, with the desk lamp craning over the words, as it has every night and day since January 1st 2011 when I worked illegally in the dark.
Over 50 magazine submissions (overshooting my goal for 2020)!
I decided to do the #100Rejections Challenge, but wanted to start with a smaller goal. I set a goal at 50 rejections with a stretch goal of 75. Then I forgot that I was only doing 50 and nagged myself for being so goddamned far behind. By chance I read last year’s year in review… and realized I had overshot them.
Things I’ve noticed while doing the challenge:
- Science fiction and fantasy magazines have fast turnarounds (days to weeks), they tend to pay, don’t charge reading fees, and are more likely to give me personalized feedback.
- Lit mags take months to get back to me, rarely pay, usually charge reading fees, and have never given me feedback. But I got my first acceptance in a literary magazine.
- Some places I didn’t think would like my work have given me very kind rejections and personal encouragement.
- Rejection alone did not make my work better.
Even though short stories aren’t my focus, writing, revising, and polishing them to complete the challenge improved my writing sense. Reading and writing short stories has led me to a better appreciation for the short form, and I’ve sought out and purchased anthologies, collections, and magazines, even bought a few subscriptions.
As a result…
First published piece in a literary magazine!
What would happen if I could control everyone with the same name as me? My thought experiment, Calling All Erins, was published in the April issue of the Tulsa Review.
Debut novel professionally edited!
The novel which began illegally in the dark in 2011 will be published legally in 2021. Click here to read the first chapter of Perceiver.
Things I’ll Do Next Year
System Reboot
Next year, I’m going to change the way I time track. You can read my 2018 Year in Review for more details on my system. Using a Google Workspace plugin called TimeSheet, I time track how much I write, edit, research, read, outline, and other miscellaneous tasks. I glance at the clock when I start to work, and when I’m done, I write #[Action] plus the working title of the project in my paper planner and for how long I had worked. At the end of the month, I put everything into my Google Calendar, and TimeSheets pulls a report for me.
A typical weekday looks like this:
#Reading = 1.0 hr
#Writing = diary = 0.5 hr
#Editing = P2 = 1.5 hr
This system worked well for a few years and helped me find some important insights about my work process. However, I think now that I’ve had my system backwards. Rather than focus on the #[Action], I want to focus on the #[Project].
So for 2021, the typical day’s entry would look like:
#Reading = book title = 1.0
#Diary = 0.5 hr
#P2 = editing = 1.5 hr
The reason I’m changing the system is because I’m taking too much time to finish books, short stories, and blog articles— years for books, months for short stories, weeks for articles. I want to be able to see that I’m drifting off a project and reel myself in to finish it fast. I want to self-publish, and to be successful in self-publishing, you need quick turnarounds on long work. At minimum, I would eventually like to publish two book-length projects a year.
Goals for 2021
I don’t know what next year will look like, so I will keep my goals low.
#Project focused time tracking, rounding up to the nearest 15 minutes.
3 pages a day.
50 magazine submissions, stretch, 75.
Hire a cover artist for my first book.
Publish my first book.
Find beta readers for second book. H
ire editors for second book.
Stretch goal: publish second book.
Closing Thoughts, or, the Annual Epiphany
This year, I found a new genre to binge: advice columns. I don’t read advice columns because I have problems (I’ll deny it if you ask). I read them because advice columns are the perfect genre for learning how to write for readers.
Readers who send questions to advice columnists usually write from shame and desperation. The questions are ones they conceal from their closest friends and family (or maybe they didn’t have friends or family). The questions are usually dire. Will anyone ever love me? How do I set goals if I don’t want anything? Why won’t my friend text me back?
The best columnists tie the asker’s question to the universal human condition. Their answers are compassionate, pragmatic, insightful, sensitive to the individual’s circumstances. An antidote to lonely readers, advice columns are proof you can love your fellow human from afar. I found answers to many questions I didn’t know I needed to ask, answered. Reading advice columns remind me why I read at all.
But I often ask myself why I bother to write.
The reasons why I write have changed. Rather, now I have more reasons. During 2020, I wrote because I felt all the wrong things. Shame that I wasn’t doing enough to help causes and people who I believed in. Guilt for being comfortable, being able to work from home, for the successes I outlined at the beginning of this post. Depression over being hostage to other people’s bad decisions. The world had been working my heart like a bag. Emotions were a slurry of alienation, disconnection, and loneliness. I wanted to feel something strong, clear, and good, so I wrote stories like I was designing defibulators, hoping to jolt my heart back to life.
A bit of truth slipped into one of them. To my horror, that one got published.
This was my truth: “My stories are me talking to myself, hoping somebody will overhear. I’ve always felt like I spy on life rather than being a part of it. It’s odd. My work can’t be meaningful all on its own; other people have to find it meaningful. I have to know what other people find meaningful to make meaning for them. But if I were good with people, I wouldn’t be turning inward to entertain myself. I probably wouldn’t be a writer.”
This was my truth. Emphasis on was.
When I read my previous year’s Year in Review Closing Thoughts, it dazes me how unfamiliar the writer is. Her insecurities, her passion, her annual epiphany: she mostly enjoys writing, but she mostly does it because she doesn’t know how to stop or what she would be without it. She expects her writing will be read, but writing for readers and predicting what they might like, feel, want, is about as useful as reading tea leaves. She writes because she’s talking to herself. Being overheard is a bonus.
Trying to write for others leads to a curious boomerang. Studying what matters to others helps you put into words what matters to you. Your stories contain the family resemblance of the books that made you think: “THIS”. With each year, less and less accidentally and more and more purposefully, you can write the THIS-ness into your own work, until one day you actually believe someone when they say, “This is good.” Because you thought it yourself, but was too embarrassed to say it out loud or even continue thinking it. Despite your efforts to stay humble, the compliment inflates your head. You’re mistaken for a runaway Macy’s Thanksgivings Day parade balloon. You write more stories and articles in that vein until you remember it’s not the content, it’s the THIS-ness, deflate, and return to the pleasurable agony of trying to figure it out.
Every day is a fight to remember the annual epiphany. Remembering against the opponents of bestseller’s lists implying this is what is good, this is what is wanted, the writer’s advice, which you sometimes disagree with and can give reasons and evidence as to why, but quash your better judgement and take the advice, because what do you know, with your lazy thinking and fuzzy feeling? You’re so lost and alone. You have no-one to talk to but yourself. In the title match of You versus You, the perverse truth is that the weaker You wins. To think and feel, know what you think and feel, and expect people to pay attention— heck, to pay— is ridiculous.
But it turns out people like ridiculous shit.
What I’m saying is, you should write the way you want. You should know what you want, too—that’s hard. So is knowing why you want. I forget every day what I think (rather, I forget to think). Fail to notice how I feel. Sometimes I don’t know if I feel, because I tend to think of emotions as sweeping, know-it-when-you-feel-it forces and not the sensitive instruments that hint at what’s important to me.
To make a big deal of New Year’s Day and re-remember what you’ve been doing every day for the last decade—without missing a single day—reminds you that thinking, feeling, remembering, and paying attention is deliberate. Every day I try to answer a question I can’t articulate. I couldn’t tell you what it is. It depends on the story, the article, the mood. The day, the year. The answer is something like THIS. Answering feels unquestionably right.