inner critic, go away; go jump off a cliff today. . . .

It's ridiculous that I just wrote a blog post justifying that yes, I am a writer, since now I feel so very iffy on that front. I know it has to do with the fact that I'm randomly depressed again, and that I just got a good critique (read, was not nice to my story in exactly the way it needed to be, and pointed out a lot of things I need to fix to make it work), so I feel like if I can't even write a story that makes sense, who am I to say I'm a writer?

in which I decide I would like to blog more often

Even if I feel I have nothing to say. I can talk about writing, current knitting/crochet projects, my poor garden, even the fact that I really do want to get my Etsy shop up and running one if these days.
Of course, I always think that, every time I visit my cousins. Two of them run the pretty darn successful Quiet Mischief and Co., and watching them work and have goals and actually make a living off Etsy always inspires me. Usually for only about three days, or so, but I really would like to actually do it this time. Even if it means dealing with being a business, and taxes and shipping and having to build my customer base from scratch.

may day, may day

Okay, so it's not May Day anymore. But it is a day where I have enough time to write a long-overdue blog post! So that counts.

thoughts on rejection

I just got my first rejection letter for a story I submitted. I have mixed feelings about this. In my writing group, we say that rejection letters are something to celebrate and collect, because they mean you're sending out stories, or something. But it still would have been nice to be published. Oh well. (I need to actually ask my writing group why we celebrate them; just so we don't get bogged down and depressed?)

I'll take the opportunity tomorrow to look at markets and see if I can send it out again. Maybe I'll work on my other story that I could possibly sell--to fix the things my writing group pointed out--and send that out too. Because as nice as writing every day has been for simply producing words, it would also be good if I started editing and submitting what I've written.

two weeks and more

Today marks eighteen days of me keeping my writing goal! Two days in that were over 1000 words, and four were 500 or more. That totals to nearly 9000 words, most of which were added to my NaNo novel (with about 2000 written in my quarterly challenge story for my writing group). And while that evil little gnome in the back of my head is saying that I wrote that much in one of my self-imposed Epic Sundays during NaNo, I'm heartily ignoring it. 9000 words is nothing to sneeze at, whether it's written in one day or two weeks, and the real accomplishment here is that I've been writing every single day for more than two weeks.

the problem with finishing

So I made it to 135k this NaNo, which is more than 500 pages written in a month. I still remember, when I was younger and working on Captive and Powers (two novelish things I spent a good deal of my teen years poking at), being amazed when I made it to 300 pages. This took several years, because I only wrote when I was 'in the mood for it'.