Delicious Humble Pie

Let it not be said that I am unwilling to eat humble pie. Last week I wrote a post about writing what you want, especially if something seems problematic or simply not very good to you. I wasn’t saying to stop writing because it’s hard, as we all from time to time must deal with hard things, but that sometimes the problems we face are symptoms of a larger issue at the heart of the work, and in order to gain distance to find that problem we must set the work aside.

Then I was told about a publisher opening their doors to submissions in April.

This sticky stuff on my face had better be egg.

So back to fantasy aimed primarily at young adults. The stipulations of the opening door are that both the adult imprint and the young adult one are looking for epic fantasy. I had one of those moments where everything in my head screeches to a halt and I examine what I’ve been doing with the written word. It was one of those things, trying to determine if it is in fact aimed at young men or not, that I simply had to set aside. It was between me and what I need to do.

Having ironed out some of the bumps in the new beginning born of the rewrite, I now find myself staring down the next two months. But I’m okay with this. It’s a hard deadline. I work more easily with those. With everything else that crops up in the day-to-day routine of your average starving artist who excised the ‘starving’ bit by submitting to a dayjob or starting a family, it can be difficult to convince myself that carving out even a couple hours from what little leisure time I have to bang my head against a cinder block wall while wearing a cast iron pot is a good thing.

But that’s really a pile of petulant whining. I’ve wanted to be a writer for years. Why should I let relatively little things like inconveniences in scheduling and employment get in the way of that?