Back on the Horse

It is extremely easy when writing long, novel-length fiction for a while for me to be daunted by tasks like re-reading or revising or editing and, as such, to procrastinate any work on those.  This procrastination, of course, results in the ultimate horror that the work never gets out.  Anywhere.  It just sits in a pile of zeroes and ones on my computer known only to me (generally).  This, then, causes me to flail about and whatnot and doubt my writing and all of that, and then I generally take long, protracted breaks until something kicks me back in.

So last week, I had a series of vignette stories come out in the latest edition of Slack Lust.  This was a fun exercise, and I had an opportunity to put something out there.  Though outside my normal style, it was still narrative and gave me an opportunity to showcase some wordsmithery, regardless of whether it was an 80,000 word novel or a 2000 word series of extremely short stories, and regardless of the fact that it was more fact than fiction. 

So, despite all the reasons that this little piece was not my normal fiction or poetry, and despite all the other things that made it "not me," what it did do was give me that little kick in the pants that I need every now and again to write something.  And to do something with that writing.  Since then, I've been sending tweets about the article (some have been retweeted to thousands of people - yay), I have received extremely positive feedback from people (who are and are not related to me, so I have both sides), and I got a kick out of having something out there for people to read.

Kinda makes me want to crank out some short stories in lieu of revising a novel.  Is this productivity fuel or procrastination fodder?  We shall see, I suppose.

It did also get me back into getting my submission status tracking back up-to-date and seeing where I am with everything, so that's at least a plus.  Only a few more subs and I will be close to my goal for "stuff out there" for the year.  And then to keep that up on a monthly basis will be key.