In High Gear

Today, with a fire under my ass, I drove to my nearest post office and put the stamps on 31 envelopes filled with book proposals which I wanted to sent off to various New York Literary Agents. According to the worker who took the huge stack off my hands, the envelopes would arrive to the selected agents no later than Tuesday. I figure, at this point in my writing career, I have to kick it up into high gear.

Here are some things I've done so far:

I've already started podcasting my short stories on Mevio.com as well as Podbean.com. I miss reading into a microphone.

Recorded promos have been sent to three authors I know. Hopefully this will help with exposure.

As for writing, I've been working on a few good short stories. So far classical music while writing at the coffee shop seems to be working.

A funny thing happened while I was rooting through my writing desk. People, sometimes it pays to be messy. Over the years, any idea or scrap of paper goes into a file. While searching through them, I found two partial short stories that were already written. They were just never typed on the computer. How do you like that? Some of my work is already done years before I decided to come back to it again. Also, while searching on my flash drive I found a doozy. Currently there are five or six drafts of For What It's Worth. On one of the drafts, I found a short story about a father and son team that go camping with disastrous results. I remember writing the story and being plagued with doubts on whether it would stand on its own or not. Eventually I decided to hang it up for now. But, looking back on the three page opening scene, I fell back in love with the characters. Something tells me this story just made a miraculous recovery and might appear in the second collection. Very excited about that.

To close, I'll leave you with this - When you are blocked, talk to someone. Just a few hours ago I told my wife how all these ideas are just to much and that I'm starting to let my reading habit, reading seven books at once, leak into my writing habits, which, of course, is working on seven books at once. She asked why I work on so many. "Well," I say, "Some ideas are challenging while others are easy and I just don't know where to start." It is at this time that she lays on me a beautiful yet simple zen-like, sage piece of advice: "Why don't you start with the easy ones first? Work your way up."

Priceless. It was just what I needed.