Welcome to the 21st century. Regardless of which side of the Y2K argument
you subscribe to, there can be no doubt that we are now definitely into the new millennium. This is my first column as president (and "big cheese") of the Woodlands Writers Guild. I would like to take this opportunity to thank the outgoing officers for their leadership over the past year and to say that I hope for good things in the upcoming year. We already have one invited speaker scheduled for next month and are working on others.Thanks to Kristie for taking over the newsletter and to Pepper for her past
work on the newsletter. I would encourage anyone who feels the calling to write either a regular or occasional article to get in touch with Kristie. Here's another chance to get published. The pay's not great, but it can still go on your resume.My resolution at the end of 1999 was to get a piece of fiction published in
2000. Much to my surprise, I had a longish short story accepted by an Australian magazine even before 1999 was out, so I thought I had it made. The story was accepted for the second issue of their quarterly, scheduled for April 2000. That issue has still not appeared, though the editors assure me that they are hard at work on it, having done a major restructuring after the debut issue. Fortunately my story "Harming Obsession" was published on-line in November, so my resolution became fulfilled.Submitting stories is a little bit like sending your children off to college or to
their first job away from home. You can dress them up, but you have to let them go and move on to something else. To stay sane as a writer, one must learn patience. Weeks and months can go past before you hear whether your latest story is accepted or rejected. If it is accepted, more weeks, months, and conceivably years can pass before it sees the light of day. If it is rejected, you repeat the cycle. During that waiting period, you should change your focus and move on to something else, something new.When a story is rejected, you have two options before sending it out again.
One is to stick it in another envelope and dispatch it to a new market. The other is to read it over again to see if there are ways to improve it. I could make a strong argument in favor of either case. We writers often have problems deciding when to stop tinkering and declare that the story is "done." On the other hand, time has passed since you've seen the story, so a quick reread may be in order to see if something jumps out at you. One of my favorite pieces of advice is the following: If you find yourself pausing to admire a particularly cleverly written passage, it's probably a candidate to be deleted. Writing shouldn't call attention to itself.When you get discouraged—and we've all been there—remember this bit of
advice from Stephen King, written after his close encounter with a Dodge minivan: Life is not a support system for art. It's the other way around.