author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

This past week, I realized something else about Morning Pages and why they're useful to me. Put briefly: They're a safe place to indulge uncertainties. Which is to say, I can natter on to myself about how unsure I am, how worried I am, how doubtful I feel, how much I despair. And it's OK, because Morning Pages are not a performance. They're not going to be graded. They aren't the space where I have to be certain, sure, confident, perfect-perfect-perfect. They're a safe place to admit to insecurities.

I haven't readily given myself permission to do that. I'm insecure like woah, but I know I shouldn't be. I'm not allowed to be. So it was sort of an epiphany this past week to realize that it's OK to write down things like "I'm just writing the same thing over and over and over. Is it really doing me any good?" or "Renaming the protagonist of the snow-glue-apocalypse story after the kid in Dr. Seuss's 'Ooblek' story isn't clever, you know." or "It's late. I overslept by a bunch. Is it even worth trying to get the day started at this hour?" or even "I've been trying all weekend not to think about the City of Boulder 'failure to file' tax liability assessment¹ that arrived Friday because I can't do anything about it until offices open later today, but it keeps popping up in my mind and making me feel sick to my stomach, and I really didn't need that on bout day² or while preparing to leave town, as though it weren't hard enough combining bout day with travel prep weekend, right?!"

It's OK to admit to doubts like that on pages no one will read, in a space of time during which I'm not expected to produce.

It's a good thing to do. At the very least, it can't hurt. It's not like forcing myself to relive unpleasant memories on the page, which can sometimes be usefully cathartic but is just as likely to be a needlessly agonizing experience that poisons my mental state for the rest of my day as though the awful incident had only just now happened, and that also poisons the Morning Pages process itself with painful associations that will make me reluctant to do Morning Pages tomorrow, and that ultimately delays a much-needed healing process by ripping the emotional wound wide open to Day 1 status. (This is why I'm less likely to force myself to journal incidents I don't want to think about, and more likely instead to just write, "I'm thinking about something unhappy and unfair and infuriating that happened yesterday. I don't want to be thinking about it. Here is what I would rather be thinking about instead...")

Unlike that, this is harmless. And it's freeing to be able to admit that I'm imperfect. It's freeing to just let myself be imperfect. I'm in a backstage sort of space, where it's OK to allowing myself time for the pre-show worries and nervous breakdowns. And in doing so, I can work through why I'm full of doubts and come up with plans for working through or around the doubts. Having done that, it's more likely I'll actually leave those doubts backstage (on the page) and be able to perform better despite them on the stage (over the course of the rest of my day).

Realizing that it's OK to wibble on the page was also a realization that I needed to have that realization, if that's not too recursive. I just hadn't been acutely aware of how much of my day-to-day stress was coming from the combination of being uncertain and not allowing myself those uncertainties, and therefore not admitting to those uncertainties, even to myself.

So I guess that's the takeaway here: We have to put on a good act for everyone else; why make our jobs harder by trying to fool ourselves too?

¹It's OK, it's all good. "Your actual tax due for those periods, even if it was zero, replaces your liability assessed here." But I did have to take an extra trip downtown, that I didn't really have time for on OMG I GET ON A TRAIN TONIGHT Monday, in order to have a smiling, friendly tax specialist in the municipal building reassure me to my face that "You are OK now." Totally worth it, though. If I'd just mailed my written note, I'd still be worrying, and I'd keep on worrying all through my travel. That face-to-face reassurance was two grand worth of a weight off my mind. (back)

²Bout day went great. No one got injured, neither during the mix-up bout nor during the "B-Team Showdown" as the announcer kept referring to our game. My Bombshells won, and I personally was responsible for two power jams in jam #2 in the first period. (Since the latest rules change, penalties are only 30 seconds long, so a single skater can go to the penalty box multiple times in a single jam.) I can't begin to tell you how proud I am of that. Whenever I feel ashamed of the stupid shit I did--"Fleur, if you come off your line one more time, I'm benching you," ARGH--I remember that, yes, while there are things I still need to work on, I've improved enough to be aware enough and quick enough on my feet to run back and cause the jammer to cut the track. Twice. During my first time out on the track that night. OK, so, maybe I get a Destruction of Pack Major penalty of my own one of those times. But still. Also, our opposing team, the Pikes Peak Derby Dames Slamazons, were a lot of fun to bout against and to party with after. There is proof of this on the internet. I'm not sure what we were doing in that photo. Pretending to be puppies? (back)

Today I got the quickest response to a rejection ever. I think it came in under twelve hours. I submitted "...Not With a Bang, But a Snicker" (previously titled "Anything For a Laugh") to UFO3 last night, and got a personal note back this morning saying that it wasn't a good fit for the anthology.

That is awesome. No, seriously. Given that most publications I might submit will not consider simultaneous submissions (a story that is being simultaneously sent out to other markets) nor multiple submissions (sending several stories to a single market at one time), a quick rejection does two things: it frees that story up to be submitted to a new market, and it frees that market up such that the author can submit a new story to them.

Roughly speaking, of course. The latter is subject to some conditions. Some markets ask authors to wait a minimum number of days before sending something new. So a quick rejection means that countdown begins sooner. And of course some markets do allow multiple submissions; still, once you've sent your ten drabbles to SpeckLit, you have to wait for their response before you can send more. The idea is, each market defines what a single go-round in their slush pile looks like, and you have to wait for one go-round to be done before you can go another round.

In the case of Unidentified Funny Objects, authors may only send one story at a time. If that story gets rejected before the submissions window closes on March 31, the author may send a second story. (But not a third after the second is rejected, I think.) Unfortunately, I don't have a second story that's remotely appropriate. But I appreciate the speed and decisiveness of the editorial team for giving me the option.

That kind of rapid decisiveness is helped along, it must be said, by sending a story that was easily recognizable as not their kind of thing. I was afraid that might be the case. Witness all that maundering about "But is it actually humor, or is it just 'rocks fall, everyone dies' with some comic relief?" At the end of the day, it's a story about all life on Earth being wiped out. This is something that is intrinsically kind of depressing. OK, maybe Douglas Adams succeeded at making the destruction of the planet hilarious, but first off, we can't all be Douglas Adams, and second off, there's a lot more going on in his books than just "rocks fall, everyone but Arthur Dent dies."

My understanding is, the UFO anthology series wants humor of the uplifting sort rather than the bleak. My story falls more on the bleak side of the line.

So how come I submitted that story despite suspecting its balance of humor to bummer might not be quite their cup of tea?

Well, as the commonplace goes, "Don't self-reject. We have editors to do that for us."

That's not to say a writer needn't do any market research nor have any discernment at all. It's more a reminder that, beyond a certain point, the fit of story to market becomes too subjective a call for the author to make on the editor's behalf.

I can make the easy calls, like, "Send the 'soft' SF that's borderline fantasy to Asimov's, not Analog" or "Don't send a story with graphic sex and obscene language to Intergalactic Medicine Show, since they want to keep things PG." And I think I have a decent handle on what makes a story a Shimmer story. (I could be wrong.)

But it's possible to second-guess oneself into immobility, and that's no way to pursue a career.

Basically, as long as I genuinely think my story's in the near ballpark of what they're looking for, then I'm (probably) not wasting their time by sending it. I might be wrong, but that's what rejection letters are for.

And if I don't send it, they can't say "Yes."

So that's my take on not letting market research turn into self-rejection.

I'm a lot better at spotting mistakes in others' fiction than in my own. That's why I participate in critique workshops. It means that while I'm pointing out the motes in my colleagues' eyes, I'm putting the ginormous vision-occluding planks of my own right where they can see 'em and tell me about 'em.

None of this should be a surprise. And yet.

I remember once telling a fellow workshop member that his story didn't ultimately work for me because his protagonist's emotionally satisfying ending came at the cost of the supporting character's agency. "I don't buy that she just accepts what he did to her and falls into his arms like that. I'd expect her to be angry. The romantic moment you're aiming for doesn't strike me as earned."

That critique session predated the first draft of "The Impact of Snowflakes."

You would think--well, I would think--that, having spotted in another author's manuscript this de-agentifying of a supporting female character to provide a touching denouement for a male protagonist--that having discussed it not only in terms of his story but also that of the larger unfortunate media trends it slots neatly into--well. I'd have expected myself to be alert to this sort of thing when writing stories of my own.

But what happens in my story? The female protagonists slowly learns the true situation (which is not a good one), comes to realize it was either caused by or at least known about far in advance by the male supporting character, and reacts to this realization by saying, and I quote, "The last man alive in my world is coming to meet me... I think I'd like to meet him halfway."

A close friend and one of my story's recent workshop critics gently pointed out that the ending was, well, kind of more gendered than what she'd come to expect of me. And also she wanted to know if the last woman alive in this world had a name?

I had not even given the protagonist a name, y'all. All the *facepalm.*

OK, so, now it goes like this. Her name is Ashley. She's been isolated much of her life because the male supporting character has been subtly and with the best of intentions manipulating her since her early years. By the end of the story she knows this, and she's kind of pissed off.

(She is also, seriously, I promise you, not into him that way. But that's the jumping-off point for a whole separate rant which I will save for later. Later!)

So what's the point of doing something called "morning pages" when it's nine o'clock at night, anyway? This is something I ask myself when I have days like yesterday. I also periodically ask myself why I still do Morning Pages at all. It's good to reevaluate a long-standing daily ritual, the way you might reevaluate whether some keepsake still belongs on the mantelpiece after all these years. Is it still there for a reason, or is it just there because no one's taken it down? Is this habit still useful, or am I just doing it because I've always done it?

A quick review: Morning Pages is a practice popularized by Julia Cameron in her book The Artist's Way. The book is a twelve-week course in creativity and identity. As the reader works their way through the chapters, they gradually build a new toolbox full of tips, tricks, exercises and inspiration. Morning Pages is the very first tool that Cameron puts in the reader's hand.

Simply put, it's three pages of longhand writing which you do all at once, without pausing for interruption or thought. You just splat your brain down on the page. Whatever thought crosses your mind, deep or petty, banal or beautiful, you write it down from beginning to end. Then you move on to the next thought.

Cameron has a particular warning for writers: Don't "write" your Morning Pages. Just do them. This is not meant to be an act of deathless or even competent prose.

When my kind and generous husband first agreed that I could leave the nine-to-five world and take my writing full time, I made gleeful plans for what my writing day would look like. I would start with Morning Pages, of course. I would then do timed writing exercises, at least three sessions of fifteen minutes each, to really get the juices flowing for the day. And then--

"And how much of your day will be left after you've done all this noodling around?" said one of the self-assigned gurus in the online writing community I frequented at that time. "My advice to you is, don't waste your time. Just write."

This was ten years ago. I was, well, younger and more impressionable and more easily made to feel ashamed then than I am now. Admittedly, we're not talking "college freshman" levels of young and impressionable--I quit my full time job just before my 28th birthday--but "young and impressionable" comes in waves. It's amazing how easy it can be to poison someone else's innocent enthusiasm, no matter what their age.

So I bowed to my unasked-for advisor's wisdom and did the newsgroup version of shuffling my feet in embarrassment, and I shut my mouth. And I abandoned for a while the activities that he disparaged, because every time I thought about doing them, I heard his words in my head again: "How much of your time are you willing to waste with these things?" For months I couldn't even pick up Natalie Goldberg's Writing Down the Bones without feeling ashamed.

Oddly enough, the daily routine my correspondent shamed me into abandoning then is very similar to the one I try to adhere to now. I begin with Morning Pages, and I try to include a 25-minute freewriting session early in the working day. These two things combined take up about an hour, tops, and it's an hour well-spent.

More about freewriting another time, I think. Suffice it to say that my unasked-for advisor might as usefully have told a pianist not to waste her precious time with scales and arpeggios, or a roller derby player not to waste her time warming up and stretching.

"My advice to you is, just play."

How about no?

Anyway. One reason I still do Morning Pages is because they help me focus my mind on the day ahead. I tend to describe to myself what I want to do with my writing time. I also mention other to-do items I don't want to forget. It helps me keep from floating passively from whim to whim. It gives me direction.

More generally, Morning Pages is where I meet myself on the page. I take stock of what's in my head. Maybe I don't want to actually face everything that's in my head, maybe I'm not going to write the crappy stuff down, maybe I'm just going to say, "There's a thing that came up yesterday that I don't want to think about and so I'm not gonna," but even that much is more "facing it" than I'd do without the pen moving across the page.

If I've got a story revision in progress, I sometimes end up brainstorming on it during Morning Pages. "Brainstorming" might be overstating things. I talk to myself on the page. I ask myself questions. I don't always have answers, but it helps to know what the questions are. As previously observed, "How do I find space to include Backstory Point A in this scene?" is much more useful than "How do I get started when rewrites are clearly IMPOSSIBLE?"

Midway through Morning Pages, I sometimes surprise myself by remembering a piece of the previous night's dream. When that happens, I'll pause whatever thought I'm on, maybe start a new paragraph or make a free-floating text block off to the side, and I'll write down whatever dream memory just occurred to me. Then I'll draw a little crescent moon in the margin so I can find it later when I've got a moment to put it into my dream journal.

Morning Pages is where I practice my handwriting. I would like to have nice handwriting.

Morning Pages is a chance to play with fountain pens filled with ink in fun colors. I like Sheaffer pens with fine-tipped nibs and refillable converters. I like saffron orange, peacock blue, foggy gray, purple. Sometimes the ink gets all over my fingers, an indelible reminder all the rest of that day that I Am A Writer.

Morning Pages, even when I don't get to them until nine o'clock at night, is a task I know I can accomplish. There is no question of not being able to finish. And on a day when I get nothing done until that late at night, I need to experience achievement. I need to remind myself that I am capable of finishing a thing I start. You know how one of the benefits of short story writing is that it lets you practice story endings more frequently than novel writing does? Morning Pages lets me practice feeling accomplished.

In the end, there's a sort of faithfulness that happens in Morning Pages. That rendezvous with myself on the page is a matter of trust and self-care. Doing it every day, no matter how late, is a way of reinforcing the assertion that I'm worth trusting, I'm worth treating well, I'm not a lost cause to give up on. (These are assertions I need reaffirmed from time to time. I sometimes catch myself doubting them.) Also that my brain's a worthwhile place to spend time in.

Doing Morning Pages even when it's gone nine o'clock at night is a way of holding that faith up against all the disparagements of the world, the rejection letters we all must face and the dismissiveness we shouldn't have to, all the naysaying, all the temptation to hopelessness, and saying, "No. It's never too late to begin."

So that's why I still do it after all these years.

A little while ago, I found that my use of Habit RPG was exacerbating the imperfection blues. Improvising upon them, you might say. Writing new verses. Singing them incessantly. Giving me, in fact, an earworm.

The imperfection blues is that self-defeating feeling that if you can't be perfect then why even try at all? If you were to give them lyrics and sing them over a three-chord progression, they might go something like this:

I got so much stuff to do today. But I can't get past thing one.
Oh lord, I got stuff to do today. And I can't get past thing one.
I done failed at thing number one, so I know I ain't gonna get nothing done.

But today, oddly enough, Habit RPG cured those blues. Temporary cure? Permanent? I don't know and I don't care. It got me through the day.

The cure for the imperfection blues might be lyricized like this:

So sometimes you can't do it all
And that can make you sad.
But I bet you can still do this!
So it ain't all that bad.

This bit of hopeful doggerel, like so many other song lyrics and most Emily Dickinson poems, employs common meter and thus may be sung to the tune of "Amazing Grace." Sorry about that.

The real-world application of this was to realize I could still do my morning pages even though it was nine o'clock at night. I could still earn the right to check the little checkbox and get rewards for my little 8-bit avatar. And then I could go ahead and submit the phantom phone story to WOMEN DESTROY FANTASY! and check off that box (and get rewarded for it). And then I could check off the "1 hour of writing" sub-item under the "5 hours of writing" daily item and thus minimize the overnight hit point loss.

By rewarding me in-game for doing individual tasks, Habit RPG encourages me to appreciate my accomplishments, however small, and not let the perfect be the enemy of the good. And even though there are days when I can't seem to summon any emotional buy-in for that appreciation, the game mechanic serves as a sort of "fake it 'til you make it" device.

It's really kind of genius, this game.

And now I'm going to check off the "post to 'actually writing blog'" item. Maybe I'll get a random drop! I hope it's cotton candy. My pet wolf cub is hungry!

In my head, I had this rant about Ray Bradbury all lined up to play Part 2 to Friday's Part 1. But I am very tired right now and not at all up for it. I'm just back on the bus from spending all afternoon and evening in Longmont, for the following reasons:

• 2:30 - 3:30 PM: Running some errands along Main Street (10%)
• 3:30 - 4:00 PM: Getting most of the post-bus biking over with before the winds "may gust up to 28 mph" (5%)
• 6:00 - 9:15 PM: Taking a roller derby optimized CPR/First Aid certification class (85%)

The time between 4:00 and 6:00 PM was spent at Red Frog Coffee, which is relatively in the neighborhood of the Bomb Shelter, thus requiring less wind-o-clock biking. There I not only enjoyed a chicken salad sandwich and a mug of tea, but I also A. discovered that Interfictions, alas, did not consider "It's For You" the perfect fit I'd hoped; and subsequently B. sent "It's For You" out to the next market listed in its personalized Slush Piles To Visit guidebook.

Two things made it really, really easy to keep this particular rejected manuscript from sleeping over. One is that the next professional market on my list has an online, web-based submission form for my use. It isn't the only market to do so, either. This development of our modern age is spoiling me rotten. I mean, forget envelopes and postage--half the time I don't even have to write an email!

The other thing, the thing of the two things that is the really key thing, is having a list in the first place. Huzzah for good planning!

I feel compelled to admit, however, that this story's list of slush piles to visit was exactly two markets long. Happily, since the market I just now sent it to estimates a 40-day response, I should have a little time to think of a third. If, that is, I can shake that nasty, baseless superstition that doing so is jinxing my chances...

Right. So. Anyway, that rant about Ray Bradbury? Here's the preview version: When finishing a book that makes me angry, it is very important to have some sort of palate cleanser available so as not to go to sleep angry or in fact fail, through anger, to go to sleep at all. Note to self: A collection of short stories that, despite their varied, sometimes futuristic, and often interplanetary settings nevertheless all feature 1950s style gender relations is not the palate cleanser you are looking for.

And that is all. Good night.

My inner adult is none too happy, either.

I knew re-reading Katherine Paterson's Jacob Have I Loved would make me angry. I said it would, and it did. I remembered that it was full of beautiful prose that told a really unfair story which would make me furious. Given this indisputable fact, it was a really stupid idea for me to read it last night when I was sick and likely to have trouble sleeping, so that I could lie awake for hours thinking about how angry I was with that book. Unfortunately, it was right there when I decided I wanted to read something before bed. I have no self-restraint when it comes to books.

It's worse than that, though. It made me even angrier than I thought it would. When I first read it, I was probably a teenager or even younger. I was old enough to understand intimately the direct day-to-day injustices Louise suffers at the hands of her sister and her grandmother. But I don't think I knew enough at that time to recognize how everyone else on that damn tiny island was complicit in those injustices. I had not yet learned that what Louise suffers her entire life is honest-to-God abuse.

Because that's what it is; and, what's worse, the author doesn't seem to recognize it as such.

Spoiler warning from here on out. Yes, I give spoiler warnings even for books that came out more than 30 years ago and won awards and get assigned as classroom reading. Everyone's read a different subset of the books that have come out since 1980; you might not have read this one yet. You get a spoiler warning now, just in case you haven't read it and you'd like to. Here is the warning: I'm going to react angrily to specific things that happen throughout the novel, right up to and including the last page. There will be spoilers. You have been warned.

Onward.

For almost the entire book, Paterson shows you what it's like to be Louise: the unregarded twin sister to Caroline, the island's golden child, for the sake of whose talents every sacrifice must be made. She puts you right in Louise's head. At no time is the reader asked to view Louise's situation as run-of-the-mill sibling rivalry which she'll eventually grow of taking so seriously. From the beginning--from, as I said, the moment of her birth--it's made clear that Louise doesn't matter. To anyone. And the reader is encouraged to feel that disregard deeply, and to resent it on Louise's behalf.

While everyone scrambles to make sure Caroline has music lessons and the best education the island can afford, no one ever asks Louise what she wants out of life. The few times she expresses any wish or desire, it's squashed. When she begins to secretly put away a little of her crab-fishing money for her own use, guessing rightly that no one other than herself considers her future worth investing in, she suffers terrible guilt over it--because her family, like all families in their community, is so poor, and besides, any resources the family has left over after their basic needs is earmarked for sainted Caroline. When Louise finally buys something of her own with her precious hoarded funds, Caroline steals it--and has the gall to tell her, "Don't be selfish." Louise has only two real friends on that island, and in the end they, too, abandon her for her sister.

(This childhood doesn't really do Caroline any favors, either; she never quite learns that other people are as real and vital as she herself is. Her natural childhood egotism never gets told "no" and so it flourishes into outright narcissism.)

And then, after chapter upon chapter of this--a little hope here only to be dashed there, a small bit of affection or concern offered here only to be withdrawn there--we come to the climax of the novel: when Louise is told, "You had dreams and ambitions all this time? Well, why didn't you say so? Why have you wasted all this time and energy in resentment when you could have been going after the life you wanted to live? That's the only difference between Caroline and you, see. She went for what she wanted but you just sat here and stewed."

Right? Eighteen years of abusive and degrading social conditioning should just roll off Louise's back like water off a duck.

I use the term "abusive" advisedly here. Between the time I first read the book and now, I've come to know a wider circle of friends and acquaintances, many of whom suffered and survived ongoing abuse in the bosom of their dysfunctional families. Abuse isn't just about the physical and verbal violence done to the victims; it's also about the long-term damage done to their self-esteem, to their sense of themselves as a person. It is not uncommon for victims of childhood abuse to reach adulthood having internalized that they don't matter, that what they want isn't important, that they don't deserve happiness or safety or affection or adequate nutrition or medical care for an injury, that the very act of wanting such things makes them bad people. That they are bad people, that they don't deserve to take up space on the planet.

This is some of the damage that abuse can cause. It is quite possible to cause that damage to child without landing a single physical blow on their person nor directing overt anger at them. Lifelong emotional neglect will do the trick.

And this is where I think the author herself doesn't understand the full impact of having subjected her narrator to lifelong emotional neglect. Because Louise's response is pretty much, "Why, that's true! The only thing really holding me back has been me! Off I go, then!"

And off she does go into the rest of the novel, which proceeds at the pace of a denouement. It's like a several-chapters-long epilogue pasted on, in which after agreeing that she's fully capable of creating the life she wants to live, she absolutely fails to do so. The college advisor who smarmily informs her that no medical school will admit a woman, is she sure she wants to be a doctor, has she considered nursing school? Or, being an attractive woman, simply getting married? This should have been a challenge for her to overcome with her newfound Carpe Diem epiphany! But no, she cheerfully settles for nursing school. Crisis over in less than two pages. Then, after establishing herself as a nurse in a tiny, claustrophobic mountain town that's pretty much a landlocked version of the place she grew up, she meets a man who infuriates her with his arrogant assertion that "God in Heaven's been raising you for our valley from the moment you were born," but then he smiles her father's smile, so she marries him. This encounter, too, takes about two pages.

It's like the author ran out of steam for developing Louise into the confident, capable woman that all the other characters insist Louise is, so instead she steam-rolled Louise toward a future of settling for this, settling for that, settling, settling, settling.

It's worse than that. While the author seems to be saying "And from then on, Louise created a life for herself out of her sister's shadow," what she actually does is line up the rest of Louise's life according to a checklist driving the story to return where it began in a deeply symbolic way. That horrible Bradshaw family story that preserves in lavish detail the heroics required to keep sickly infant Caroline alive, while simultaneously erasing healthy infant Louise from memory? It plays out all over again on the final pages of the book, and it feels like the reader's supposed to be happy about it.

I was sort of looking forward to this scene as mitigating the unrelenting awfulness at last. But that's only because I totally misremembered how it goes.

Here's what I thought happened: Louise suddenly remembers the healthy baby whom she set aside hours ago in order to perform life-saving heroics over the sickly one. She thinks, "Oh no! I'm creating another me-and-Caroline!" So she gives the healthy baby a memorable story of his own: she picks him up and cuddles him and nurses him with her own mother's milk.

Wrong.

What actually happens is, Louise spares a bare few sentences for the healthy, forgotten baby about how he should be held and nursed rather than left lying in a basket. Then, her duty done, she returns all of her attention to its proper recipient: the perfect tiny infant she's just saved from death and to whom she offers her milk-taut breast.

Well, shit. So much for that.

I don't know what Paterson intended in this final scene. Maybe she really intended Louise's "You should hold him, you should let his mother hold him" to indicate that the healthy baby wouldn't grow up neglected like Louise. But I can tell you how it hit me. My emotional takeaway is basically that Louise has finally realized that of course all attention and care was lavished on Caroline, how could it be otherwise? This was the proper order of things, which only now is she in a position to understand and accept.

I'd like to believe that the author intended to tell a story about how a child survived abuse without losing her sense of self-esteem, and how she finally managed to create a place of her own in the world. But that's not how the emotional equations balance out for me. When I solve for X, what I get is "Yeah, life's rough. Too bad. Suck it up."

And here's where I remember that Paterson also wrote Bridge to Terabithia. Damn it.

Paterson's novels have won awards, and rightly so. She is very, very good at what she does. But what she does is very much not for me. She writes lovely, intimate prose about deeply felt childhood hurts that resonate in my soul, that are never adequately healed but instead provide the framework for quietly triumphant coming of age stories, which can be defined as "the process by which one realizes and makes one's peace with the fact that life is unfair and life will always be unfair." In other words: Suck it up, kid.

I just don't need that in my reading life. Especially when I'm sick.

If last week moved slowly, still it finished up where it needed to be. "Other Theories of Relativity" and "It's For You," both much transformed from the previous drafts, both went out into the wide world. And then, just for grins, so did "First Breath" in hopes of seeing it in reprint.

This is my second time sending it out as a reprint. The first time, I had the unmitigated chutzpah to suggest it might be appropriate for the VanderMeer's feminist spec fic anthology.

About which, I hasten to add, there is nothing wrong. An author needs unmitigated chutzpah to believe her writing worth others' reading at all. And this was a story that at least one editor had judged worthy to pay pro money for and press between hardback covers in a table of contents alongside some pretty awesome authors, so its quality wasn't in question.

However, I had some moments of crawling insecurity about it. One the one hand, the VanderMeers' anthology was to survey feminist speculative fiction from the 1970s onward; did I really think this little story could stand up in that kind of company?

Obviously, the proper answer to that question was, "Don't deny the editors a chance to decide for themselves. Send it in."

But on the other hand, there was the much more devastating insecurity having to do with not having published nor even finished another story since then. Did I think that having made this one sale, I was done? Was I just going to try to milk those 2,900 words or so for all I could get out of them and call it a career?

Well, no, of course not. But all those demons of the family Imposter Syndrome were jeering at me about it. Or shaking their heads sadly. Or just asking, in a tone of grave concern, whether I thought I had the right to try to reprint this story when I hadn't sold any new ones since.

So I sent it anyway. And it was not chosen for the anthology. And that was fine and good and about how these things generally go. (What was chosen? I do not know. A brief search has not turned up news on the anthology. I presume it's still in production.)

Flash forward to yesterday, when I sent it out again. Whole different story.

For one thing, far less pressure: The market I submitted it to is quite respected, but it's just another market. It isn't trying to be a piece of literary history. So that made things easier.

What made it even easier was knowing that it was one of seven pieces I had out in the slush. Seven! Two reprint submissions, one unpublished story on its eighth trip out, and four stories that were Brand Spanking New, Never Before Submitted, Never Before Seen By Editorial Eye, Setting Foot In Slush For the First Time! Seven. And by the end of the week I'll have sent two more reprint submissions out.

That's more stuff simultaneously in slush than I've had since, oh, 2006 or so. I think that's a dandy measure of the success of my new day-to-day work routine.

Now, it can't be overstated that my little fearing monsters' concerns that maybe I hadn't yet earned the right to try to reprint "First Breath" yet were--there's no way to say this gently--total bullshit. Well-intentioned bullshit, true, but bullshit none the less. You earn the right to reprint a story by having the rights of a previously published story of yours revert to you. Simple as that. There's no additional mechanism required and no further permission that you need.

But having what feels like a shit-ton of other writing out on editors' desks really helps.

Yes, this has been an "I feel like a writer!" blog post. Yes, I'm still doing those from time to time. Kinda pathetic, I know. Hey, we get our affirmation where we can, right? And the best kind of affirmation is the kind we can make on our own. Behold: I am a self-affirmation-making machine, my friends. A veritable one-woman factory cranking out the stuff.

Which will no doubt comfort me later on in the week when I'm trying to individually position grains of salt and pepper on the soup of the next short story in the revision queue.

Writing at Fuse again today, which makes it three times this week. I think we've finally succeeded in making it a routine, John and I. Either that, or the prospect of a free beer during "Friday happy hour" is sufficient temptation to overcome all resistance.

I'm liking our Fuse workdays, but I find I like them best when we get there before ten o'clock. When we get there later than ten, then we have breakfast upstairs, there there's the inevitable settling-in period downstairs, and what with one thing and another I don't get to my first "real writing" task until about eleven-thirty. Momentum is lost and never truly regained.

But today John had a 9:30 AM meeting to "go" to, which is to say to be present on the phone for, so we made sure to be there by then. Suddenly the day stretched long and full of possibility, and I was able to do all the things with teeny breaks for Puzzle Pirates in between and still not feel I'd left anything undone by the time beer-o'clock rolled around.

One thing I had time for was a lunch-hour walk to the library, just three blocks away, for some short story research. Here's the thing: I'm beginning to realize that "Other Theories of Relativity" appears to have entered into a three-way conversation with Katherine Paterson's novel Jacob Have I Loved and Ray Bradbury's short story "The Kaleidoscope" on the other. So I've checked them out of the library to refresh my memory because these sorts of conversations should be held deliberately.

The Bradbury connection became obvious rather quickly. I mean, you've got some number of astronauts stranded in space and contemplating their inevitable demise--how do you miss that? Unless you hadn't read the story, of course. I had, and it stuck with me in the same menacing, unpleasant way as "A Sound of Thunder" and (I think) "The Rocket Man." Only I couldn't remember which collection it was in nor its name, so I spent some time in the library flipping to each story's first page and reading the first line.

"The first concussion cut the rocket ship up the side with a giant can opener." Yep. That's the one. And on an unrelated note, a story critique note: A line like that, I'm expecting the next line to start with something about the second concussion. But no, Bradbury left me hanging. I also find the story's ending to be slightly off-pitch and missing its rhythm; the little boy's line should be "cried," not "screamed"; and the mother only needs to say her line once.

Why yes I am critiquing a Ray Bradbury story. There's no chutzpa about it. I critique everything to do with story. I critique movies, and video games, and occasionally friends' conversations. It's a writer thing. (At least, it's this writer's thing.) Deal with it.

The nod to the Paterson novel only became clear to me once I'd got some vague idea of the sisters' relationship. The reflection isn't exact, but it falls along similar lines. The main character is very clearly the Louise of this pair, all her life resenting her sister's successes even as she's proud of them; yearning for a deeper connection and, in scrambling after her sister to try to regain it, constantly stepping into emotional bear-traps.

I'm really not looking forward to rereading Jacob Have I Loved. I remember it as being a beautiful, haunting novel, but I also remember how angry it made me. Every injustice visited upon Louise, every callousness committed by Caroline, every circumstance that made utter futility out of Louise's attempts to be her own person--argh. And there's no use being angry on behalf of a fictional character! There is nothing constructive to do with that anger! So I go through my days grumpy and cranky and I take it out on people and then I realize why and I feel stupid!

I think the only book that has come close to having that effect on me since has been Jane Eyre. I was not pleasant to be around while I was reading Jane Eyre.

For now, I might not so much reread Jacob Have I Loved as simply open it to random pages and see if I get an "a-ha!" out of it. I may save actually rereading that book for when John goes out of town in May. Then there'll be no danger of the book making me inappropriately cranky at him.

First: Don't save writing--even the little bits--for after roller derby practice. Do not save anything for after roller derby practice that cannot be done with a body and brain that just went through two or three hours of roller derby practice.

Second: Sometimes you just gotta forgive yourself.

Third: There will be a tomorrow. Tomorrow will be better.