While Waiting to be Published: Tea and Sunshine

While Waiting to be Published

A blog about what I do while waiting for the envelope that says "yes" ....

Tea and Sunshine

This is one of those fairly typical times in my writing life: waiting for word from publishers. I feel a little under the weather, so I am trying to match my time and capacities to what needs to be done. I have three novels which need to be typed up and revised. I have a novella that needs to be typed up and revised (and researched). This year’s 3-Day Novel is coming into focus (after the usual anxiety that I will spend the whole weekend with a completely blank mind or crossing off blind alley first paragraphs). (This will of course be followed by the anxiety that I’ll run out of story during the weekend and end up with a Half-Day Novel.)

I spent yesterday, sick, thinking everything I wrote was awful: no one’s wanted to publish it in a year, right? However, I remembered that I don’t think straight when I don’t feel well and Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life says we all hate our own work, at times. I sat down in the evening and read over an incomplete novel: it was pretty good. I read over the short story which was published last year: the new novel was better. I had some thoughts about structuring the universe they both appear in then went to sleep.

So I will stay close to my mug of tea and a light blanket, prop myself up at my computer, and do something small and undemanding in my open time.

I also added a review of Brian Aldiss' second novel, Bow Down to Nul, to my LibraryThing account. (I think it failed to post on my Twitter feed.) The book: