Avoiding Submission

Despite the full and irregular schedule of my day job, I’ve completed the recommended changes to my novel. That should be a cause for happiness. For some reason, though, I’ve been avoiding the actual submission process. That is obviously an issue.

Even sending it to the same agent who made the recommendations (the current plan) seems worrisome. There seems to be an actual fear of the submission. Sure, the worst she can say is no, but I think that particular no can hit with more weight than I want to feel.

It’s as though there is a dark blotch of despair lurking in the farthest borders of my mind. It circles the hope I’ve attached to the novel. It senses the possibility of death for that hope. If I get another rejection, I fear the despair will dive fast and rip the hope to shreds.

Of course, I’m not actually that susceptible to any long-term anguish. A rejection would bring disappointment, but I’m a big boy and can handle it. MY old writer’s group used to joke that you couldn’t really understand being a writer until you could wallpaper your office with rejection letters. It just comes with the territory.

For now, I’m going to chalk it up to the extra stress and exhaustion of the day job. I’ll put the submission process on an actual to-do list; I tend to actually accomplish those tasks. Before too long, the manuscript will be on its way. If it doesn’t sell, I’ll make changes and try again. At some point, one of my other writings will be ready for the same process and I’ll start that one out as well. As long as I enjoy the writing process itself, I’m good.

It would be nice to sell something, though.

A Simple Rewrite

As mentioned in an earlier post, I received some very encouraging feedback from an agent. The feedback did have suggestions for changes. Overall, the changes were a good idea but not very complex or difficult. That only leaves the question, why did I have such a hard time doing them.

My trouble with making the changes didn’t have anything to do with the changes themselves. Instead, the difficulty was with making myself actually do them. I’ve had a week off from my day job and yet it is only on the second to last night that I’ve made myself sit to make the changes.

They are done now. I will let them sit for a day or two and then review them to make sure I didn’t do anything blatantly stupid. That’s my normal process for fixing things; fix it and then double check after a short break. There shouldn’t be any major problems.

None of that addresses the fact that this should have been done nearly a week ago. Procrastination is a problem. From what I hear from writing friends, it’s not a rare problem. Still, with all the excitement that the feedback provided, I should have been more aggressive about scheduling time for the rewrite.

As I review things, at least as well as I can, I think I have an idea of the issue. This novel is very important to me. I have put in a lot of work and emotional energy. I really want it just right, and this feedback helps me do that. As a slight perfectionist, especially with a bit of an ego, I think I’m afraid I won’t get it right. I believe there is a fear that I won’t be able to get the novel perfect.

There’s probable a host of psychological theories on why someone would avoid working on something out of fear that they won’t get it right. I’m not a psychologist and don’t want to pay the session fees to discuss this matter, so I’ll just make note of the issue and try to adjust my to-do lists to accommodate the possibility of future occurrences. Maybe that will help.

Either way, the rewrites are already done. I’ll double check them in a couple of days. If all works well, I’ll see about submitting to agents again before the end of the week. Then I can start procrastinating on my next work.

Fever Dreams and Frustration

I’m still in the recovery stage from simultaneous flu and sinus infection. Illnesses with fevers give me strange dreams and, since I tend to drift in and out of sleep at those times, I remember more of the images. Thinking about the dreams reveals a little about my life. For one particular dream, it showed not only some of my frustrations, but how my writing life blurs with my day job.

I pay the bills by teaching computer programming at a local college. One of the most difficult parts to teach is data abstraction. For programmers, like everyone else, abstraction is when you boil down a class of things into the characteristics common to all instances of that class. A software developer who can define classes really well becomes a very efficient, capable programmer capable of making software for almost any purpose. Teaching people to think this way is a pain in the backside and a source of great frustration.

In my dream, I stood before an unknown class in an unknown classroom, trying to get them to find the common features from a set of scenarios. Every time I got them to see the commonality of one part, they seemed to lose any previous understanding.

The scenarios were actually scenes from a screenplay. Each scene had:

  • a location
  • a time
  • a primary character
  • a message for the primary character
  • a secondary character who misunderstood the significance of the message
  • a reference to the next scene, i.e.: where to go next.

This sounds like a scene to most people I know, and at the same time, it seems like a record or class definition to most programmers I know. Why were my mystery students so confounded by the idea and why did it frustrate me so?

During the semester, I write negligible amounts; the day job takes too much time. When I don’t write for a while, it makes me cranky. If there is any psychological interpretation of the dream, I guess it is probably about the lack of writing I do when class is in session. It makes sense. During the summer break, I can turn out five thousand (first draft) words a day. When classes start, I can occasionally find time to knock out a couple of hundred. My brain is just too locked down on the subjects I teach.

At some point, I will have to find a way to maintain balance so I can write throughout the year. It will be good, but may take a while. Maybe when all my courses have stabilized and the supporting materials are all in place, the day job won’t take up so much of my time. Until then, it’s occasional short poems and writing notes till break.

As for the screenplay in the dream; that was disturbing too. Apparently, my subconscious mind has developed opening scenes for a very dark, gritty version of Saban Capital Group’s Mighty Morphin Power Rangers™. The location for each scene is where a previous Ranger died in battle. The people showing up and getting a message are the teens selected to become the new Rangers.

The people misinterpreting the messages were relatives of the deceased Rangers. One thought the message meant the new Ranger had just killed the Black Ranger, his big brother. Another listener thought the new Ranger was the reincarnation of her Red Ranger son who died in a battle so long ago.

The Power Rangers show arrived long after my morning cartoon age, so I have no idea why my brain picked and developed this story. There is probably a reason, but I may not want to know it. For now, I’ll stick to my self-analysis regarding work-life balance.