Last night at my Monday Night Writers group, the conversation turned to what slows us down or stops us in our writing process. One of the members mentioned that he starts questioning his work as soon as he puts the words down, doubting their value or creativity, or if the project itself has any hope of going somewhere. I get it. I have felt the same way.

Or worse, when I read something that is extraordinary, such as Tomorrow There Will be Apricots by Jessica Soffer, I start wondering why on earth I am trying to write when there are so many more talented and gifted people out there. (The fact that Jessica is young enough to be my daughter doesn’t help either!)

Anyway, that old self-doubt doesn’t just creep in on little cat feet (as Carl Sandburg said about fog) but instead lumbers in like a giant woolly mammoth, trampling over whatever little amount of creative confidence I possessed after the last round of rejections. (Related question: why do rejections affect me more than acceptances? I have had three short stories published in less than a year—a record for me, by the way—yet when I get a “Thanks, but no thanks” response from a literary journal, I immediately think my best writing days are so far behind me that I would need a telescope to see them!)

Anyway, I don’t have any great answer or solution to the problem. All I can do—all that any of us can do—is just appreciate the talent of other people and then work on our own material, using whatever talent we possess and doing our absolute best to keep improving every day, line by line, word by word.

Ready to submit your short story? Here are five fiction markets to approach! (Always check websites for full details!)

The Adirondack Review
Submissions: Online via Submittable
Word count: Up to 4,000 words

Harpur Palate
Submissions: Online or by mail: Harpur Palate, English Department, [genre] editor, Binghamton University PO Box 6000 Binghamton, NY 13902-6000
Word count: Up to 8,000 words

Chamber Four
Submissions: Use online form or email to submissions@chamberfour.com
Word count: None listed

Red Fez
Submissions: Online
Word count: None listed

Full of Crow
Submissions: via email to fiction@fullofcrow.com
Word count: 250 to 2,500

I have had to hit the “pause” button on my fiction—not by choice but by circumstance. Moving my father from my house (where he had been recuperating for several months from a heart attack and surgery) back to his Florida home was an all-consuming project: final visits with Ohio doctors, the packing of all the paperwork and clothing and miscellaneous items that had accumulated since October, the  arrangements for someone to stay at my own home. And added to that the attendant worries about his welfare once I was no longer right there, doing all the caregiving tasks that needed to be done.

Anyway, it was just too much to try to add in even that 30 minutes a day so I hit the “pause” button and gave myself permission to take a break.

Then, as Fate would have it, I was given a little something to tuck into my writing storehouse for when I am back home and “fictioning” again. My seatmate on the flight to Tampa mentioned that her family lived on Amelia Island, just off the coast of northeast Florida. Why did this catch my attention? Because a short story (that may ultimately turn into a novel) that I wrote a long time ago called “Peripheral Visions” had the character traveling by car from Ohio to an unnamed destination on the east coast of Florida. And the more she talked about Amelia Island, the more obvious it became that my character would in fact end up there.

So now I have something to think about on the flight home, to keep me from worrying (okay, obsessing) about my father and how he will manage.

I’m thrilled to report that my short story, “Interim,” is now live at Red Fez!

A little bit about this story… I don’t really know what sparked this piece. Sometimes I do, like “Ice Cream Sunday,” (which appeared in Fiction365), but in this case, I have no idea what the genesis was. The idea that nothing in her life was what it seemed, down to the name of her street, Tall Oaks Drive, when there were no oaks anywhere?As for smoking, no, I don’t smoke, but I have known enough people who do to understand the craving.

What is different about this story (when I think of others that I have done), is that I have switched from past to present, sometimes in mid-paragraph, with no warning. Example:

“But the flower died. Little by little, leaf by leaf, it shriveled and withered and died. The petals fell off and lay on the floor beneath the dirty window sill until they crumbled into nothingness. And I never figured out what went wrong. Too much to drink? Not enough love? I just know she died one day.”

I think it works — you tell me — but it wasn’t an intentional decision on my part. It just wrote itself that way.

Anyway, I’d love to have any comments from you on what you think of the piece, both from a story aspect and from a technical, writing aspect. Oh, and one more side note for those who are tired of getting rejections and give up submitting, this piece was submitted to close to 30 publications before it finally found the right home at Red Fez. So don’t give up. Never give up!

Looking for a new market for your short fiction? Check out today’s list! (Be sure to read detailed guidelines before submitting.)

Black Warrior Review
Submissions: via http://bwrsubmissions.ua.edu
Word count: no longer than 7000 words

The Carolina Quarterly
Submissions: via https://www.tellitslant.com/home/journal_details/21
Word count: about 7,500 words (25 pages)

Damselfly Press
Submissions: Jennifer(at)damselflypress.net
Word count: up to 10 pages of fiction/ 2 stories per submission

North Dakota Quarterly
Submissions: Hard copy only to The Editor, North Dakota Quarterly, Merrifield Hall Room 110, 276 Centennial Drive Stop 7209, Grand Forks, ND 58202-7209
Word count: no restrictions

Rosebud
Submissions: Hard copy only to RFI PROSE Submissions, C/O Roderick Clark, N3310 Asje Rd., Cambridge, WI 53523
Word count: 1000 to 3000 words

I’ve been working on two very different pieces the last few weeks. One of them — working title, “In Absentia” — is the one that Morrow Wilson had gone through with a finetooth comb and pointed out every flaw. In the nicest possible way, of course. And he was right on all counts.

The second, called “Bad Day” (which is a terrible title but I don’t have a better one at the moment), is still a work-in-progress. It started out as a short story, but now as I approach 20,000 words, might have morphed into a novel.

The two stories couldn’t be more different. The first is very dark, fairly literary and definitely not a “fun read.” The second one is lighthearted — both to work on and to read. (I usually start each writing session reading the past 500 words or so to get me mentally and creatively back into the place I was the day before.)

My original plan was to finish revising “In Absentia” but right now I am dealing with some other challenges — real life, not fictional — and found that starting the day in a dark place week after week was not necessarily the best thing. So I ping-pong between the two. The first week, I work on the first one, the second week, the other. Darkness and light. Seriousness followed by humor.

I’ve never actually worked like this before. I  generally finish one complete draft before either starting a new story or beginning yet another revision, so I don’t know how well this will work. I’ll either end up with a completed short story that meets Morrow’s expectations and a pretty good chunk of the first draft of a novel, or I’ll get so confused between the two that neither are any good.

I vote for the former.

For the past ten years or so, I have been engaged in the ongoing process of renovating and updating my home and surrounding landscape (really, just a fancy term for “yard”). The reason why I’m still not done isn’t because the house is so big — it’s only a little over 1,000 square feet — but because life, in the form of a divorce, recession and the inherent economic ups and downs of being a full-time freelance writer, too frequently intervened.

What does this have to do with writing? Wait — I’m coming to that.

So among the first things to go was the wallpaper, much of which I had put up when I bought the house in 1979. In the first two years, I had papered nearly every room, not because it was cheaper to paper than paint but because, with a six-year-old and a one-year-old running around, at least I didn’t have to worry about yelling “Don’t touch the walls!” I could slap up a strip of paper, push the furniture back in place and stop. And start-and-stop-and-start again was pretty much the pattern of my paperhanging experience, since my younger kid picked up every germ that entered the tri-county area and hang on to it for dear life. And if you’ve ever had to deal with a sick kid, you understand why it took forever to get the rooms done.

Anyway, there were long periods of inactivity, while I was either deciding what to do next or wondering where I would find the money to do what I wanted to do, followed by furious bursts of energy. For example, in one roughly two-year span, I replaced the roof and all the windows, added a sliding glass door and deck, and put on new vinyl siding. Then, the recession hit and nothing was done for quite some time. Now, I am back on the renovation track again, finally finishing the main bath updates that began sometime in 2003.

And as I debated about where else I could put the new subway tile that I fell in love with (I first bought enough to put on one bathroom wall, then more for the area above the tub surround, then bought even more to do the rest of the walls and the backsplash in the kitchen!) I thought how my reno life mirrored my writing life.

Sometimes, I am writing new pieces — a literary version of adding new rooms to my home — and sometimes I am updating what is already there. Rip out those outdated clichés and replace with updated words and phrases! Eliminate the barriers that slow or stop the reader and create better “sight lines” (a goal that is part of every home design show I watch) so the reader has a better overall view of the story.

That’s what I am doing these days to my short story, “In Absentia.” After going over the story with Morrow Wilson (read my post on this here), who pointed out where and how to make it better, I have been “renovating” the piece, word by word, line by line and paragraph by paragraph. And, oddly enough, I have been enjoying the process.

It’s different from the initial writing because I know how it ends — no surprises there. And yet there are still revelations, still things to learn about the character, still serendipitous moments like yesterday, when on my morning walk/run, I came up with the perfect slogan for the delivery company, whose truck has now figured in as a key element in the piece. And like the reno process, if I take my time and plan it out, the finished product will be so much better than what I started with.

While it’s true that some of my short stories and essays have been accepted for publication with very little prior editing or reworking — the version of “Betsy’s Boots” that ran in Woman’s Day was almost word-for-word what I wrote in the first draft — most have definitely benefited from a redo, update or wholesale reconstruction.

So my advice to other writers is to go back over all those unsold, unpublished pieces that have been languishing in the drawer or on the hard drive or somewhere in the “cloud” and take a fresh look at them. A little judicious editing or creative reworking may reveal the great “bones” of the writing that make it a workable piece. Then all you have to do is enhance what is already there.

Just a quick note to announce that my short story, “Ice Cream Sunday” is now live at Fiction 365! (Can’t find it? Search by date: 2/23/13)

Just as a side note: this short story had been submitted 17 times since 1995. Most of the time, it came back with a “Thanks but no thanks” form rejection, but sometimes editors had included positive comments.

So… I kept submitting, figuring someone would like it well enough to run it. And the fact was, I liked it. I believed in it. I was willing to keep trying to get it accepted because I thought it was a good story and it ought to be read.

Luckily, Fiction365 agreed with me. So the next time (and the next time and the next time!) someone says “Thanks but not thanks,” I’ll just go to the next one on the list.

So last night, Morrow Wilson and I spent more than two hours on the phone while he pointed out ways to improve one of my short stories that I thought was ready to submit.

Never mind all the clichés that he rightfully said needed to go, adding “You’re a better writer than that.”

Forget about the obvious error of having a body being “wheeled to an ambulance.” (Unless the body in question has grown wheels, it’s the gurney that gets wheeled. The body is just along for the ride.)

No, the biggest mistake was a plot point that I had failed to develop or even hint at: why Ruth left home. What drove her — a 30-year-old woman who had thus far failed to take charge of her life — to leave her crummy backwater town to head to New York?

Beats me — since she (the character) hadn’t bothered to share that little detail with me. But since it is absolutely crucial to the story development, I’ll have to mull it over, and hope that, at some point, Ruth will enlighten me. With luck it will happen.

It has happened before. When I was writing “Annabelle,” I had probably hit revision 7 or 8 before she “told” me about a key incident in her childhood that put her on the path for everything that followed. That’s what I need Ruth to do, but if it hadn’t been for Morrow’s eagle eye, I would never have realized that it was missing.

Which is why we all need someone, preferably another writer, to read our stuff and tell us the truth. Not because we like being faced with where we failed but because, when someone takes the time to do that, the implication is that we can rise to the challenge and fix what’s wrong. That we are, as Morrow said, better writers than that.

So thanks, Morrow. I owe you!

Thursday night I had a wonderful far-ranging conversation with my friend Morrow Wilson, author of the recently released novel David Sunshine.

And, as it always does when we talk, the conversation ran all over the place — from book marketing to the business of writing to (the best part) writing itself. We brought each other up to date on our published works and then moved on to those in progress and where they are, or might be, going.

Morrow Wilson

Both of us are in the early, early, early stages of writing something that might be novels, but it’s still soon to tell. As Morrow said, the stage we are at is probably akin to what women go through when they hope they might be pregnant. Maybe they’ve missed a period or two, maybe they have some nausea, but they are unwilling to try those home pregnancy tests, just in case they are wrong and have to face the disappointment.

And I realized that perfectly describes where I am at with my current work-in-progress, which has the awful working title of “Bad Day.” I thought it would be just one of my lighter short stories. But the darned thing passed the 2,000-word mark, then the 5,000 mark, and now it is approaching 15,000 words and I find myself wondering what’s going to happen next.

Will Annie get a better job that brings in more money that her current task of writing blog posts for Bug-Bashing Billy? Will Angie realize that she deserves better than Fred? Will Yogi Swarmsee overlook Annie’s toppling of a row of students as she tried in vain to get into Triangle Pose?

I have no idea, but I am enjoying “meeting” these people every morning for 30 minutes (my allotted fiction writing time) and seeing where it takes me. And if the “baby” starts to move, then I’ll know for sure that I am definitely pregnant with another novel.

(By the way, click here  if you want to read an interview I did with Morrow at my One on One blog.)