Onward and Upward

I got the results back for my L. Ron Hubbard’s Writers of the Future, first-quarter submission this week. I’m happy to announce it won my first, SEMI-FINALIST! This made me ecstatic. Sometimes I get a little complacent and frustrated with my inability to nail down a win. That’s the ‘Leo’ in me thinking I’m ‘all that.’ I know—despite my own imposter syndrome—that I have talent. The First Chapter contest wins and the many placings in the Writers of the Future is proof enough of that. But obviously talent is not enough—and I knew that starting out.

In addition to selecting the best stories from the newest writers, Writers of the Future is an anthology. Anthologies need diversity. So maybe my stories weren’t awesome enough, but when compared with similar stories, I’m just not the ‘one’ that’s going to make it into the anthology. But I moved up this time because I followed Wulf Moon’s advice and punched the emotion in my story to 11.

Now I need to tighten my writing up and focus.

A Busy Year

2020 was an eventful year.

The house we rented since 2015 went on the market in late 2019. We began house hunting and moved into our new home on February 15th. The move made me miss the LTUE writers conference, which fell on that same weekend.

The novel coronavirus, Covid-19, escaped unchecked from China also late 2019. Within a couple of weeks of our move, the world shut down in an attempt to slow the spread of the virus. The shutdown succeeded in preventing the hospital system from being overwhelmed, but panic encouraged governments to remain locked down. Some workers were deemed ‘essential,’ and kept working. As a postal worker, I kept working. Coworkers gradually got sick and we USPS employees began working 80 hours a week.

Between the ‘fixer-upper’ we’d just bought, and the 80 hours a week at the post office, my writing suffered.

But I kept busy anyway. See, I’ve found that if I don’t do SOME writing during the day, I’m not happy. So when I’m at work, I write during my lunch. It’s not a huge amount of time, but it keeps the juices flowing. And that—and a mountain of yard work and house repairs—has been my lifeline for a very rough year.