Two Weeks...

I've got two weeks to get a short story written and submitted to reach my April monthly goal which is in service of my yearly goal. I've picked the contest I'm submitting to and have two of their prompts loaded and working in my head and on paper to get a good story. But I'm stuck.

Which is always my problem when I try submissions. Either for publishing in anthologies or books or just contest entries. As soon as I take my work from "Hey, this is a fun thing I wrote in 20 minutes what do you guys that I know already and are bound to be nice to me because you are my friends think?" to "Hey here is something I've actually worked on and polished and think is good enough for strangers who don't have to be nice to me to read" my brain switches off.

My muse goes to her room and slams the door. "YOU DON'T EVEN UNDERSTAND ME!" and she stays there until I coax her out with promises of no deadlines, no pressure, no strangers.

But then the side of me that REALLY REALLY wants to hold a book, or a magazine, or a a print out of a screenshot, of something I've written that was published by someone who just thought it was good enough to publish takes over. "Why does she always get to call the shots? She's such a baby!"

Because that's really what it is. Being a baby. Rejection sucks. It just does. And as you all know the only experience I've had with submissions is rejection. And mostly the rejection comes in the form of silence. Not even a form letter saying, "hey, you kind of suck, but cute that you tried" just nothing. Which is the pits.

I've also got my yearly blog goal that needs reached and for some reason I've really been slacking on those as well. Looking forward to next month and monthly goals and it's looking more and more like a Blog a Day in May will return to catch me up. It's so weird really. I love to write. I really do. I love to write fiction and nonfiction and I love to hear what people think about what I've written and yet...

Why do we do this to ourselves? We figure out what we like and what we want to do and how we should be focusing our energy and then we don't. Is it a self worth thing? Like maybe I'm not worth the time to take to write because it is for nothing else but bringing me joy? Cleaning, cooking, taking care of things around the house, those all get priority. And it's me. It's not Brent driving that. If I did nothing by write for 8 hours a day and hired a cleaning person and ate every meal out he would be like, "Whatever makes you happy." Seriously. Which should lessen any feelings of what I need to do. And I SWEAR to myself that it will.

But it doesn't.

A friend of mine posted about a conversation she had with her teenage daughter. She said she did a soul baring breakdown of what she was missing in her life and what she needed to do. Her daughter replied, that she always says that and then doesn't do it. And oh my gosh did I feel that. We tend to know what we should be doing, what our deeper selves are telling us to do. And then we don't do it.

Are we worried about being too happy?

Too content?

Has our culture told us that life is struggle for so long that we find struggle even when we shouldn't?

Or do we feel guilty if we are able to do what we want to when others around us can't? I know I feel this. Brent works. He works hard. At times his job is not pleasant. But he doesn't have the choice to not go. Because I don't work. I took that choice away from him. And I've looked at giving it back to him but he makes more money than I ever could at this point.

Unless I publish a bestseller.

So there is that.

And yes, I know you've read this exact blog from me before, and that's really my point.

I've got two weeks to break this cycle.

Wish me luck.