It feels good to be off to a great start writing in the new year. 

And so far, two of my resolutions are checked off.

First, I wanted to write more blog posts, and although I did not specify and make any certain plans known in my original resoultion post, secretly I made a challenge to myself to write (and publish) a piece for three consecutive days. Today's post is the third. 

I'm not sure I'll be able to continue writing daily posts once I start working both jobs again (and, Goddess help me, I'm considering trying to start freelancing in editing and proofreading as a third job). But the challenge I have set for myself is at least one per week. 

The other resolved resolution was writing more creative fiction and poetry. My grandmother always said that whatever you do on New Year's Day, you will do for the rest of the year. So I worked on and completed a poem from my Priority WIP poem list (more on that in another post). I also started, but didn't finish, a new poem and some future blog posts. 

Today, I will begin fulfilling another of my goals for the year. I will choose a book on writing and editng craft from the five I picked out from my collection of books on craft that I was either given or bought, but haven't yet read. Everyday, I plan to read a chapter or two from each of the five books. Today, I have chosen to read the first chapter of a book that has been on my shelf since shortly after I moved into my current apartment four years ago. Revision and Self-Editing is written by James Scott Bell and published by Writer's Digest Press. I think I got it for some ridiculously low price when I subscribed to Writer's Digest.

There are also some upgrades to my resolutions. I intend to seek out opportunities for beginning my editing and proofreading career. I hope to save enough money to be able to have my first paying issue of The Were-Travler (information, here). I am hoping to soon sign on to a monthly membership of the gym at the high-rise office building where my new office at the public media company will be located. I want to keep losing weight and feel better. I plan on a long long overdue visit at the dentist (as soon as I get some decent dental insurance) and do something about these awful broken and painful teeth of mine. 

That's it, folks. Just a few excited lines of success in the first week of the new year. I am hoping to receive some long awaited news about some poetry and fiction submissions made in the past. A nice acceptance email would be a great harbinger of 2017. I would blog about that, for sure. 

I hope your pursuits will all be successful as well. 

Peace--
​

A shorter clip of this was posted on Facebook earlier in the year, and it resonated with me. So I decided to watch the longer version of the YouTube clip of a commencement speech given by J.K. Rowling on the subject of the unexpected benefits of failure. 

The beginning of the New Year is typically the time we begin to re-evaluate the past year and make up our minds to better ourselves in the future. But we often have difficulty admitting defeat, even to ourselves, because in our modern society failure carries a negative connotation rather than a positive one. But perhpas it should be different. It's normal to feel some negativity and self-loathing after failing, but that should not last long. It should be soon followed by positive re-focusing of one's energies to strive to be better next time. Joanne nails these points in her own brilliant way. 

It's a little longer than the clip posted on Facebook, but well worth watching. The author of the famous Harry Potter series talks about the most valuable lesson she ever learned in one of the best commencement speeches I've ever heard. 

I've been meaning to post this talk of Joanne's for awhile now, but today it hits home more, so I'm finishing this post and sharing it with the world. Because sometimes you need silver linings when the rainbow fades to pale. 

​May we shoulder onward through our defeats and come out victorious in the end!

When you write stories and poems, write and actually submit them to magazines and anthologies, that takes a hell of a lot of nerve. Super-thick steel coated ones, if you get my drift. But submitting your work is easy peasy compared to what you go through after.

Next comes the Hard Waiting Time Game.

I have been waiting for news on five poetry submissions for over 130 days. I know that's long without sending a query, but at the time of submitting to this journal I read on their guidelines that it could take up to 4 months before hearing from them. I keep checking my Submittable account and it still says "In Progress" so I'm not going to sweat that one just yet. 

In the meantime, I should be hearing back in a few weeks about a major submission of a flash story to a well-known publication. I sent them my flash story "The ABC's of the Apocalypse" awhile back and got the news a month ago that the story made it through their first round of reading and was kicked up to the editor. The email said to expect a wait time (Hard Waiting Time Game Level 2) of about 8 weeks, so I should be hearing something about this one over the next week or so. 

I have other submissions in elsewhere and looking to put some more through over the Easter weekend. 

Just like gamblers say, especially about the lottery: "You can't win if you don't play," this modified adage holds true for writers: "You can't get published if you don't send it in." And I would add that you need to be patient. Getting published is a waiting game. Write, submit, be patient, and persevere. 

Elizabeth Gilbert, the author of "Eat, Pray, Love" gave an interesting TED Talk on creativity and failure that we watched in our Senior Portfolio class this past semester. 

I just went through an ordeal of having a big rejection lately. I had submitted 3 poems to the Sigma Tau Delta journal, "The Rectangle." I was hoping that at least one of the poems would be good enough to earn a spot in the journal, so I could use that publication as leverage to get into the grad school program I have my heart set on. I got the blessing of one of my professors, Dr. Hallock, who was acting as our advisor for Sigma Tau Delta and praised the poems. 

I waited with anxiety mounting every day for the news. Then, it finally came a few weeks ago. I did not get in. The form rejection email stated that they had over 500 submissions. While it was a little reassuring to know that there was so much competition, that thought alone did nothing to assuage the feelings of unworthiness that every writer feels when they get a rejection. 

As usual, I moped around about it for a few days. Then, I said to myself: "Maria, stiffen that upper lip, buttercup. You got a rejection? Big deal. You've gotten them before. Stop throwing yourself a goddamn pity party, get writing some new stuff, and submit those poems again somewhere else!" I resubmitted the best one to another poetry journal, which also earned me a rejection, albeit a nicer one. They actually told me my poem was well received by the editors of the journal, but it did not fit with what they wanted to do in their current issue. Hey, as a publisher/editor myself, I can identify with that. Plus, a personal and encouraging "No" is  better than a computer-processed form "No" any day of the week. So, I'm going to toughen up once again and resubmit it somewhere else. And on and on it goes. 

Keep trying. That's all we can do. I've been writing since I could walk. I'm sure as hell not going to stop now. 

I am a writer, and I must write...or die in misery, with all my angst piled over my bones like brittle dead leaves. 

You know the song.

If you don't, watch the video above. Or not. It's not a song I would recommend unless you like cheesy 80s ear-worms. It's there as a point of reference, to emphasize the following. 

Writers can totally dig that statement, working for the weekend. For a lot of us, this is the only time we can scrounge some word-slingin' time. Some of us emerge from bed early Saturday morning, haul our half-dead asses to the nearest caffeine procurement device. Once that is accomplished and wake -up mode has fully powered on, we sit in front of our computers for as long as we can and make word pudding on a blank screen. It's gloopy and messy as hell, like all first drafts, but getting it down is all that matters. The time for turning it into something tasty comes later.

I've got several stories of what I call the "backburner" variety in my Word files. I am going to make a habit of it to decide what I want to work on each weekend. I think this is a good way for me to get back into the habit of working on certain stories with an end-goal of finishing something to put in the editing folder or send to beta readers.

Currently, I have two stories I really want to get more editing done on as well as the slew of stories to continue writing.

The following are the stories I want to work on this weekend, and ONLY these stories:

• For Editing:
  • An Irregular Meeting of the Cult of Conspiracy Theorists
  • The Imminent Fall of the Tumbler Stargate and Its Mother AI
• For Working On:
  • Particle Girl Theory
  • Venusian Eggrolls Taste Like Despair
  • 14 Riffs on a 2-String Guitar

I would dearly love to finish one of those WIPs this weekend and chuck them in the folder for beta and editing.

Making task lists like this help me, whether it is getting through college or writing. What works for you?

​It wouldn’t be end-of-year blogging without some goal-setting. My Year 2015 Post was about looking behind at the year that was. This post is about looking forward to events as yet unfolded, and trying to orchestrate some good out of what may come. 

Last years goals were a mixture of health and success (academic, financial, and writing) related objectives. I began walking more. Even though I haven’t seen the results of all that walking in much weight loss, I will continue to try hard with my exercise. I also graduated Summa Cum Laude with my Bachelors Degree from the University of South Florida St. Petersburg, and that was an unexpected plus for the year. 

So where do we go from here? Well…here is everything I hope to accomplish in the coming year. 

1. Get some more hours at either job whenever I can. I need the money for taking the Graduate Record Examination (GRE) and applying to graduate programs.
2. Pass the GRE (get brushed up on the maths and nail this thing in one go!)
3. Apply to the 5-6 graduate programs I’m interested in.
4. Blog more. It’s not that I didn’t blog much in 2015. I did a helluva lot of blogging last semester for my Senior Portfolio class. So I have some posts to steal from there to make up for lost time. But I also need to blog fresh good stuff on here. 
5. Read more. I read 126 books in 2015. My goal was 75. I would like to set a goal higher than 126 for 2016 and blow that one sky high as well. 
6. Get the few completed short stories I have sitting around edited and in decent shape for submitting to magazines. 
7. GET PUBLISHED BIG TIME IN 2016! That means a decently paying market. 
8. Write more. Now that I’m not writing for academia anymore, I would like to start making sweet words with my muse again. We have missed one another. 
9. Keep walking. Try to finally invest in a stationery bike or look at getting a membership at the City Gym I pass by every day. I need to get really in shape if I expect to be cruising big-ass campuses like Florida State or Iowa or USF Tampa. 
10. Keep breathing. That's very important. 

That’s it, really. I’m sure there are other things I need to do, but I’ll deal with all that stuff as we roll along. 

As for you all, I hope you manage to slay your 2016 Resolutions List like the bosses you are. 

Peace and Joy and Love. 

Every February for the past three years, I have participated in a Facebook group called Post It Note Poetry. The goal of the writers in this group is to write small poems on post-it notes, pair the poems with an image, take a picture of it, and upload the resulting photo of the image and poem. 

I didn't have a supply of post-it notes this year so I utilized the software app called "Stickies" on my Macbook, downloaded some free, "no attribution required" images from Pixabay, and combined stickies and pics to create my Post It Note poems. 

In this challenge for the previous two years, I was never able to write a poem per day and end the month with 28 brand spanking new poems. This year I was able to do it. Hooray!

I experimented with some different forms: did a trial and error (a couple of errors, but good ones) with tanka, wrote a new list poem, wrote an acrostic poem that was the result of a bibliomancy prompt where I picked the title and subject from a random page in a book (happened to be Ursula K. LeGuin's The Dispossessed, page 121, my finger landed on the words "sweet-scented paper), and as usual wrote some haiku-forms (haiku poetry with more than one stanza) and some free-form. 

I wrote more then 28 poems for the month of February. I estimate the number of poems I wrote is around 40. Not all of them made the cut for Post It Note Poetry. Some of them were too long; some were not good enough and need a lot of work before they are ready to be submitted to a poetry journal. But some of the 28 poems I posted to the Facebook group will be submitted for possible publication. I hope one or two of them may end my long dry spell in publishing. 

Some of the best poems I wrote in February 2015 for the Post It Note Poetry are listed below: