The Holy Grail – Literary Journal Publication!

I’ve haven’t blogged for a bit for several reasons. Mostly, it just felt like too much for me to do. This whole blogging thing is a strange beast. I don’t have all that many followers and while I’ve been told by a few of you that you enjoy my musing, I doubt any of you are hanging on my every word eagerly anticipating my next post. Sure, you might read something and say “I enjoyed that and hope to see more,” but I am not so delusional to believe you are waiting expectantly for that “more.”

Am I Obliged to Blog?

Well, the largely rational part of me isn’t under the illusion that y’all wait for my words to arrive in your feed or inbox. Like anything else in life that I take responsibility for accomplishing, I look at my blogging as a kind of obligation. No, it’s not an obligation of the kind that anyone is relying on me to get it done or of the kind that I can’t live without. However, blogging was sort of an obligation to myself to keep producing words and creating something.

Wait, that’s not quite right. What I really wanted to make myself feel obligated to myself to just writing anything. Blogging, specifically, was just one way to fulfill that obligation to me. Believing there is a ready and waiting audience out there helps nudge something that is just pure self-indulgence toward making it feel like a real obligation. (Side note, I know I could journal to “just write anything,” but I have a hard time journaling.)

So, if I think you are out there reading this and eager to hear more of my musings, I feel like I should produce more of it.

To Me & Myself

I am forcing myself to keep writing “obligation to myself” and “for me” in this rambling post. I am so good at fabricating obligations that I start telling myself I NEED to be writing blog posts. And lately, I’ve failed to write any posts at all. Then, I started feeling bad about not getting this self-imposed obligation done.

I finally got tired of beating myself up. There no immediate NEED. So, I reminded myself, the real obligation was to just write anything. When I reframe it, I realize I’ve met that obligation to myself already. Blogging wasn’t necessary.

Writing Accomplishments

While I haven’t been blogging, I have been writing, editing, revising, and rewriting. I did a bunch of copywriting (techie SEO content stuff) for a few companies. I wrote several essays for classes. I’ve pitched story ideas into an endless black hole of editors, magazines, news organizations and literary journals where a few of many asked for finished ‘on spec’ pieces that ultimately got rejected or ghosted. (I am still trying to place them if anyone is interested in a story about a 20-year-old dog or a 21-year perspective on my first marriage or a story about how motorcycling helped my self-confidence)

And I painstakingly revised, rewrote and polished a few pieces that I keep submitting to literary journals.

Published!

Then, this month, I finally reached the pinnacle of the literary journal submission game. A piece I first drafted over a year ago got accepted. (YES, please clap, cheer and high five me for this.)

The essay started as a Modern Love submission titled “Grief, Therapy and Riding Motorcycles.” It was rejected as it should have been – that version was not good. I workshopped it in three writing classes, two writing groups and paid for additional feedback from an instructor and an editor. I submitted various versions of it 17 times. Thirteen rejections later including with one very forcefully phrased hard no that made me decide to give myself until the end of the year to place this or I’d put it on my blog.

Then, it finally got an acceptance to a literary journal. Actually, I got two acceptances within a few days. Fortunately, the second one allows for reprints and the piece will appear again early 2020.

So, after all that preamble about blogging and obligations, here are the first few paragraphs of “Motorcycle Riding through Grief and Separation.”

It’s only a teaser. If you’d like to read the whole thing head over to Snapdragon: A Journal of Art and Healing. An electronic version of Issue 5.3 Broken | Whole is only $5. The money supports the journal which is an important resource for writers like me who obsessively submit, revise and polish the same pieces over and over again until it finds a home.