Thought-Drive

Tomorrow is the first day of the open submission period I've been aiming at with all the recent refinements and edits. Honestly, I finished the last, latest read-through a week early. Early morning head aches and close-faced line reading made for some dizzying moments. I felt better and worse about everything at the same time. I took a couple days off and went back through the submission guidelines again. Last year they got over 1200 entries, and 300 were rejected because the authors failed to follow instructions. Recent events prompted me to go through some extreme measures to ensure I wouldn't be in that unfortunate group. A one-sentence summary and a synopsis no longer than two, double-spaced, 12-point Times New Roman font pages. At first, I thought I had three books to send, then I read how they don't want young adult. Then I did some heavy deliberation on what young adult fiction is and how the term is defined. What clinched it, I think, is that when I went to write...

I recently posed a question to a creative professional I know. I presented to him this comparison, a created work completed in ones mid to late 20s, which was over time revisited and in some ways reimagined, versus the second or third draft of a piece completed years later, early to mid 30s. The ages are arbitrary. What I was getting at is one piece was done without the benefit of the extra years of wisdom and understanding, but it was edited and retooled, whereas the other was less modified but it benefitted the most from all available years of experience. His first answer was not an answer. He saw what I was getting at, at what I was really trying to investigate, and he said, "some ideas are just better than others." That struck a cord with me, but more on that later. I further clarified that it wasn't about good or bad, it was more about what is more valuable, what should, everything else being equal, be the better work, the one we complete at our most experienced, ...

It's been years since I started this, and I'll be the first admit that I haven't done a good job. I don't write often enough. I don't put in pictures or links, both of which would make me more internet savvy, beyond creating a better looking and more digestible online essay. But I've always committed to this in the spirit that maybe I could help some people by being honest with my own struggles. At least, should anyone ever ask me for advice, that's how I plan on giving it. Don't take this road, or don't open that door. I will, with the best of my talent, tell them what road I took, what door I opened, and how it all looked when the wash came out. In that spirit: feedback. Once upon a time I submitted 7 of the 11 pages of a short story for a competition. I got called into my mentor's office, where he asked me to look at my submission, and then asked my confused face if I noticed anything wrong. He told me to be careful about that in the future...