Still fighting the good fight, as someone said.  I thought at this point that I'd be in two writing groups but one of them has entirely failed to materialize.  I think that was to be expected because the other person involved has actually got a lot on his plate: he's highly productive in print, on stage, and on radio, so... why would he condescend to small potatoes like me?  Very well.

The other group, despite itself, is causing some substantial material to come into being.  We've been having difficulty getting together as a group, people turning up and dropping out from week to week (personally, I think weekly would be too often to meet, except people aren't meeting every week so it works out), and I think we lost a writer, but the rest of us are actually writing.  One is focusing on her travel stories, another is generating really excellent poetry--and I'm not usually a fan of poetry--and I even have a short story about ready to be sent out.

That sounds anemic in my ears: everyone else is throwing out their work with wanton abandon, submitting weekly, several times weekly, and I'm orchestrating this tremendous effort to refine one short story before submission.  Fear of success, or just laziness?

But I'm still writing plenty.  I started a blog (which I won't advertise here) in which I have committed to writing one short story every day.  I've pretty much plumbed the dregs of my notebooks and hacked out every half-baked idea I've ever had, and now I force myself to come up with one new, original story every single day (except weekends, which usually go to family concerns).  I'm very happy with a lot of the material that's come of this, and I really feel like this is a useful practice and I'm actually growing from it, just as anyone else would develop a frame of musculature from regular visits to the gym.

I have the short story blog, I write daily in a blog dedicated to stationery and pen pals, and I write twice daily in a blog where I complain about traffic incidents, complete with photos.  That's just a vent for my spleen, but it is still a writing exercise.  So the quantity is certainly there, and the quality is improving, but what needs to happen next is that I start turning these freeform exercises into actual manuscripts that I formally submit to publishers.

I also need to research the legality of online publishing as it pertains to print publishing--many places will not accept a manuscript if it appeared online first, like, say, a blog, considering that the first publication--so if anyone happening to read this knows anything about that, please point me to some useful links, thanks.

The writing has been very slow-going.  I dicked around with a couple short stories for a while, then dropped them.  I haven't touched my novel since early May.  As for the two writing groups, only one has actually met, but external events have caused me to miss all meetings since the second get-together.  I touched base with a guy for the second group and we still have to work out a mutually beneficial schedule.

But the fact is that I haven't sat down and dedicated myself to writing.  I'm maintaining my blogs, which are spiking in attention fortunately.  The blog in which I complain about traffic has received considerable attention from the local community and is starting to turn up in New York's radar; my regular blog continues to get inexplicable international attention so I've decided to capitalize upon that and expound upon global issues.

I terminated my Open Salon account, due to the high school politics of its citizens.  Worthy writers were being passed by while sensationalist, talentless ****s were jockeying for visibility through pressure.  I terminated my Twitter account, as I prefer the flexibility of Tumblr.  I eliminated a couple other satellite blogs because there wasn't enough kickback in them, my energy was better diverted elsewhere.

I don't even post here much because I'm tired of all the solicitations: "Hi!  I don't read any of your stuff, but how would you love to read my latest brilliant work!" No one can be faulted for self-promotion, that's for sure.  I just thought this arena would be more of an exchange of ideas, rather than free advertisement and self-aggrandization.  Don't ask me where I got that crazy idea, though.

The six months we budgeted for my writing career didn't yield any breakthroughs.  I was not published anywhere, and I realized how hard it is to stare into the face of Abundant Free Time and still sit down and write seriously.  Other people have said as much but there are some lessons, unfortunately, one must experience for oneself.

On the other hand, I have been published twice in my university's literary magazine, which can still go on a resume.  I found a job as a proofreader at an advertising firm, and they've asked me if I'm interested in copywriting at all.  (One case in which "yes" is not a strong enough word.)  And a week and a half ago, I concluded a gruelling, sporadic 16-year undergraduate battle and walked across the stage to receive my Bachelor's Degree in Creative Writing.

So I've tacked on some achievements and I'm in a good place.  Now that I'm out of school (for now), I have to work on my self-discipline and start churning out bodies of work.  In reading Gene Wolfe's retrospective on his own career and technique, he cited a story about Harlan Ellison, instructing his writing classes to write one short story a day for a year.

It was not hyperbole.  One short story per day, for 365 days.  Can you imagine?  If you could keep up with that, at the end of that year you would have a wealth, a plethora, no dearth of rich material with which to work and ramp up your career!  I tried it for two weeks--my interest in new projects usually flares up and dies down in two weeks--and it was hard, but I did it.  I surprised myself with what I could produce at 11:30 PM with absolutely no ideas, when I'd just start typing random words and those words would coalesce into a reasonable idea--springboard.  I invite anyone to try this exercise to prove their dedication.

So rather than being overwhelmed by a limitless horizon of options, I'm emboldened.  I talked with a couple of my favorite classmates and we will form a writer's group.  My professor has expressed interest in coaching me in writing even after I've left the school.  I'm exploring a couple literary contests--Minneapolis is an intensively literate city.  Things are looking very good: all I have to do is bother to reach up and pluck those apples off the tree.

Depression's nothing new to writers--sometimes it's the paradoxical motivating force that pulls the pen across the page.  Some of the best humor comes from depressive roots, and certainly it's close acquaintances with introspection and examination.

It's also a stunting effect.  My own depression is cyclical and when it erupts, zit-like, I question the whole writing process.  Should I bother?  Who would read my crap?  Do I even have anything that needs to be said?  What makes me so great?

My depression has been entertaining a tawdry, incestuous relationship with my inner critic.

Sometimes only certain types of writing are affected.  I can crank out flash fiction but my blogging is disabled.  I can blog but I have nothing to write in correspondence with personal friends.  I can write letters but my pen-and-paper journal is neglected.

Other times, writing as a function is suspended, and along with this everything else I enjoy suffers: World of Warcraft, cooking, stamp making, playing with the cats, &c.  It's hard to read a book at all, but currently I've got a stack of books by my favorite author and each one is an admonition of my weakness.  "Look at how much I wrote," they say to me, "and you can't even plonk away at your fancy-dancy laptop?  Look at these novels!  Look at these collections of short stories!  Imagine what doesn't appear in here!  Imagine all the writing submitted and had rejected!  And you can't muster a single sentence?  For shame."

I can't even plunge into drinking.  My 12-year-old Speyside is for writers, my harsh Czech absinth is for writers, and I clearly am not one.  At best I can ask for a filtered water.

It's at times like these when every author of note and influence insists, "You've got to just sit down and write something.  Write about how you can't write anything.  Write 'I hate life' over and over and over and see where it goes."  It's like an Olympic cyclist who doesn't have access to his bike, his stationary bike is broken, and he's told to lie back on his bed and make pedaling motions in the air at the very least.

Is that right?  Is that it?

More adventures as a writer: one job, one refusal.

I received a solicitation from someone who found me on Monster.com, asking if I were interested in applying for a position as editor with a marketing company.  Excited, I leapt through all the hoops, tuned up my resume, contacted my references, and gave three strong interviews.  It wound up in success and I was hired!  I went in to work last Friday, a slow day for the office, and practiced my chops on a couple proofs.  It felt good.

But my boss kept referring to me as a contractor, which confused me.  No one at any point of the interview or application processes suggested this was anything but a permanent hire.  I'm meeting with HR on Monday so I'll have to get the definitive answer then.  I may have to research what it means to  be my own business.

And I submitted a short story to three periodicals I found on this site.  I set up markers in my online calendar as to the earliest dates I could expect to hear from each of them.  There's been no word so far from two; as for the third, they returned my unopened manuscript back, heavily stamped REFUSED.

I don't know what that means.  Did I do something wrong?  Was I ineligible to submit, being out-of-state?  Was my envelope not pretty or professional enough?  Am I too fat?  The only feedback I have is some angry Sharpie.  I came here to look the publication up again, find out if I missed anything in their requirements, but the search function is down and apparently the directory is too.  It will be some time before I can investigate this mystery further.

In the meantime, I wrote a successful blog post on Open Salon.  Unlike other material I post there, it was popularly received and still garners some attention.  It's been a very positive experience, but a concerned friend of mine e-mailed me to suggest I not throw my best material away like that.  She said it could have easily been published (and I could have been paid for it), and that's true but how was I to know?  I think I've written much better stuff and posted it, and it's been completely ignored: I have no idea how people are going to respond to my material.  And I could have written it and sent it out for publication in a local magazine or newspaper, and after it was systematically shot down or ignored I could have posted it online, and it would no longer have been timely.  It wouldn't have gotten the attention it did when it was fresh.

I really don't want to argue in defense of my weaknesses.  Maybe I should have dressed it up and sent it out, but the thought really didn't occur to me.  I wouldn't know where to send it around here, and I couldn't imagine that it would survive the slush pile to actually be scanned by human eyes, and if it got that far there's no freakin' way someone would've said, "Yes, we need to print this."

On the other hand, I ran it online and a couple dozen people have been highly complimentary.  I feel better as a writer after this experience.  What would I have gotten if I'd run it in a print publication, ten bucks?  Less?  I'd rather have 24 hours of feeling good about myself.