Keeping Busy

Keeping my mind off the query inbox.

Photo by drown_ in_city on Unsplash

Well, friends, my queries are out in the world.

In fact, I have a shiny handful of rejections already in. Most non-writers don’t know how to react like this, but I’m with podcaster and author Mur Lafferty, who insists that we writers celebrate our rejections, because it means that we wrote something and put it out there.

So I am wholeheartedly celebrating these rejections. Even as a part of me is still very anxious and hoping for manuscript requests.

But we can’t focus on that right now. Otherwise, we’re going to drive ourselves crazy.

So I need to focus on another project. After a week or two of drifting lost between projects, I have a couple that I want to focus on: one fiction and one nonfiction.

For the fiction: right after the Parkland shooting, I started writing a book. Moved by the huge emotion on social media, I wrote furiously, a story about the aftermath of a school shooting. Two years later, someone pretty much published the same book—except their book featured band kids instead of my choir kids.

So I put the book in a blender, and came up with something different. There was still a shooting, there was still grief and heartache and heartbreak and romance aplenty. I turned one of my minor characters into the main character, and came up with something fundamentally different (and sometimes I worry, not quite as good).

But I finished a rough draft of that a few years ago. A very rough draft of a book I called The Girl I Wish I Was. And I vaguely sketched out a sequel, The Girl Between Us.

Now that Hannah is in as good a shape as I can get it alone, it’s time to work on telling another story.

As for the nonfiction: over the years, I’ve written a bunch of essays on Medium. Most of them are on completely random subjects, but there are many about the craft of writing poetry. For a few years now, I’ve wanted to pull all of those posts into a book of essays. I want to get that book out into the world.

So I started that today: going through the essays and essentially rewriting them for a non-blog format. I got the first essay done, which is a great start.

It feels weird trying to present myself as some kind of authority on poetry: someone with no degree, no professionally published poems, no kind of authority to speak about the subject — except I write poetry. I’ve written a lot of poems, over a very long time now.

So I guess that’s something, right?

I’m desperate to keep busy, friends. Shake off the dread of waiting on these queries, and the existential dread of being officially older, as the counter ticks over later this month. And I hope that you’re keeping busy, too.

With love,

Zach