It feels difficult to get back into blogging, partly because that strange time between Christmas and New Year is over and I’ve forgotten what routine is. Also because in the past few days I’ve been submitting more writing to online journals, etc., so blogging hasn’t been my priority.
As I wrote in this post, this year I want to focus on getting my writing out there. While having my writing published would be amazing, and is the goal, even being rejected but getting feedback would be great. My original goal was to send writing to twelve places this year, which is a piece a month. This was my original goal as it would be manageable with my schedule and allow me time to edit what I write.
So far I’ve already submitted to five places.
These have all been poems I’ve been working on over the last few weeks. From now on, if I want to submit something it still needs to be written as I don’t have any writing that hasn’t been submitted somewhere. Even though some places do allow simultaneous submissions (where you send the same piece of writing to numerous places at once), I sent something different, well, just because I wanted to.
The point is, as I have already submitted to five places, I might bump up my goal to more than twelve.
It does feel good to be submitting work, though it’s a hard balance because all my best writing is going to these places rather than my blog, or a book. While I would love to publish a novel, I would also love to publish a book of poetry, but if all my best poems are published elsewhere, will my book suck?
Similarly, I would love to be putting some of these poems on my blog as I’m really proud of them! They’re longer, more serious and about my personal experiences. But if I put everything on my blog I wouldn’t have anything to submit.
I don’t post badly written things on my blog (well, maybe if I went back over my old posts I would disagree), but if I posted everything I wrote on here I wouldn’t earn money as a writer.
That sounds shallow, as though money is what this is about. Which isn’t true, because I do write and will continue to write without being paid for it. But I do want to be a writer full-time, or at least part-time, which means I would be getting paid, which would mean writing outside of this blog.
I don’t have an answer to this problem, but I did find something I’d love to show you. The photo below is from primary school (I can’t quite remember what year, but I’d say between year one and year four), and my first attempt at poetry. I even earned a certificate for this, in which the comment says “what a creative poem on squids!”
Sarah xx
the softest words 