Of course I mean March is magical if by magical I mean “awful.” We’ve been hit by the plague. I started getting sick Tuesday evening, was in full-blown illness by Wednesday midday, and was off my feet most of Thursday and Friday. I was moving around more Saturday and Sunday, but still haven’t overcome the blahs, the sore throat, coughing fits and general nausea and weakness. For about a day I was lovingly taken care of by my darling and awesome wife… and then she got sick and we’ve pretty much limped our way through a lousy weekend.
First class is finished. We had to do a presentation for our “final project”, which seemed strange since I felt the 50 page novel excerpt we wrote should have been the “final project” for a novel writing course. There was a requirement we speak, but with my illness that wasn’t possible, so I whiffed on it, did a half-assed sort of assignment trying to skip the question we were supposed to answer (explain how you will continue forward with your novel… which I don’t intend to). I tossed on some music I had slapped together from samples a few years ago… hell, probably ten years ago, time really does fly it seems… and called it a day once I wrote up some notes about what I would say if I were capable of making a noise that didn’t sound like a tortured rhinoceros.
I’ve slipped well off my writing the last few days. Being sick does that to you. I’m also struggling with motivation as short story after short story gets rejected by the various magazines. A couple had positive notes (“wanted to like it, but didn’t quite capture me completely, keep submitting”), but it’s still a bit depressing at this point to have written a half dozen stories and received around 20 rejections so far spread across them, plus I’m now up to around fifteen or sixteen agents that either rejected or never replied (thus rejected through lack of reply) the novel. And writing the fifty page excerpt for class pulled me out of what I was already doing, so I feel a bit ruderless at the moment and need to reassess works in progress and make a decision where to move forward.
Welcome March. Now get out of the way, let’s get on with April.