Don’t you just love cold, wet weather? All you have to do is spend a couple of hours out in it - working in the garden, or the graveyard in our case, or on your bike battling against crosswinds and hail for thirty miles - and then you can spend the rest of the day in toasty warm indoor pursuits, feeling virtuous. That was yesterday - today it is just cold, cold, cold, and I’ve got a dodgy tum so I’m inside by the fire while Himself is off cycling in the mountains.
I’ve been taking some Looks At What I Do, specifically comparing what I’ve achieved in October against what I achieved in September. I’m not talking about word counts, which I think can be misleading unless qualified. (I tend to write two or three drafts of a short story by hand before it gets typed onto my laptop, for example, and never count the words; life’s too short.) No, my yardstick for progress is how many pieces, stories or ideas I have submitted. In other words, how often I’ve stuck my head up from behind the big, safe wall and said, ‘Hello, this is me! I’m trying to be a writer! Umm, what do you think of this?’
During October, into the world I sent:
Three short travel articles, unsolicited
One pitch for another travel article
Two short stories to women’s magazines - result unknown as yet
Five short stories to competitions - one unsuccessful, results of others yet to be announced
That’s eleven. Eleven.
Paltry as this may seem to some of you, this is a huge improvement on September (three submissions in total: one article accepted, one competition not won and one unsuccessful womag submission), which was in itself the first month in my entire life that I’d submitted or pitched more than one idea or story.
This doesn’t include all the stories that I aimed to finish for competitions but didn’t finish in time; some of these are on my To Be Worked At list because I think they’ve got legs. It doesn’t include my drafts of other travel articles, ready to be worked up if any of my pitches (sent out in the last couple of days) get any bites. It doesn’t include my long-term projects, the novel I’m currently plugging away at daily and the cycling memoir that I work at a couple of days a week.
Eleven submissions. Eleven.
It’s been nice and safe behind the wall. If you don’t send work out, no-one can reject it, can they?
One of my hobbies is hula-hooping. Now, I am not a performer. Being the centre of attention has always been a nightmare for me, I can’t stand the sound of my own voice, and having more than three people look at me at once does horrible things to my knees. However, you can’t practice hooping in the garden (indoor practice has been forbidden since the smashed-lightbulb count hit double figures) without attracting some attention. I’ve become used to people stopping for a stare; I’ve even busked a little, and performed with my fire-hoop at some chilled parties. The performance-fear is still there, jellifying my knees and my digestive tract, but I do it. It’s a simple equation. The sheer loveliness of hooping is now greater than the fear. Just a smidgeon greater, but that’s enough to make it better to perform than to sit down wishing I had the guts to perform.
At last, I’m getting to a similar place with my writing. Far, far better to keep sticking the head up and sending work out into the world than endlessly working on it in the safety behind the wall. My stomach muscles clench every time I click Send, or when my fingers release the envelope into the postbox, but then it’s done. On to the next piece of writing.
By the way, if you are curious about hula-hooping, type Safire’s Hoop Manifesto into YouTube. It’s all about persistence and practice - transferable to any art or discipline - and there are some clips of beautiful hooping. Have a look.
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