What?!

A new month already? Life has sped up suddenly, and it's February.

I'm not going to make that May deadline for my novel. No way, Jose! I've come to a stuttering halt somewhere in a nasty rough draft of Chapter 7. Only Chapter 7! That's just about 100 handwritten pages. *sigh* I remember the days of my energetic youth when I could write 15 pages a day, with a quota of 6. That amounted to an epic of almost 300k words in six months!!! And I accomplished that feat, not once, but twice! The quality may have been crap, but the content was out of my tortured brain. My quota has slipped to 3 pages a day. I'm thrilled if I get in 3 measly pages. Maybe, since I'm aiming for 100k (120k at the most), I'll still be able to finish the rough draft by May 31. What happened to that irrepressible writing spirit? That unquenchable frenzy of the imagination?

Answer: It got repressed. It got quenched.

Well, while I'm still groaning over Chapter 7, I have had just about enough of rejections over a particular short story called "The Bone Harp." So this weekend, I started a heavy rewrite, taking the advice of several editors who were kind and generous enough to take the time to respond with more than the dreaded form letter. The story also received a couple of helpful crits at LegendFire, for which I'm grateful. When I'm satisfied with a story, but no magazine seems to understand that I am satisfied with a story, how am I to know what's missing, where I went wrong? My critiquers and those generous editors become invaluable.

I just hope the rewrites work.