Holiday Convergence; April 18 2022
It’s uncanny – several holidays happened at the same time, if I’m not mistaken, so to anyone celebrating anything, I hope you had a fantastic weekend! While I’m not religious in any way, my family always saw Easter as a great excuse to delight us kids. It’s a tradition I plan on happily passing along. A magic bunny who hides chocolate around the house? Sign me and my kid up!
I’m working hard to find delight in things when recently, I’ve been so frustrated. In talking to my friends, I discovered we’re all having the same issue: 2022, among other things, has felt like a year full of Waiting.
In terms of my writing career, I’m waiting on a ton of various responses, several of which are past their deadlines – I’ve been assured an answer is coming, but no one knows when. In my legal pursuits (namely the lawsuit following the SWAT raid on my home, which you can read more about here if you haven’t already), the police are holding back information due to their investigation still being open, which means we’re at a standstill. My landlord plans on selling the house we live in, and while he assures us he plans on encouraging the new owners to keep us on as tenants, we still don’t know when the house might be sold.
I’m getting pretty weighed down by it all. There are more things, smaller ones, but they’re all similarly outside of my control. I’ve been coping with it by trying to send out more queries to literary agents, submitting more short stories and poems… but, naturally, that perpetuates the cycle, giving me more things that I’m waiting for a response to.
The one high point is that I’ve been succeeding in my goal to write one poem (minimum!) every day of April, so far. Topics are getting harder and harder to come up with, my fallback being very personal works based on events in my life. I’m hoping to do something with them at some point.
Now, it’s time for the next installment of our improvised story!
Nothing was coming to mind. Not their name, not their home. No family or friends. Nothing but breaking the surface of the water and realizing they needed to find their way to dry land, or the rapids would wind up tearing them apart. It wasn’t as though they’d hit their head – surely they’d know, there would be residual pain.
They dragged themselves to sit upright, peering at their surroundings. A thick forest sprouted a dozen feet away, the foliage around the river sparse as though regularly eaten away by fauna coming to the water for a drink. Way down the river, a buck had dipped its head close enough to the surface to lap at it, alert ear flicking and twitching every few seconds.