Not Mourning This Morning; September 19 2022

As anyone could tell you, the hardest part of a routine is getting one started.

I’m still not used to waking up early to bring my kid to school, and it’s been like pulling teeth, trying to get myself to work. Now, to be fair, I was sick for most of last week. A pretty wicked cold – though not Covid, thankfully, as a couple of tests ruled out. Now, though, I’m not giving myself room to make excuses. I’m going to exercise, and I’m going to work.

There is one thing my slacking allowed me to do, though!

Read. At long last. I’ve made a two-book dent in my immense To Be Read pile, and thoroughly enjoyed both novels. I’d missed reading. A lot.

It has, though, made me a little more depressed about the state of my career. I read these books and honestly feel like mine could stand among them. It’s proven to me that I’m really not a bad writer, whatever my querying stats have to say on the issue. So, what more can I do?

I sent off some fresh attempts just yesterday, but it’s become a demoralizing process no matter what I do. All the more frustrating is when I find an agent who seems to like everything I have to offer, only to be closed to queries.

Or worse, they’ve already rejected it, and I have to wonder what about my story repelled them.

In other news, it’s Canada’s day of mourning Queen Elizabeth II, which I’m pleased to say Ontario is not recognizing as a ‘day off’. I’ve got no love for the Queen or the new King, based on numerous things smarter people than I have made comprehensive lists of. My favourite is from this series of tweets, which I considered screenshotting and inserting into this blog’s page, but the list was way too long.

Without much else to say, here’s our story this week:

“What about writing?”

They looked blankly at Inanna, who rose to fetch something – paper and a quill. She offered it, and they accepted without being sure what they were meant to do with it.

Write, apparently. But what?

Tentative, they dipped the quill in Inanna’s hastily-fetched pot of ink, and found that they may not have consciously known what to scrawl, but muscle memory had an idea.