D. Thomas Minton

I ride the bus to my day job.  Not only do I save a lot of hassle doing it (I work in the middle of the city and parking is horrendous and expensive), but I also use it to get a lot writing work done, a sort of mobile office.  A few days ago I was riding the bus and scribbling away furiously on story revisions.  I hope I wasn’t, but I was probably jabbering away at myself at the same time, like some sort of crazy person.  After several minutes, the woman sitting next to me asked what I was doing, and I told her I was revising a story.  Naturally she asked if I was a writer, and without thinking, I said, “Yes, I’m a writer.”

I find this interesting because I’ve never identified myself as a “writer.”  I’ve always identified myself as “someone who writes,” which I think is different because it implies that I write in addition to something else, that writing is a secondary thing.  Writers to me are people like Hemingway, Faulkner, Atwood, etc. who are identified by the larger world by and through their writing.

So after telling the woman on the bus I was a writer, I had a nice conversation with her and her husband about writing and some of my publications.  It turns out they were science fiction and fantasy fans, so we talked about favorite books.  Her husband dabbled in writing, and expressed an interest in publishing, so we also talked the business side of writing.  Overall, it was a pleasant conversation.  Only after I had gotten off at my stop did I realize what had transpired.

I’m not sure if this actually means anything or not.  Have I crossed some sort of mental bridge without even realizing it?  I don’t know.  I don’t feel any different—the temperature of my forehead says I’m not sick.  I don’t think my writing is any different.  Yet, perhaps my perception of what my writing means to me has changed.  Hmmm…I wonder if this is a good thing…hmmm…I think maybe it is.

I track my submissions using the The Grinder, an excellent Duotrope alternative created by David Steffen and Anthony Sullivan over at Diabolical Plots.  In the The Grinder, the status of my submissions are color coded, going from black to orange to red as they approach, enter and passed the estimated response-time windows for a market.

Half of my submissions are now in the orange or red, which means I’m into or have passed the average expected response window.  I know this is generally a good thing–acceptances at most publications take longer than rejections, so I’ve likely gotten past the first readers and advanced into the next round of the process.  That doesn’t mean my stories will get picked, but they have likely made it into that exclusive 5-10% of manuscripts to hit the editor’s desk for final consideration.  That’s a nice place to be, so I just keep telling myself to be patient…to stop compulsively checking The Grinder a dozen times a day…to keep writing instead….

I’ve been in a bit of a writing funk the past few months.  I’ve not had writer’s block, per se; the words just haven’t been coming as easily as they have in the past.  The last three weeks, however, I’ve made some progress at clawing my way out of the hole.  I completed a new story—it’s only a flash piece, but it’s the first entirely new short story I’ve finished in a couple of months—and revised on another story that had been collecting dust on my hard drive.  I’ve also got a third story nearing completion (another year-old draft), which would keep me on pace to meet my writing goal of a finished story per month.

I also recently passed the two-thirds mark on the novel I started during last year’s NaNoWriMo, and I hope to have the first draft finished sometime around the beginning May, provided, that is, I can figure out how it should end.  I know vaguely how I want things to go; I’m just not sure how to get there.  Fortunately, I’m confident a flash of inspiration will come; here’s hoping that lightning strike happens soon.

It’s times like these when I know I just need to write my way out of the dry spot.  This is especially true if I want to turn fiction writing into a viable second (or maybe first) career.  Inspiration is a wonderful thing, but it’s not there all the time, and a successful writer doesn’t have the luxury of writing only when the muse favors him or her.  Sometimes it’s simply a matter of butt in chair and fingers on keys.