Fresh start: go!

My favorite type of chili is very simple -- lean ground beef with slight spice, pinto beans, chunks of canned tomato, kidney beans if I'm feeling beany, and a generous portion of shredded cheddar cheese. When it's fresh and hot, it really is delicious but pack it away for a couple days in the fridge and then reheat and then it's at it's finest. The key is to let it take a break.

I do this a lot in my life without really knowing it until I'm on the other side of the break.

One of the most important things I've learned about myself in the past decade is that I enjoy slow and simple. You can have the most complex anything (especially music) but unless my ears or eyes can pick apart the layers, I won't really feel it.

I decided a bit less than a decade ago that I wanted to write, so I did. I wrote two novel-length pieces of speculative fiction and had plans for more. I wrote a number of short stories, all either science fiction, fantasy, or an odd mixture of both (which now apparently is lumped into speculative fiction). I went to conventions, I was in a writing group, I wrote reviews for several publications, and I submitted my stuff to countless publishing houses and magazines (without success).

The beginning of my break coincided with the end of my first marriage. I thought I would use that summer (2003) to edit my second book, to really polish it and find a publisher. I got stuck in an endless cycle of 'it's not good enough' and I set it aside. I don't think I will ever revisit it because it's not who I am anymore and I don't ever think it's who I was. I think writing all that stuff was important though because I was writing.

Several things have come to mind in the interim. You always hear people saying to write what you know but honestly, I think I would rather write about what I like. One other thing is that I would get really discouraged that I was writing and submitting and getting rejected, that I would go into the bookstore and there would be rows and rows of just crap writing. I realized that even though those folks got published, I wasn't reading their books (and probably nobody else was either because all those books are still there) so it shouldn't matter.

So my brain let that congeal into knowing I want to write for myself about things I like.

I'm not saying that my writing is the best in the world because if you have any sort of intelligence at all, you realize that there will always be somebody stronger, smarter, faster...whatever, they are out there. The difference is timing, connections, and that amazing human trait to endure humiliation otherwise known as tenacity.

No guarantees I won't slip up and write a random story about the crazy dreams I have now and then (the one about the giant turtle who travels across galaxies comes to mind...) but I'm going to start with my small list of things I like, starting with paper. Results to be posted soon.