New Writing Stats

If one were to look by the numbers, I’d be a publishing success. So far in 2023 I’ve had 8 acceptances—about one per month.

Except . . .

How is success measured? I’m struggling to get representation for my novel manuscript, placement for my short story collection, and then there’s the nonfiction project languishing because I lack a platform.

Yet, I continue to write and get smaller pieces accepted. This is not a revenue driver. Mostly the journals taking my work are grateful for free content (their word, not mine)—though I do think they genuinely like the story. Albeit, they do not pay.

This week I learned a short story I wrote titled Little Norway was taken by Pensive Journal: A Global Journal of Spirituality & the Arts. Cool! The genesis of the story is thus:

When my daughter was getting married and had her reception at a church in Sycamore, IL I remember seeing the church kitchen and thinking—a homeless person could hide out here and always have food and a stealth place to live. This was before I moved into my Tiny House and sort of do the same thing, though not in secret. Then during my 2020 bike trip across the country I took a break at a small church somewhere in North Dakota. Somewhere, as locations never seemed to vary or the kind of churches, often small, old, white-centric, mostly forgotten. The landscape was what came to mind—the desolation, mirroring my thoughts about spirituality, the feeling of loss.

My cross-country bike trip was the summer of 2020—an election year. Running non-stop on TV were campaign ads, horrible, all of them. None focusing on issues or presenting a platform, but, more or less, decrying the opposing candidate over nonsensical issues. Always the battering rod were immigrants. Images of them pouring over concrete walls, the intention to make human beings seem like cockroaches, vermin. I hated the insinuation, the dog whistling. The blatant racism.

On top of all of this, it seemed the ads were having an effect upon white-majority Christians, Evangelicals. Had they forgotten that our Christ was once an outsider, his family right after birth sent into exile? Where at least was the Golden Rule, the Sermon on the Mount, the Good Samaritan?

Finally, another link in the story chain was the origin story a good friend of mine had once told me about her birth and subsequent adoption. And that story seemed to be the motivation my main character needed in order for her actions to have validity, to make sense in the Little Norway story. Thanks Kathy.

I’ll keep posting when my work final gets out there. For now it’s forthcoming—a nebulous netherworld between acceptance and publication.