New Year

Like many people, I had a few days off over the recent holiday season.  Being a working-class writer is not easy, since most employers demand their pound of flesh, and then some, so taking a few days to write was, in a word, bliss.

The new year begins with a new round of responsibilities and a boss making renewed demands for more time.  As it is, the time I have to write is measured in minutes rather than hours.  I keep hoping that this will be the year that I’m noticed.

Well, I may be exaggerating there a bit.  I started writing fiction, by my recollection, in about 1975.  It may have been earlier, given how sloppy those initial manuscript pages look.  In a working-class family, I didn’t have the first idea about how to get published.  I’m still learning.

2014 was a boon to me, with four fiction pieces published in one calendar year.  That has never happened before.  I first started sending out potential publications in 2009, and had not my first been accepted, I would’ve likely sent my last piece out in 2009.

Since then I’ve ensconced myself in the cycle or proposing and being rejected, with the occasional editor who sees eye-to-eye with what I’m trying to say.  All appearances to the contrary, I’m not a hack.  Neither have I ever taken a writing course.

Those who write because they write know that it can’t be learned or taught by classes.  Surely it can be enhanced, but my classroom was a redneck town with a hostile attitude toward boys who were too creative and not too physical.  So I kept my light under a trashcan.

Reentry at work is hard.  I have to awake too early again.  I yawn through my own writing while the sun is still reluctant to get out of bed.  This past week I saw the moon on my way to work and then again on my way home, in the opposite side of the sky.

More stories are coming.  I work on them every day.  I still get many rejections, but I’m starting to learn it is the price to pay for writing as a working-class man.  Or woman.  Or both.  Fiction is wonderful in that way.  Each new year offers new possibilities.