No, I Didn't Vanish

I just had a hard drive failure followed by a sinus infection followed by a bricked laptop battery, that's all. I haven't given up on writing, blogging or anything else. It's just very hard to find a way to post when Blogger is blocked from work and your home computer has been rendered nonfunctional.

Back to business, I suppose. Since I last posted I've taken up the Fifty Book Challenge, and I'm currently on book thirteen of the year. Not too shabby. I've actually got about five different books going at once, bouncing back and forth between lighter novels and thicker ones, so it feels like I've read a lot more than just those thirteen books. I'm still on a Japanese lit kick, trying to burn through all the translated works in my stack. It's going to take a while to get through them all, especially when I keep buying more and picking more up at the library. I need to return Sayonara, Gangsters and Life in the Cul-De-Sac to the Carnegie Library by Sunday. Chop, chop.

I sent out four manuscript submissions today. I always feel a mixture of confidence and unease when I mail them out. I see other peoples' works in small press magazines and I honestly feel my own work matches up, but shortly afterwards my confidence inevitably begins to falter. Am I too gimmicky? Too unrealistic? Am I only 'good' to myself and Eric? Sometimes I just don't know. Logically I know that it's mostly a game of finding the right manuscript for the right publisher, but sometimes I feel like an amateur. I suppose, in a way, I AM an amateur. 

I have another meeting of the 100 Words Club to go to on Saturday. It's a group that evolved from the Pittsburgh NaNo board. There's some really interesting people there. The concept is that you should devote time to at least 100 words of either new fiction or editing a day. Easy enough, right? Well, I hate to admit it, but I don't write every day. I try to, but I spend most of my time reading other, more successful, authors' works, hoping to better myself in the process. The days I do get down to writing, however, I tend to get my wordcount up into the thousands. I'll just have to keep pushing myself to stick to a regular schedule. It's the only way I'm ever going to build up a collection of works.