I’ve not been too keen for the winter months for a number of years, but not because of the colder weather and that I am a walking beanpole. I actually like jacket weather, since I have an excuse for all the plaid and flannel that people assume (rightly) I like to wear.
But January is usually when I try to prepare something of a budget for the household and come to the same conclusion as I usually do: that I need more work, and I’m not likely to get it from the postal routes. When I was younger, I tried to supplement my income with a second job, something preferably in manual labor that was paid in cash. But that work is hard to come by.
And let’s face it: I’m getting old. I stepped outside this Sunday morning and immediately decided I’d rather clean the stove than yardwork. My joints agreed with me.
So, January is usually a stressful month for me, which in turn pushes me towards my preferred type of escapism: story-telling. Last year, I couldn’t write as much as I had liked, but this year I’m putting my foot down and making the time. But this does lead the question as to how can I find work while needing to write as a therapy against the stress of not making enough to (as much as I’d like) pay for the needs of my family and household?
Lo and behold, the Universe decides to mess with me by showing me a competition I can enter.
The challenge is to write out a short story with a max of 6,000 words and send it in before the 1st of February. At the time I had stumbled across this, it was 16 January. Do I send one of the short stories I’ve previously written and hope that by some miracle, the judge decides they’re worth publishing (all of them need work, in my honest opinion) or do I test myself and see how much I’ve improved with a new story?
If I write a new story, which world do I go to? Can I put this Legendarium I’ve been in for the past month down (I think I’m going to call it Tales of Eró, but not sure just yet) and dive into a different setting? Could that distract me from my current project? Or do I try sending something from Eró?
…did Professor Tolkien ever have this problem? I bet not. But I’m not at his level, for all that that is the goal.
Now, I do have several stories within this world that might fit the parameters of the challenge. This world has grown much larger than I really ever expected, and I’ve started filling up three different notebooks. The style of those stories, however, might not meet the criteria. They’d be analogous to historical essays, not real narratives. I have one in particular that is done as a narrative, but it reads like a report (because it is a report, but the character doing the reporting is a scribe and what scribe worth their salt would not include dialogue?) and that may not be ‘marketable’.
Lord, but I hate that kind of rejection notice. The last one killed my drive to write short stories for a long while.
But hey, there’s a chance it could be seen as an attempt to bring back older styles of narrative and story-telling. If it isn’t accepted, then at least I’ll have one more bit of world-building to add to Eró.
Stay safe out there, folks. Wish me luck.
-JB Swift
Swift's Corner 