On Careers…

I wasn’t sure that this post would happen.  Not because I didn’t have the time to write it.  Quite the contrary, I sat down last night and had hours at my disposal to write both this post, and to work on Temple in the Stars.

No, what I didn’t know is if I should even bother.  I described Friday what I went through to get Temple ‘ready’ to submit for editing.  When I wrote that post, I had been in communication with my editor, but hadn’t reviewed her submission.  I hadn’t done a great job, but she didn’t pull any punches telling me so.  That’s good!  She did a great job with her feedback, and you must have such feedback.  Everyone telling you everything is rosy is a recipe for long-term failure.  I had thought, prior to actually digging into the returned editing, that I had made mistakes but would have some positives to work with.

What I actually found out after sitting down to review the work I submitted was this: it is the literary equivalent of a dumpster fire.  Nothing about what I had done was worthwhile.  Flat, non-engaging Mary Sues, completely listless and lacking plot, an intro which is completely worthless, and verbal tags that I had thought were minimal were apparently very much the opposite.  In essence, I had spent almost a hundred hours working on generating, re-writing, editing, and re-editing Temple in the Stars to create a worthless pile of nothing.  It’s… well, it made me seriously question if this is actually something I should be pursuing.  If I couldn’t produce worthwhile writing after investing that level of time and effort… let’s just say that last night was a long evening.  I had to wrestle with a lot of my personal demons, my personal failures, weighing and judging and deciding if this was just one more thing I had to add to the long list of “Stuff Justin Screwed Up”.

After sleeping on it, I feel that I should keep going.  The soggy excuse for a story that I submitted to Karyn notwithstanding, I genuinely enjoy the act of creating new worlds.  I like marching forth and creating a cabin out of the endless forest of words.  It might not be an amazing cabin, it might even be a leaky piece of junk, but it’s mine.  And that actually means quite a lot, both to me personally and to my professional career.  I have to be willing to own my work.  I have to be willing to own up to that work as well.  What I submitted is not fit for public consumption, but if I am able to put aside my ego and my pride, and accept that it’s what I submitted, I can move forward.  I can begin fixing the mistakes that have been made, and find ways to obtain training on the things I do poorly.  Granted, at this stage that appears to be everything, but that just makes any improvements I do make all the more important, because each of them is a necessary one.

Literaryfully,
Justin