Life is, naturally, full of both wonderful things and the less wonderful (and I am not about to talk politics or climate change just now), but there are times when writers can't help feeling stymied.
I speak here not of writer's block, but of ways in which we find ourselves putting in a lot of time on tasks necessary to our writing work that nonetheless often make us feel like we are banging our heads against a wall.
To give a couple of examples from my weekend: after devoting the first half of Saturday afternoon to my taxes, I turned to what I hoped would be the more pleasant task of looking up presses that might be interested in considering my novels. The said novels are, to be sure, under consideration at a few places already--mainly contests that award publication and some prize money--but it's best to maximize chances of acceptance. And so, after spending several hours investigating the websites of quite a few small presses, the end result was that two did not have functioning methods of submitting work online because they had not updated their websites from previous years and the links were dead; some presses refused to reveal how they acquired books (or indicated that they do so by contacting writers whose work they see elsewhere); several other presses looked like good bets for one or another project but were not presently reading submissions (natural as they do not have a huge staff, but still... irritating); and hardly anyone was revealing when the next reading period would be. Some presses encourage us to sign up for their email lists, which is not unreasonable, but on the other hand when one is already inundated with emails of every description, the likelihood of noticing Press X's announcement of an open reading period is rather slight. With that in mind, I did not sign up for anyone's email list, although I know it makes me seem like a difficult character to please. Anyway, after all of that, all I managed to come up with was a contest for fiction collections, so I submitted my collection to that. Saturday afternoon was not a total loss (I made progress on my taxes and submitted one book to one place), but it felt lossy all the same.
My Sunday, I thought, should involve sending out some queries and proposals to scholarly presses, as I am preparing an anthology of Czech modernist texts on art, visual culture, and aesthetics. I read over the requirements at one possible press, spent a good while crafting the required query letter (this press wants queries prior to proposals, which is reasonable), but soon received a form response stating that the editor in question has left the press and no replacement has not yet been found. While other members of the edtorial team are dealing with the Art workload, it would obviously be a silly time to re-send my query to one of them as they do not normally focus on the press's Art list. After all, they can't even keep their website up to date (unless the said editor just left) to say there is currently no Art acquisitions editor.
I daresay that this afternoon I will go on and query or propose to another publisher or two or three, depending on how much I need to rewrite my query letter and/or my proposal for each one, but it was not encouraging for the very first one to be a waste of effort.
And of course I also have other weekend tasks, such as looking over the paper proposals for this year's Czech and Slovak Studies Workshop, and putting together two bookcases purchased to replace one which collapsed shortly before Christmas.
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