The last week has been fairly hectic for me, in part because it involved the run-up to Spring Break (and, perhaps less festively, midterms) and in part because it involved the kind of preparatory space-clearing needed to make something of a free-ish week. My Inner Delinquent would like nothing more than to take a deep dive into Elden Ring, but I can see enough enticing deadlines on the horizon to keep the creative gears turning.

To get myself ready I made time for a deep dive: I have seven holdover stories from the latest edition of my submission tracking guide, and I gave myself about a week and a half to revise four of them, normally with a specific destination in mind. In some cases that was simple work–trimming off a couple hundred words, and in one case adding 400–but others involved more extensive reconfiguration. It’s easy to get caught up in the zest of a fresh draft, but there’s real pleasure to be had in spending time with an old friend and seeing how it’s changed since last you met. Still happy with all those pieces more or less as they were and as they now are, and I think it’s healthy to go back and revisit old haunts, if only to see how they’ve changed and how you’ve grown.

The tricksier bit of business is owning up to unreadiness. The two remaining stories from that holdover set are, I think, pretty dang good, but at the moment the places I’d most like to send them are closed to submissions. There’s a sort of insistent impulse to send them somewhere–anywhere!–just for the sake of feeling as though I’ve got irons in the fire and many things to look forward to, but I’d rather see them sent to the best homes I can think of, even if that means waiting for another month or three.

And the same general principle applies to writing new stories, especially in response to anthology calls. I’ll often rattle ideas around in my skull for days and even weeks, but sometimes they just don’t catch (or, with an annoying degree of regularity, they emerge in an underdeveloped form and find themselves shouldered aside by far more energetic ideas with much later deadlines). An older version of me might have forced the issue, trying to write something–anything!–for the sake of maintaining momentum and good writing habits. But I think that’s a disservice to both the editors of the world as well as my own sense of what it means to write good stories. I can be prolific when I try, but I’d rather be a smidge more discriminating.

Circulation, especially during dry spells, can feel quite a bit like running in circles, trying to beat your own best time. But when it comes to writing, and to writing the best fiction I can, the clock or the calendar is probably not the instrument best suited to measuring progress.

I’m incredibly excited to be writing for the crackerjack team at Superhero Necromancer on their latest addition to The Rainy City campaign setting, Beasts of the Outer Swells. The Kickstarter went live this morning, and it’s already reached its goal, which means this nifty zine will be winging its way to mailboxes all over the world in just a few months! The images are absolutely fantastic, and if you fall in love with the art, be sure to pop over to the site of the artist, Bill Spytma, where you’ll find even more of his portfolio. (Prints can be had at Society 6 as well!) Writing for games is a real treat for me, and if you’re into whimsy, weirdness, and a bit of the wicked, The Rainy City it might just be your cup of tea!

To begin, a confession: I’m pretty terrible at self-promotion. I’m somewhere on the introverted half of the spectrum, as many writers are, and I’m also afflicted with a strong sense that lots of the content we are bombarded with in our daily lives is unwanted. So my strategy for the moment, such as it is, is to keep on posting here–what the kids call Content™–so that readers who find me have somewhere to go if they want to see what sort of mischief I get into.

There is some fine guidance on managing the daily work of self-promotion out there, to be sure. Not too long ago Sadie Hartmann–known to many on the webz as Mother Horror–posted this super handy guide to navigating the wilderness of social media, and I’ve come across others here and there. Like any aspect of the writing life, however, one’s presence on the internet as a Hawker of One’s Own Stuff probably ought to involve a little calculation and circumspection. Back in the day I hosted a blog that I posted to daily, and I had a respectable number of regular readers. At day’s end, however, I realized that my blogging time was obviously digging into the time I needed to devote to fiction and poetry, so I had to let it go. Nowadays I hope/intend to strike a better balance, with a post here two or three times a week, posts to Twitter several times times a week, and the rest of my time devoted to my work. I’ve started off the year well, with two short stories already in the books and some writing for a game project already in polished draft form, so it seems to be a balance that suits me. The trick, of course, is finding the balance that suits you.

I’ll add to these thoughts on content a little ways down the road, but for me–at least today–it’s something like an exercise in mindfulness. I’m trying to be a little more deliberate and reflective this year in terms of what I do and how I do it, and if I chance upon any discoveries or unriddle any mysteries along the way, well, you’ll find them here first.

Today I am roaming a strange corner of the Feelscape, having risen to the news that my application to join the Horror Writers Association was accepted. I’ve got a few degrees, which is nice, but I’m also a certified mixologist, a certified hypnotist, and an authorized horror. Expect more from your neighborhood weirdo.

Because the better part of the speculative fiction writing life consists of staring at a monitor and hunting down synonyms for squamous, such recognition is a lovely thing. I’m not in the business of ranking my feelings, but crossing over a professional threshold like HWA membership certainly falls somewhere in the vicinity of publishing a story or finishing a project. These are the writerly highs we can rely on.

But today I’m also enjoying a writerly feel that often strikes me as equally rare: the one that comes from rescuing a draft breaking bad. On my desktop I’ve got a ridiculous and conspicuous array of folders I deperately need to organize (Writing Priorities, Creative Writing, On-Deck Projects, Works in Circulation, Works in Progress, and Pieces to Work Up among them), but somewhere I dare not mention I have a folder that harbors my secret shame–those stories that are finished, by which I mean written from beginning to end, by which I mean gone too far for me to fix. At some point I’ll extract the core idea and begin again, but in the case of such stories the repair work calls for much more than insistent revision, which can sometimes salvage a draft from matters of defective tense, perspective, et cetera. The inhabitants of this Island of Misfit Stories involve some error I made at the outset that conditioned the entire draft, and while I can cannibalize passages for sexy turns of phrase I have to concede that the story in its current form is a lost cause.

So it’s a rare relief–or perhaps even a sign of something like maturity–that this morning I looked back at the first 500 words I’d written for Blood Rites Horror’s For Whom the School Bell Tolls anthology and realized the story in its emergent form wouldn’t get off the ground. There was nothing fundamentally wrong with the prose I’d committed to pixels, but I recognized an early commitment I’d made, exploring the psychology that motivates my main character, was bound to yield a certain kind of epiphany at the end. It would have made for a good story, I think, but not one with the effects I intend. I have the bad habit of trying not to waste prose if I can help it, but scrapping what I had and beginning again with a clearer sense of what I need is not a waste at all. It’s a necessary step for writing the finest story I can imagine.

It’s perhaps not the feel I’d most like to have on a Tuesday, but it’s an entry in the catalog of #feelz I’m learning to respect more and more as my writing life unfolds.

Not very long ago a writer on The Twitters asked how folks came unstuck when they found themselves bestookened when they sat down at the keyboard. Plenty of people ventured plenty of good answers, but I thought it would be worthwhile to acknowledge just how powerful prompts can be.

I’m something of a pragmatist these days, which means I do less writing for my own diversion and more purposeful writing to spec. When I speak of responding to prompts, then, I’m not often talking about the ones you find on many writing websites (and please note that I’m not disparaging them, either–they can be incredibly helpful when the brainpan has run dry). I’m talking about the prompts that materialize when anthologies of fiction are being put together and special issues of magazines are being assembled.

It’s worth noting, however, that I’m not especially crass or mercenary about it. I don’t target the ones that are offering the best rate of pay or even the best exposure. Most of the time I need to find a sweet spot, matching an existing impulse to write a new thing (and my idiosyncratic habits of mind) with a destination that seems especially and explicitly receptive to such stuff. When I find something that strikes me as really juicy–take for example this call for submissions-slash-prompt from Clash Books–I really can’t keep those wheels from turning. Even if I can’t commit a story to paper in the time frame proposed by the editors, I almost always come away with a seed worth planting, watering, and watching.

Right now I’m doing a little bit of writing for the good folk over at Superhero Necromancer, over the weekend I’ll put some finished pieces back into circulation, and after that I plan to write some pieces in responses to calls for stories and poems that have inspired me. It’s the sort of engine that requires regular maintenance and, truth be told, a little bit of warming up in colder weather. But once it becomes a pattern and a habit–ideally as a supplement to the ideas we already have rattling around our skulls–then the search for prompts can become an enormously generative part of your creative life.