Waiting is the Hardest Part~

(My boyfriend hates Tom Petty. It’s a good thing he doesn’t read this blog.)

The other day, as I was scribbling up some more of Soulless and thinking about what the heck I’m going to do with myself after this book is finally finished and out the door, it hit me that writing requires a lot of patience and a lot of waiting, and that waiting can be a killer. I’ve been keeping busy outside of Soulless, after all, crafting and perfecting a small handful of short stories that I’ve been shipping out to various markets. One of them I feel really has a strong chance with the magazine I sent it to, while another is in the second stages of review, which means it passed a first stage which means I am dying over here. It’s been several weeks, and that’s a good thing, right? If it was bad news, I’d have heard it by now, riiiiiight?

Waiting is definitely the hardest part of this business. The writing, while no easy task by an means imaginable, is still not too terrible, because I enjoy the writing. I like doing it and it’s something I’m in control of. Once that story is out of your hand and off into the vast nether regions of the industry, you can’t do much more about it. You just have to sit and wait and hope it didn’t get lost in the cracks. You check your email obsessively, feeling that slight stab of disappointment every time there isn’t an email there from the respected recipient. At times, it’s all you think about: why haven’t they gotten back to me? Have they gotten back to me now? Am I missing something because I’m out doing something else right now? You try to focus on other new stories to send somewhere else to ease the pain, but it’s always there in the back of your mind: I need to know!

Anyone else feel this way? How do you best manage the waiting that goes along with submitting your work to others? You can only distract yourself with more writing for so long before you’re left dying to know what’s going to happen to your precious little stories…