I’m a little late with my first post of the year. I’ve been busy writing new short stories, four in the past three weeks. I had anticipated they would all be between five and eight pages. I can normally tell because I write a lot in my head before it goes on paper. Most were, but one surprised me and is twenty-two pages. I also did a once over of literary journals to decide who to submit to, I’ve queried another fourteen agents for my novel, that takes me up to 102 agents queried (NEVER GIVE UP), and I also revised a couple of other stories that are a part of the collection I’m working on, and I revised the beginning of my novel again. As you can tell, I’m unemployed, however, I like to say I’m being paid to write while also looking for full-time employment (as a writer with an agent and a book deal.)
We’re in the middle of the second polar vortex and the second week of the water crisis in West Virginia. Luckily, even though I’m directly in the middle of the “No Use” area, the little town of just under 11,000 people that I live in happens to get its water from the Coal River, not the Elk/Kanawha confluence where the spill occurred. Even so, I had friends coming over for showers, filling containers, and my husband and I also took water to my brother-in-law and his family. We also got our fishing licenses and went fishing last weekend in 25 degree temps with 20 mph wind. We’re a little die-hard, and so are the trout because we didn’t catch any.
In the amount of writing/revising that I’ve been doing, I decided on my next favorite word – anemic. I fell in love with it when I was reading It’s So Easy: and other lies by Duff McKagan of Guns & Roses fame. If you haven’t read it, you should. You can tell Duff is an avid reader. We share a love of Cormac McCarthy. I was really very impressed with the fluidity and beauty of his memoir. Anemic in the sense Duff and I use it is the lacking vitality, listless, weak anemic, and, like Duff, my use so far as been to describe light. I use it only once in my novel and once in my short story collection. It’s very effective in scene setting, but I use it sparingly, like adverbs. Ha. Happy writing!