I'm trembling in fear.
It's a flash piece about an eccentric old walnut tree that is worrying whether the rains of the "wet season" will come this year. And then of course there's a twist. But I'm not going to spoil it! I figured I would work really hard on it and maybe push it through to the AW Anthology. Maybe I would get lucky. Better to fail among friends, right?
Well that time has come sooner than I thought. I now have a finished draft of my flash and then I have to go through the submitting process which, thankfully, has less rules and regulations on AW than some other places. I can follow standard formatting - my computer does all the real work for me. No problem right?
Wrong. Now I'm filled to the brim with noob questions. The guidelines for this anthology say submit it as a .rft attachment. I can do that.
Except, what do I write in the body of my email? Nothing?
Do I include my username on AW? Or do they know it from the email I have set on there?
What do I include in contacts? Is just an E-mail fine, or do they need an address, phone number, etc.?
It's mind-boggling! And I know common sense would have a play in here somewhere, but for some reason that part of the writing process has decided to call in sick. Now I'm sitting here chewing my nails to bits worrying I'll screw up my first submission and be doomed to failure for the rest of my life. Like Mac will send out a mass email to agents and publishers saying to ignore anything I submit for the rest of my natural life. (However when I become an immortal god, then we can talk.)
You see? Obviously I'm delusional. See that's my paranoid-self talking. For some reason we've all passed millions of years of evolution and in a crisis we still think the world is going to eat us alive. So I am sitting here, while the world breathes down my neck, overlooking my piece searching for something wrong that may not even be there. But I don't know anymore! I'm going insane from all this. And I stepped away and came back and still sat there and scratched my head, completely unable to tell whether what I had just written was any good or complete crap. I'm at a lost but I want to give myself the best possible chance to get this right. I wanna be published and I refuse to screw it up.
By the way, before I go that I just wanted to point you all to a post that I thought was really brilliant and it actually gave me a pretty original short story idea that I'm working with. An AW member (Bartholomew) helped me a lot with editing my flash on AW and I started browsing his blog when I came upon this article. It's pretty simple, talking about how to combine something marketable with something original and coming up with something that not only is interesting, but you can actually sell it. Which is, you know, important.
I normally suck really bad at combining ideas, but the other blog he links to in the first sentence actually helped a lot as well. I starting looking for similar ideas and themes which were mainly taking scary or depressing things, putting them together in a non-scary/depressing way by adding comedic elements. And while sometimes I veer away from this, I do notice that I enjoy taking serious subjects and turn them into something light-hearted and funny. The subject of corruption, tyranny, evil v. good, hell, heaven, death, and the afterlife all came up in Being Evil. But in the end it's a funny book that takes this serious subjects and turns them into an Adventure! story. And if that's what I'm good at, and what I like doing then I should go for it right?
Anyway, thanks a lot to Bartholomew, both for helping me with editing and his blog posts, which also helped immeasurably. I feel kind of bad sticking you at the end of a random post...
Well bye guys!
-Jessie
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