To-Do List

Last time, I talked about my plans for Project Zero and a couple of the obstacles that I face in putting out a new edition (and any other of my work, honestly) and I forgot the biggest one (to be fair my neighbors were fairly loud. Also, they were playing the bean bag game...for hours):

I hate editing. No, it's not a dislike. No, the thought of editing my own work makes my skin crawl and my stomach churn (I have no problem doing this to others' work, but I curl up into the fetus position and cry when it comes to my own).

I tried to quantify why in the hopes I could overcome it (didn't really work) and I this is what I think my problem is: what if I take out or change the one thing that would have gotten me published? I know for the most part that this thought is ridiculous. I mean, if I want to change it, then everyone else who reads it probably wouldn't miss it, right?

Anyway, enough of my self-pity for now. As the title says, I have a to-do list. You'd think it'd be stuff I have to get before school starts or something. Well, it's not. Instead, I have a stack of ps3 games next to our TV. A stack of four or five games that I vowed to get through before purchasing any more games.

The stack started with the Zone of the Enders HD Collection and includes Lego Lord of the Rings, Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker, Resistance 2,  and Assassin's Creed I and Revelations. And that doesn't even include the games I wanted to play through a second time, like Arkham City (I platinum'd on Asylum) and Bioshock Infinite (psyched for the expansion DLC), or the games I get for free through PSPlus.

This time I'm sitting at the DMV waiting to renew my license and I'm typing this on my phone (I upgraded to the GS3 back in March. Handy for doing things like this...), so I'm keeping this one short.

However, if any of my author buddies see this, can anyone recommend a magazine or something like that that publishes YA, supernatural, and/or general fiction short stories?

Writing Revisited

Every so often I like to remind myself (and thus, my readers) that I fancy myself a writer. That is, until I came upon a tweet that went something like this: "A writer is too afraid of failure that he never finishes anything is not a writer..."

Now, I know what you're thinking. "Mr. Kellen, if you look a it that way, you are too a writer. You've written stuff, even if it isn't very popular..."

And that's true, since I have finished some stuff (you can find it here and here), there are a number of unfinished projects that I'm sitting on for a variety of excuses (don't have the time, can't think of how to end something, etc.) and those might all be good and valid, but it can't help but make me think: am I afraid of failing?

Again, I point to my first finished work and say, I submitted it to publishers, agents, and the like, with little to no success (I had one whole agency pass it around to every agent before telling me every single one took a pass on it). So I have finished something and made the attempt to get it published traditionally before going the e-distribution route. But, what after that?

I swore up and down that A Plague Upon Thee was going to be different, that it was a unique idea that no one else in the world would think up. Yeah, you can read how I feel about my chances now here. Part of that, I would say, is that I sat on the manuscript for too long. I finished the second draft in early '10, but I always meant to go through and polish it up before submitting it to publishers and agents.

So...is that it. Is my early rejection leading to a fear of failure and therefor, a fear to even complete something so that I won't be rejected again? Not saying it is a certainty, just something to think about...