When your Muse is on a slow boat to China
Mysterious inventories. Jovan Jimenez/Flickr/CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 Eight earnest short stories, either in edit or unpublished. Five quirky little flash pieces awaiting submission. Who-knows-how-many poems scattered across who-knows-how-many notebooks, folders, and hard drives. Let's not open the Pandora's box of picture books. And the next "manuscript," today an outline but tomorrow ... still an outline. I had not intended to start my new year with a creative writing inventory. Rather, I'd showed up at the library to reinstate both a writing habit and a writing goal that worked well for me in past lives. The former, to leave the house one night a week to write for two hours; the latter, to receive 100 rejections by the end of the calendar year . To kick off my march toward progress, I started looking through my records for one particular story, a short humor piece that felt fresh and recent in my mind and that I wanted to finalize for submission. Imagine my surpris...
