Earlier in the year, I wrote a post about my 2020 writing goals, and then COVID happened.
While Western Australia is in decent shape (no community transmission, no lockdown, very few active cases), the mental toll of watching the rest of the world burn has made writing incredibly difficult.
I’ve put aside the novel I was revising to query this year. I haven’t started the novel I intended to write a rough draft of. I’ve done some work here and there on other projects, but I feel as though I haven’t made any tangible progress on any of my goals.
But one of my goals was to repeat last year’s September Story Challenge, wherein I attempted to submit to a short story market every day during September. I found the experience last year to be incredibly valuable and liberating, so I wanted to do it again, COVID anxiety be damned, I’m going to do it. I’m going to make 30 story submissions in 30 days, which means I’ve got a lot of writing to do this month.
Of course, this doesn’t mean I’m going to write a story every day this month; I’m not that crazy yet. I’ve got a buffer of sixteen stories in various stages of completion. Some of these are stories I wrote for last year’s challenge, and some are stories I’ve written since. I’ve also got a list of ideas to work from, so it’s not like I’ll be making up the rest of the stories from whole cloth as the month progresses.
I’m excited to try this challenge again. Two of the stories I wrote for last year’s challenge have subsequently been accepted for publication, and I’ve gotten good personalized rejections on many of the others. While I’m not aiming for these stories to be accepted, I am hopeful that completing this challenge a second year in a row will result in more story publications. And if not, I’ll have gotten that much more practice at rejection.
How has COVID affected your creative goals? Are you finding this time to be better for your creativity or worse? If worse, how are you working to overcome mental fatigue and find creative energy again?
Thank you for reading and stay safe.