SLOW TIME FOR MY WRITING

Usually I have a stockpile of writing to submit to my writing group in San Francisco, which meets every other week. Lately I'm scraping together two or three flash, sometimes rewrites. I think it's the first time in seven years that I've had so little for the group. In fact in the first years I often didn't even take my flash to them, since I had long essays I wanted critiqued. My lowered productivity makes me nervous. I've been working—revising LUNATICS flash that they looked at, figuring out what can stand alone and submitting those to magazines (a time-consuming process, both the editing and the submitting). My reading for the project has slowed down. The beginning of the semester has me absorbed in the class I'm teaching. I spend altogether too much time on social media, especially twitter, reading other people's work and publicizing mine. I have quite a few things coming out right now. I don't think I have writer's block, but I'm still distressed about it.

I finally decided on a submission to F(R)ICTION after their really gracious solicit, and it looks like they like my flash "The Lunatics' Ball" pending what sounds like a potentially long round of edits with many editors involved. Not sure how that will turn out, but I'm thinking that THE LUNATICS' BALL will be the title of the collection, making this the title piece, so I'll be interested to hear what they say. Luckily I sent it to just them, so don't have to worry about juggling simultaneous submissions while I wait to see if this works out. This will also take away from producing new work, but may be time well spent.