During October, I’ve focused on writing creative fiction and not so much on the Lloyd District blog.  I felt I was on the “verge” of writing success and worked on fictional stories.

There is a web site called Duotrope.com that caters to writers.  If you register, you get access to all of their information and you can put the titles of your own work online and search for markets that will publish it.  The site is better than I make it sound.

I don’t know how many writers have registered there, but I figure it is a lot.  Every market you can think of is part of the site, too.

I’ve written about twenty-nine stories.  Recently, I began to focus on “acceptance ratio.”  A story was accepted by a zine with a 60% acceptance ratio, then a 40% ratio, then 20%, and finally 3%.

It seemed like I was on the right road.  I was close to the professional level.  I was enthused enough that I wrote a longer short story, 7500 words, “The Disappearance of Caylid Cholg.”  I also wrote a short story called “One Cost of War.”

Here’s another place where self-doubt can attack you – a roadblock.  You begin to wonder, “Have you written all your “bad words” yet?”  In short stories, I have been rejected over 200 times so I consider myself an experienced potential author.  I’m definitely not a professional author.  Yet.

A potential author has “bad words” inside them and those bad words have to get out.  When someone new to writing asks an “experienced” potential author to critique their work and they say yes, that person may not be equal in skill.  However, they may be a great writer in-the-making.  What the experienced potential author is reading might be the “bad words” in the way before a beginner starts producing the “good words.”

It’s hard for a potential author to recognize they are putting out “bad words.”  Mistakenly, they think they are a genius and they are typing only “good words.”  It is sort of like, “You don’t know what you don’t know.”  You may be able to recognize “bad words” later, but not when you produce them.

The goal for a potential author is to get better.  How much better?  I don’t know.  That may be why it is important to get a work critiqued – not so much for what a critic says, but because it provides insight into your own work.  Through their eyes, you begin to see mistakes you make all the time.  Once you see them, you can correct them.

I’m working on my “bad words.”