Preemptive Retaliation

Back in February I was subjected to a flurry of writing. Call it inspiration, call it desperation, I don’t know – no, I do know. My algorithm had tuned itself to creative writing for some reason, and I was bombarded with ads and promotions for writing magazines/publications/competitions etc. I guess advertising works on me, because I started tapping and clicking and reading submission requirements and deadlines and getting ideas and… well you get the gist. There was a call for sci-fi related stories, a competition to be published in a digital magazine. I had an old sci-fi story that I had written for Mike a few years ago that I was still quite proud of. I edited it, tweaked it, and sent it in.

And I got second place.

The horrendous AI art aside, there’s some pretty nice writing on that website. Some good stories, and mine is amongst them. It’s the same feeling I had when I had a story published in The Spec Book – a feeling of “Wow, isn’t this nice?”. I blasted it on my socials, got a reaffirming amount of messages and likes, and immediately took to the keyboard again to write more stories and submit to more publications.

I threw in three stories over two weekends, and now they’re slowly coming back to me. So far there hasn’t been success, but there has been feedback. One publication was glowing in their praise of my narrative voice and pacing, but had a series of questions about the story that they felt weren’t answered. My initial response was to get my back up – I started mentally explaining the questions they had, I pulled up the text and highlighted the section that they must have missed, I read and re-read the feedback because I was sure it was written by AI (and I am still sure of that but hey ho).

It took me a moment to get over the disappointment, and to sit back and think about what they’re saying. I remember years and years ago I read some writing advice that was along the lines of; if someone reads your work, never listen to how they would change something, but what they would change. Don’t take on their ego, accept their feelings. There’s something missing there that they can detect, something that they didn’t get. Now I realise I need to take my ego out of it too.

And that’s the annoying thing about this – the questions and thoughts they had were all valid because i had them too. I knew there were aspects of the story that were vague, that left a little bit too much to the imagination, but I didn’t work on them. I left them. Maybe it was time restriction, maybe it was lack of wanting to work on it any longer, I don’t know. I just know that I knew their criticisms before they said them.

Still, feedback is feedback and compliments are compliments. I’ve saved the feedback into a folder where I store other feedback to my work. Sometimes, when I’m down or disillusioned or just grumpy, I open it up and read it. I bask.