As I suffer from Rheumatoid Arthritis and need to take
immune suppressants to control the disease, I have to be very careful about the
contact I have with people. So far I’ve been lucky and have managed to steer
clear, but now it feels inevitable that at some point everyone of us will test
positive. We can only hope that because of the vaccination process, that for
the majority, it becomes nothing more serious than a really bad cold.
I’ve always use the period between Christmas and New
Year to review my writing goals from the previous January and set new ones for
the year ahead, and I try to start the new year fully enthusiastic for my
writing life. Usually I manage to achieve all my goals until roughly
mid-February, and then I go off on a tangent. Although I only had one short
story published last year, I did do a lot of work and I have a couple of big
projects which are nearing completion. Hopefully these will bear fruit during
2022.
As ever my goals for losing weight, eating more
healthily and exercising more fall by the wayside before the year is very old,
but I will set them again for this year and hope that I can put some strategies
in place to finally meet them.
During 2021 I fell out of love with short story
writing, not because I don’t enjoy writing them anymore, but because I’m
struggling to know what to do with them. The short story market has seriously
diminished over recent years, especially as some magazines have closed the
submission process to writers who haven’t been published by them previously.
I’m sure this is because they are inundated with submissions and that shifting
through the slush pile it too labour intensive, but it is saddening for those
of us who are struggling to get our feet on the rungs of the ladder.
Lockdown has exacerbated the problem and sometimes it
has felt as though submitting short stories is like posting them into a black
hole. So I was delighted when Yours Fiction accepted one of my stories – The
Floods of Change - for publication. And I was even more delighted to see it in
print in the November 2021 edition, and even get a strapline on the front cover.
I was also delighted see a new magazine on the market,
Seven Days, but disappointed by the news that even in such a short time it has
proved not to be viable. It has seriously made me want to take a more direct
control of my writing life, and over the last few months I have been doing some
research into self-publishing. This is something I will be looking into in
greater detail during 2022.
I hope that you are all feeling enthusiastic for your
writing life and the beginning of this new year, and most of all that you stay
healthy and happy.
