blew the dust off of scrivener a few weeks ago to see what horrors laid within and discovered two short stories i recently allegedly written. alleged as one of them is very well by me as it is about a serial dream i had several years ago but the voice and tone is slightly different and the other? the other i’m not so sure as there are glimpses of me here and there but the story and verbiage feels like someone else. does that make me hack? i’m so poor in creating my own world i must reach out to take someone else’s voice?
who the fuck knows.
lately i’ve been contemplating on changing my writing professional name to something else. sometimes i think lisa rabey is too tinged in controversy to move forward than i think i would find redemption in my writing life by keeping my name.
a piece of advice i received seemingly a lifetime ago was thinking about writing was also work. just because i wasn’t putting pen to paper didn’t mean i wasn’t doing something and that it just happened to be in a different space. i remain skeptical.
i’ve become a huge fan of newsletters in the last few months because why browse the internet for things to read when someone else is already doing it for you? many of the newsletters are written by writers who add essayists to their slashes (fiction/memoir/essayist would be my slashes) as well but are getting publication and maybe payment for their work because THEY ARE ACTUALLY PITCHING TO THESE WEBSITES.
i know — i’m as shocked as you are.
as i read their work, i became more influenced on what i could write and the list just keeps growing.
as of this writing, i have come up with 20 different pitch ideas and essays i’d like to write. maybe it’s not too late afterall.
it is seemingly convenient to forget when i was on a pitching spree last fall those pitches were accepted and some of them were paid gigs.
longtime readers of exit, pursued by a bear know i’ve been traveling / moving around a lot these last two years and many of my belongings continue to remain in boxes. much of these boxes have been repacked and renamed so i always slit the tape, check the contents, and then tape it back up to verify its contents when i land in a new place.
a couple of boxes remain what they are marked: notebooks. as one would guess, notebooks covers diaries, journals, other writing from my catholic tinged youth until my mid-20s. much of it is fiction, more of it is diaries. i’m afraid to read any of it because what secrets they hold may be just that – secret. but these boxes are comforting, they tell a linear story i seem to casually put on the shelf and maybe i am not the hack i continually tell myself to be.
here we are, yet again.
if you’ve been paying attention you get the subtext something is up and that something is i’m going to keep trying. even if i have to recoup and beat and recoup and beat until my dying breath on this topic of woe is me and woe is my writing life,
i’m going to keep trying because that is what i do.
i expressed my fears to the ex-husband, he who is my biggest fan, and he remarked he’s played thousand of hours of basketball but he’s always suspected he wasn’t quite good enough for the nba (though at 6’7, he’s certainly tall enough) and because of that he has never tried out. so maybe, he posited, that is what it’s like for me? maybe it isn’t about the name recognition, literary fame, or writing a solid story. maybe it’s just the sheer joy of writing that should sustain me.
i’ve been thinking about his comment and i’ve come to the conclusion it is not so much as being rich and famous but that i have a voice that i want the world to hear.
maybe that is all that matters.