Oz Comic-Con and writing

Suzie Eisfelder

Yes, there is a connection. I’ll be at Oz Comic-Con this weekend and then the following weeks I’ll be writing about what I’ve done and who I’ve seen. There will be photos on Instagram, stuff on Twitter and Facebook and then some scribbles here. There are some awesome special guests coming including Alyson Hannigan from Buffy and Sylvester McCoy from Doctor Who. I’m sure you’ve seen them in other things as well but for me these are their biggest roles.

I’m struggling with my writing. I took the plunge and starting trying to write short stories several years ago, I did this quite privately without telling anyone. I wrote down any ideas I had and they’ve been accumulating nicely, but the actual completed stories have not. At least, not until this year when I started submitting to Wordly.

But that’s not the problem. The problem is that I expected my first submissions to be rejected. I expected to then put them away in the ‘bottom drawer’ to potentially be revised and resubmitted somewhere else years later. I expected to build up a stash of short stories in my ‘bottom drawer’ so I’d have something there to more easily revise and submit elsewhere. My ‘bottom drawer’ is currently empty of completed stories. The editorial committee of Wordly have thought my stuff worthy of publication and they’ve published my first two submissions.

This means that when the opportunity to submit to a publication crosses my desk I have nothing ready to revise and submit. I’m now having to take my old ideas and rewrite them from scratch. I had an idea when we were in America in 2013, I’d been gradually working it into a short story.

I picked this up a couple of weeks ago for revision to have something in my ‘bottom drawer’ and have thrown out at least 90% of the writing. I see that there’s absolutely no way this would have been published. The difference between what I wrote only a few short years ago and what I’m writing now is a universe away.It’s beginning to look better, next week I hope to share it with a couple of friends for their opinions.

In the meantime I was encouraged to submit the short story I wrote for one of my classes last trimester to Veranda Journal. So I did that. Then half an hour later I got my mark for it. I’ve not looked at the comments to see what was wrong but I now anticipate being able to put that story in my ‘bottom drawer’, I’m sure it won’t be published.


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