July 28th, 2015

My tiny heart–a review!

One of the hardest things about this long edit of So Much Love I’m into (we’re over a year and still going strong) is that no one reads my work except for the purpose of finding fault. I shouldn’t complain, that’s what editing is and I’m grateful for the help–and lucky to work with amazing people–but it’s hard. I submit work to my editor, to my writing group, my husband, and I get good, constructive notes and the occasional smiley face or checkmark, but that’s not what I wrote it for. I would like people to be engrossed, moved, entertained by my writing, and until I’m through editing, that can’t exactly happen. So I’m sad.

Because of the terms of the contract, I can’t publish the stories from the book in mags or journals right now, and because of the amount of time I have free (very little) I can’t give non-book stories the time they’d need to get into publishable form. So I can’t publish anything for anyone to read just for fun. Which means I was way disproportionately chuffed to find this itty-bitty review of my story Ms Universe on Joyland a couple years back, from Maggie Mason on The Book Mine Set. Yes, it’s only a few sentences, and most of those are spent on whether Martian is an antiquated term (is it? I sincerely didn’t know, and am not doing any of the clever things the reviewer thought I was!) But it also says the only thing a writer really wants to achieve, “it held my attention the whole way through and I quite enjoyed it.”

Honestly, the writing has been so tough lately that I was incredibly emotional about finding this. Also, I have had a migraine for two days, so that might have something to do with my state. But in any case, I’m grateful and will try to make my book live up to that sentence above. It’s what we’re all aiming for.