For the past month, I’ve been slowly warming my writing muscles back up again. I had tried to push myself with an insanely easy goal during winter break, and then I promptly gave up after repeatedly not meeting the goal during the very first week of break. For the month of January, then, which was also my first month teaching two classes since having the baby (though they’re both still online), I decided to just sit back and see what would happen. I obviously wasn’t ready yet to set goals. I did, however, have things I wanted to be working on, and not just in that “I really ought to be writing” sort of way; in that more magical, exciting way, where story ideas and sentences to accompany them dance through your head when you’re doing even the most mundane tasks: washing the dishes, taking a shower, rocking your baby to sleep.

So without even making any effort to push myself back into it, I opened the writing file on my computer and started sifting through my drafts. I was pleasantly surprised to remember that I did, in fact, write several drafts of new stories last year. I have the tendency to feel like I’ve hardly written at all since my book came out, but it isn’t really true. I haven’t revised many drafts to the point of being ready to send around, but I actually did write quite a lot of new stuff last year. 

So I got back to work revising a few of those drafts. I had Damien read a couple of them, and some other people read a third (which Damien had already read). I’m now hungrily revising—and maybe, just maybe almost ready to start sending out—the most promising of the new stories I wrote last year. There are still others that I’ll probably get around to tinkering with later, and a few that I moved to my “Failed Attempts” file (what a strangely good feeling it is sometimes to definitively say, “I will not waste any more time on this story.”).

Up next, I want to get working on a new idea I had recently that I think might develop into a novel. Maybe it’ll just be a novella. I don’t know, but I can’t wait to find out. I do feel like I should be pushing myself to try working on longer pieces. I’m a bit hesitant about novel writing these days—my experience trying (and failing) to publish the novel I wrote as my MFA thesis left me both disappointed and feeling very shaky about my abilities as a novelist. I’ve read, then revised, then reread the damn thing who knows how many times. The fact that every time I read it, I think it’s publishable makes me wonder if the problem is, in fact, my own ability to recognize what a good novel should and should not be.  

I’ve had enough success publishing short stories that I sometimes wonder if I’m not just one of those writers—there are many, and many of them are very good—who just is and always will be a short story writer. Period. But sometimes I have these ideas, ideas that I don’t think could fit into the space of a short story. So even though I’m tentative and maybe a bit afraid, I’m going to start working on this new idea, and if it ends up developing into a full novel (gulp), well then. So be it.