I’m going to a wedding on Saturday.  (Trust me, this is related to writing; Clarion West specifically.)  Weddings are generally happy occasions with people coming to wish the new couple well.  But I suspect that every wedding has an angry spinster or two.  Or a jealous younger bridesmaid.  Or that guy whose girlfriend just dumped him.  In other words, though wishing the couple well and meaning it, there’s always someone hurting as they realize how long it will be before THEY say “I do.”

I am the spinster at the Clarion West wedding.  I want every attendee to have fun, learn, and succeed.  I am trying hard to keep up with the logs of their experiences.  But inside, there is that nagging feeling that this could have been my dance.  I can deal with that.  What I think is bigger is the issue of how long it will be before I get my turn.

Best-case scenario, I’ll be there next year.  (We are planning another baby inside a reasonable window of time there, so we may be looking at two years!  Let’s ignore that for a moment.)  I believe I will make it into one of the Clarions next year.  Does that make me egotistical?  I suspect it does, though I like to call myself “confident”.  Same thing.  I doubt it’s a stretch for a writer on the waiting list to expect to make it next year.  Anyway, that’s a long way off.  I still have to write new stories, isolate my “best”, send them out, wait out that interminable acceptance interval, get accepted (please), find the money, make plane reservations, wait until summer, then FINALLY go.  See, it feels like a lot.  Still, I know I need this kind of experience to really get me going.

Ever watch American Idol?  You know how there is always that guy that makes it all the way through the audition process and is the last guy cut, watching the dude standing beside him move on to primetime while he gets a heartfelt invitation to jump through the hoops again?  That’s me.  And the first episodes of the show are airing (or blogging) now.  I watch; I cheer; I’m sad.

I dwell on this now because I am slumped.  I can’t focus on writing.  I have other distractions contributing (notably my involvement with my church’s bible school), but I’m also inventing distractions.  I pulled out an old video game and am obsessing over it.  I started reading a book that has been on my shelf for months (though that may help).  I check my email for story critiques seven times a day.  Writing just isn’t coming out.

Face it, I’m depressed about CW.  Lame of me, but I am.  I dared to hope and now I reap the consequences.  I need something to snap me out of it.  I go camping in a few weeks; I tend to do well there (not internet to distract me).  I did some late-night freewriting for a story idea based on Japan’s Festival of the Naked Man; maybe breaking ground on a new project could get my wheels spinning again.  Or seeing some of my stories in print.  Or some forced keyboard time.  Or taking those morning walks I keep insisting I’m going to do.

I need to do something.

Moving on to the divorce part of the post, I find myself very disappointed with the SFF Online Writing Workshop.  The quality of the critiques I have received has been pretty good, but I am displeased with the quantity.  So far it’s just two apiece on the stories I posted.  Critters could usually deliver anywhere from eight to twenty, depending on the length of the story, though the quality of the comments was admittedly inferior (not immensely, but somewhat).  It’s tough to determine a consensus with only two and a consensus is what critique groups should offer best.  How do I make alterations based on that?  To make matters worse (the way plot lessons always tell you to), my one-month free trial is over in less than a week.  I need to decide: do I pay for a year or not?

I confess, a month is the time it takes for a story to reach the top of the Critters queue to get read, so maybe I need to give my stories a month at OWW to generate a reasonable number of critiques.  Still, I find some things lacking.  There is almost no incentive to offer a SECOND critique at OWW.  A story with no reviews earns double poiints, so why comment on a story with one or two?  The crit-4-crat approach may work better, but I have struck out there, too.  I opperedC4C on my longer story and have since had one taker.  I’ve been getting more attention on stories at Baen’s Bar (though, admittedly, the comments are less complete there).

We’ll see what I decide.  It may be worth the fifty bucks to try to generate a community of people who want to read my stuff (even if it’s just because I read theirs).  As for my jealous spinsterhood — this too shall pass.