Voluntarily Vulnerable

Maybe you've heard the quote, "Art begins by revealing the artist to you and ends by revealing you to yourself."

Turn it around a little and it becomes, "Art begins by revealing you to your audience."

Scary.

And yet, we do it. We long for an audience, in fact. At least I do.

It's hard, isn't it? To make yourself vulnerable like that. To reach into your heart and lay it bare on the page and then put it on display for the world to judge. Why do we do that to ourselves?

I think it's because sometimes something from our heart touches somebody else's heart. And the last part of the quote comes into play. We reveal them to themselves. And that makes all the risk worthwhile.


And I feel like I'm naked in front of a crowd 'cause these words are my diary screaming out loud and I know that you'll use them however you want to.  ~Anna Nalick

Forgetting About It

I have this uncanny ability to forget about my submissions.  Well, I don't forget about them exactly. I just send them out, make a note of the market's stated response times, and then I just let it fall out of my head. When the proper amount of time has passed, a little alarm goes off in my head. "Have you heard from X market yet? Maybe you should have heard from them by now." I don't always act immediately on the little mental reminder. Usually another week or two will pass and I'll think. "Oh, yeah. Maybe I should check on market X. I haven't heard from them yet." Then I'll go and check their return times again. Check the Black Hole. Worry that maybe I missed an email somewhere. Maybe contact the market if enough time has passed. Maybe just let it drop out of mind again.

This ability makes waiting that much easier. I'm not all tense and worried about my submissions all the time. (Only sometimes.) It can also shoot me in the foot, though. Like a story I just this week started thinking I should have heard about by now. I double-checked when I'd submitted it, and it was a sufficiently long time ago to get me to check the market again. I found it the magazine had shut down. Grrr. Guess I should have checked earlier. Anyway, the story is off to another market and put safely out of mind again.