Follow-up question: does anybody give a shit?
I’ve been informed by reliable sources* that all successful authors have a blog. As this is, obviously, both a necessary and sufficient condition to success, I’ve scrambled aboard the bandwagon of 2007-style blogging. So, hi! I’m Meredith, and I write.
“But you only just landed your first acceptance,” that voice which sounds suspiciously like my undergrad creative writing professor whispers. “You’re not a writer.”
To which I say, one: you were always a dick, so kindly shut up. Two: I kind of am, actually, though not in the way I’d planned.
The truth is, I write a lot; I just don’t write a lot of fiction. My day job requires a truly eye-watering amount of writing. I’m a policy advocate in Washington, DC, and I focus on tech and internet policy. Professional advocacy is about 40% reading, 35% writing, 25% talking, and 10% crying. (I’m very much an inside-the-beltway creature; grassroots advocates can probably swap the talking/reading ratios, and index way higher on the crying.) My job involves distilling the most Byzantine systems imaginable into clear, comprehensible English for a broad range of audiences, and then finding the pressure points, analyzing those, and formulating common-sense ways to make them better.
The world trains women to be modest about their skills, to which I say: get bent. I’m a damn good writer, and a clear thinker, and a pretty okay editor to boot. (If you feel this is “cringe,” feel free to imagine me pulling a Stewart Smiley and reciting it to myself in the mirror. Just know that it’s your problem, not mine.)
I do, also, write fiction. I write maybe less structured fiction than I like; very little of it makes it into manuscript format. But I write short stories and various drabbles all the time. I’ve been extremely lucky to find a cadre of wonderful, creative, talented writers and artists to hang out with online, and we swap stories constantly. It’s an incredible milieu. They all deserve publishing deals, but they are also all incredibly stressed out people leading incredibly stressful lives, and so none of us really writes as much (or as formally) as we’d like.
Here it’s worth noting that my very first accepted story–“Zero Tolerance,” coming out in Bury Your Gays: An Anthology of Queer Tragic Horror in March 2024, from Ghoulish Books–was written in September 2018. It took very nearly five years to find that piece a home (and what a home it found!). In those five years, I’ve had another child, worked two jobs, and survived a global pandemic. I’ve also, in that time, completed a grand total of one (1) additional short story for publication. That one’s been on the submission circuit for about six months, and seems to be on a similar trajectory as its sibling (shortlisted at Uncanny Magazine, rejected everywhere else, hopefully on a journey to its eventual home).
All of this is to reiterate the obvious: writing for yourself and friends can be fun and self-indulgent. Writing for an audience is, by and large, a struggle marked by self-doubt. Maybe it gets easier with repeat success; someday, if the stars align, I’d like to find out.
* – Reliable sources include my husband, my own observation of several authors whose work I admire, and also a very helpful chat with the gracious Ada Palmer some years ago that she likely does not remember (hi Ada!)
Ink Splotch 