Work and Disillusionment

I spent the day working outside battling weeds, except for nap time.  Nap time is good.  Oh, and writing time. 

I'd planned on getting a short story out today but it needed editing.  I overshot when the post office closed by about an hour, so it'll have to wait until tomorrow.  Tonight gets to be research time.  The market I'd planned to send it to is closed until August, so I'll just have to find someplace else.

I used to be all weird about where to send stories.  Thanks to becoming more practiced at it, it's much less stressful.  Writing cover letters is less stressful now too.  Every one is a little different, tailored as much as possible to the publisher or agency based on what I know about them.  Writing one cover letter often took me a day or more.  Now it takes me a few minutes.

Am I becoming careless and disillusioned?  Or am I just getting better at them?  Either way it's a good thing.  What, you say, careless and disillusioned is good?  In one important sense, the sense I embrace, yes.  It's not good for me to obsess about cover letters.  I also prefer reality to illusion, and by becoming disillusioned I'm letting go of weird fantasies like if I write the wrong word or phrase the editor will hate me forever and my name will be mud.  A lot depends on those cover letters, but not *everything*.  If they're professional, fairly free of irritations (like, apparently, "I hope to hear from you soon" is an irritation to some agents and editors) and presented in good faith, I should be okay.  And so should you, my fellow unpublished writers.  I know it's hard, because I did for a long time, but try not to freak out over the cover letter.  Or the envelope.  Or the stamp you use for the SASE.  It took me forever to get (partially) over these things, and the only way I managed to do it was submitting on a regular basis.

So here's to collecting those rejections, carelessness and disillusionment.  Yay!