Alice Buell Lawrence

I don’t mean my day job, the land of consensus and collaboration. Where there are infinite stakeholders for infinite projects. That’s a manageable brand of stress precisely because I am managing personalities, amibitions, fears, and change. I know how to do that.

When I have my writer chapeau on, though, it’s what it must feel like to be on stage performing alone. I’ve never performed theatre and I am famously garbage at music, so it’s not a situation I’ve been in before. But when it’s me staring at either my Freewrite or my laptop, it’s all on me.

Right now I am editing two short stories to try to publish starting January 1. Arbitrary deadline, but some submission windows open then. Which entires I’m editing? That’s up to me. So is where I’m submitting them. And they’re pretty decent stories, I think: I’ve come back to them and like the flow and quips. One is called Capri and the other is called Six Seconds. They’re both written to be part of a collection I’m calling Third Coast Tales. Each one is based on some part of my time as a Yooper. How they come together is up to me, on me.

So is whether I should be doing another editing run on my novel or writing another chapter of the next one. Or maybe writing a short story as a break. Or maybe edit up more of these stories to get published.

There’s no right way to do it. I have six more novels in me, and I’m not getting any younger. My hope is to actually get them published, though I will write them either way. But to get published I need an agent, and to get an agent I need some publishing credits, which means short stories which means writing and editing those.

I think.

There isn’t a right way to do this. There isn’t a definite outcome of these projects, and all of the decisions are mine and mine alone, just like the consequences of those decisions. There is pride in being your own boss with this work. It feels very liberating. But each footstep brings questions. Maybe there are answers out there.