I am being surprised and delighted

When I started this new habit of announcing, to the day or whatever higher power, "Surprise and delight me!"as I got out of bed, I didn't really believe it would happen. At least not on a daily basis. But it has. Someone could argue that I am now noticing things more, or allowing myself to be delighted where I might not have been - but whatever the case, I am surprised and delighted pretty much on a daily basis! Today's surprise came in the form of a blog post over at the Emerging Writers Network. I had submitted a review to the EWN of Alexandra Chasin's short story collection, Kissed By... , as a guest post for Short Story Month, which was published on the blog two days ago. I thought that was it for my appearances over there.

Then just now I got one of those most useful Google Alerts, I check out EWN, and there I am again - but this time I - or one of my short stories - am the subject! Dan Wickett is discussing On A Roll, one of the stories in The White Road and Other Stories. He discusses a particular aspect of the story, and I won't give it away here, pop over there and see what he has to say. He is most kind about my book, which is the delightful part! He asked me a question at the end and so I broke with protocol and left a comment to explain a little about how the story came about.

I would also like to mention here that it hasn't all been roses and delightful surprises in Tania's Writing World. I have received a number of rejections and failed to get anywhere in quite a few competitions. I don't normally mention these, but in the interests of not skewing the statistics, I thought it was time I did. These always bring about a short, sharp stab of disappointment, but this gets fainter over time, and I just start thinking about where next to send the stories. I'm always submitting stories - now only to paying markets, as I mentioned in an earlier post. I've submitted stories to places I never even considered - Tin House, Ploughshares, A Public Space - and am expecting rejections any day now! (Although also open to being surprised and delighted, of course, but a girl's gotta be realistic...)

So, another week starts and now that I have broken through the 1000-word barrier (I wrote a short story last week which is a mammoth 1200 words), I am expecting to push that a little further, and perhaps not write any flash stories for a while, to try and wean myself off the thrill of instant gratification. We will see how that goes.