ACCEPTANCE

I'm a published author, now, you may bow before me, but fffffff.

Life has a way of happening even when you’re ready to tell the world to stop, because you want to get off.

It happened. I’m seasick, heartsick, and somehow still content.

My submission was accepted. My FIRST submission was accepted, on the first try, and I feel like that’s such a humblebrag it doesn’t even count as humble. It’s full-chested proud. The Villains Anthology picked up “My Bonnie Girl,” paid me for it promptly, and it will be published. I’m excited to see if a hungry tarantula is incorporated in the cover art, and honestly I’ll be a little disappointed if it isn’t, because the acceptance letter was intimate and enthusiastic. They said that my protagonist was “one of the most creative and unexpected” they received.

That said, I’m still a hollow soul. I’m still hungry, and still somehow bereft.

This wasn’t supposed to happen.

I hate what I am these days, in theory. In practice. In execution. I want to appeal to lots of strangers and not bother the real people that I know. I worry that the people who join orchestra and leave after one practice hate me and my personality. I think that my wordy output in writer’s group is obnoxious rather than something to be celebrated. I really just want to hide, and I think that I could be happy hiding as long as I could still write. Finding time to do that during Fall Break for my kids has been tough, but I’ve always had a word document open in one hand. I always find time to mortally wound the fictional people I created.

I think that maybe friends are a lot to hope for and want. I think that family is difficult enough. I have kids now who are needy, responsive, and developing personalities. I have orchestra solos to commit to, and really LOCK IN to.

I’m lonely. I’m Zoey, of all the Kpop Demon Hunters. I’m “too much and not enough.” People my age, sex, and social class just hate me, for some reason, and yet here I am, existing. Painfully. I wish I was young enough to act in blockbusters because I can cry on cue, seriously. It takes so little.

I have a husband who needs me to visibly care. I have a writer’s heart that needs to howl louder than every demon on this side of the veil. I have three children, and a violin, and a tailor who kills gods living in my authorspace.

My rough draft has 110,000 words. I’m working on that right now. If you need me for anything else, please really ask how important it is. I love people, but they tend to dislike me. They go their ways, and I go mine. I’m always hurting, and putting up walls, because the harder I go, the worse it gets, for me. The more excessive I am, the more I just put people off. The realer I am, the more people decide I’m not worth their time.

And that’s fine. As I told Michael today after chamber practice, I would rather offend a thousand people than sing my soul quietly.

I’m going to play the solo in Scheherazade. I’m going to publish My Bonnie Girl. I’m going to work on these hundreds of thousands of words that I want to have meaning, and go beyond my years on this planet. I’ll make it happen. This is what I’m made for.