#AmWriting: In Which I am Learning & Growing!

This is probably my most productive summer so far in terms of how much writing I’ve gotten done. I was updating my CV the other day and it was a pleasant surprise to see how far I’ve come since I started ‘seriously’ pursuing writing. Also, speaking of which, I made a website on Weebly so that I can put all my “stuff” in one place for everyone to find. 

PUBLICATION NEWS

I was looking through my archives and I realized that the last time I made an writing update blog post was a year ago (in August!). (However, I did share some publication news in my, “I’m back,” blog post.) So this month, I have two poems in Alexandria Quarterly and one poem in Moonsick Magazine. These are two literary magazines I absolutely adore and I still can’t believe my poetry was published in them. In July, the following poems were published in Eunoia Review: “Abattoir,” “Dirge,” “Dirty Mouth,” “Eighteen,” “Impulse,” “Humility,” “little disasters,” “Kismet,” and “Modern Art.” I submitted a ton of poems because I was expecting to get rejected…only to not get rejected. So that happened. I sent out a new batch of poems today and hopefully, someone out there will fall in love with them and you guys will get to read them soon! 

ADROIT JOURNAL SUMMER MENTORSHIP

For some reason or the other, Adroit took a chance on me and I was accepted into the mentorship program. In case you’re wondering, I studied poetry and my mentor was Anthony Frame. Before the program started, I was really excited about getting to interact with other young writers & receiving feedback on my work & writing stronger pieces. Well, after the first week or so, I forgot about all of that. I was too busy churning out poems last minute and being exposed to amazing poetry. Two or three weeks in, I also travelled to New York City where I did a writing program at NYU (more on that later). So there, I found myself frantically writing “things” and panicking. I didn’t have a lot of time to chat with the aforementioned writers after all but through the Facebook group (chat) I did get to know them. And I enjoyed exchanging peer reviews even though I’d expected workshopping poetry to be more scary/stressful. But in short: I had a lot of fun. As for the poems I wrote during that time – I had to edit all of them for my final portfolio but right now, I’m only satisfied with six or seven of them. I’m planning on eventually submitting all of them to contests or magazines.  

CREATIVE WRITING: FINDING YOUR MUSE IN THE METROPOLIS @ NYU SPS

I confess I was not the biggest fan of this writing course. I think I expected something completely different. I think this course was mostly aimed at people who are deciding whether to pursue writing and/or want to know what typical writing class is like. I am not super experienced but I was hoping to learn some new things and grow as a writer. That didn’t happen. In fact, this course was five days long and we did not even write a whole story. I’ll also take this opportunity to whisper that I did not like the instructor for various reasons. All that said, it was cool to (sort of?) study at NYU and I did make a lot of great friends. I also got to meet a literary agent and a few authors (Kody Keplinger!!). Discussing writing and opportunities in publishing also made me more determined to keep pursuing my goal of getting published (someday!). 

OTHER

I’ve been looking to get more formal work experience so yesterday, I applied to positions at a few literary magazines (ie. Glass Kite Anthology) and an internship. I, personally, feel like the application process is very stressful. Since I have a lot of free time, I spent one-two hours on each application (not including the procrastination). I’m very nervous and I already have some other good news to share but I’m keeping quiet until it’s all finalized. 

I also confess to avoiding all the writing linkups because I don’t want to delve too much into my first drafts. I’m a perfectionist and I always get caught up in the mistakes I’ve made – and that usually leads to ditching the project. A great example would be Project Hot Chocolate, which I am no longer writing even though I wanted to finish it before school starts (tomorrow). But after ditching Project Hot Chocolate, I resurrected The Deadline! I doubt anyone remembers this but I came up with the idea a year ago and posted a few chapters on Wattpad before the self doubt got the best of me. According to myWriteClub, I started writing it on July 24th. It’s been a little more than 3 weeks and I have written 22,000 words! I’m being intentionally vague (and only posting snippets on Twitter) because it seems like I only get shit done when I’m not taking myself too seriously. 

I feel like this is the blog post I’ll point to if people ask me how productive I’ve been this summer..but now I want to hear from you guys! How has your summer been so far? Do you write? Do you read? (Are you human??) All very important questions of course.