- Submitting is highly addictive.
- Tracking submission is also highly addictive. So much so that I had to stop tracking Submittable, Duotrope, and the Submission Grinder from my phone for a bit (but they crept back in).
- Writing fiction is a hobby, writing personal essays is a necessity and writing urban essays is an intellectual outlet.
- Fiction rejections don’t really hurt, nor do personal essay rejections. Urban essay rejections hurt a whole lot.
- What is it with venues that do silent passes? Not cool. Is it still under consideration? Is it a pass? Who knows.
- I already cringe at my first published essay. I find it overwritten, meandering and overexplained. Although maybe that was what I needed at that point in my grief-processing journey.
- When something is published, it kind of falls into a black hole of silence. Or that’s what it feels like to me. There is no feedback loop. Maybe it’ll feel more real when I get a paper copy of my work?
- I feel very vulnerable about being a French person living in Quebec and writing in English. Even though English came as a necessary language of the heart after my dad’s death, I do wrestle with the feeling that I am betraying Quebec’s unique culture by doing this.
- I struggle with loneliness as I do not know a single writer.
- My only bêta-reader is my mother-in-law, when I even dare to send her my stuff.
- An acceptance email makes it all worth it.
- My personal essays are a practical way to open conversations with my therapist.
- I will manage to (involuntarily) connect anything I write to: my dead dad, Montpellier, or bureaucracy.
- I need to chill on the use of anaphoras.
- I tried writing poetry, and I think I suck at it?
- I try to quantify everything: average number of days between rejections, average rejections between acceptances, and throw in the median amount of days between acceptances too, just for fun.
- Punctuation goes inside the quotation marks. Some French habits are hard to drop.
- I need to stop changing my bio for every single submission. For a while, I even wrote it from scratch every time and let the wind carry me where it pleased.
- I dislike semicolons, but I’ve relaxed my rule of never using them; they can be useful. Mostly, I just find them ugly.
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