Old, Forgotten Things

I was wandering around my room looking for clothes in my underwear today and I saw, tucked into the bottom of my bookshelf, the Verandah anthology that I'm published in. I picked it up and flicked to my piece, which I've always thought should be better. But... It was pretty good. Oh, I can see how I'd improve it now, and some things still bother me stylistically, but... It worked. The language was rich and detailed and the concept worked better than I'd remembered.

It gave me a fantastic lift. I find it really difficult to have confidence in my writing, because it's so very hard to judge the quality of your own work - especially as people might easily love it completely or fucking despise it... I think all writers do this to some extent. About the only thing you can do is keep at it, I guess, or try to get as much distance from a piece as you can before making any kind of judgement on its merits.

It must be so hard for people writing personal trauma pieces to be able to distance themselves enough from the work to actually work on the quality of the writing. I'm in awe of that.

Anyway. I feel good about writing, today. It was a nice reminder that I can create something that's not total shit, and that people like it enough to get it out there.