Very Much In Progress

I've been meaning to do something about this for quite a long time. I don't know why I haven't, to be honest. What's the use of buying a URL if you aren't going to do anything with it? OK, that might be a bit of a lie. For one thing, I've been doing a lot of other stuff, including some work with a local charity which has taken up significant amounts of my time over the last couple of weeks especially. Aside from that I'm trying to practise guitar more (not having face-to-face lessons is one of my biggest frustrations in this lockdown), edit some tricky drafts that I've been unable to face for a long time, read through some of my friends' drafts, go for short but frequent runs in order to test and help heal my sprained ankle and regain some fitness, and learn Swedish. Days are surprisingly full for me at the moment! For another thing, I have enlisted the help of an incredibly talented family member to make this website actually look like a website. I thought I could do it myself. Perhaps I could, if I had the patience. But I do not, and I do not want to belittle the training and skill involved in creating something that's going to represent all that I am to anyone who even glances at it. So after a socially distanced business meeting during which I attempted to describe my brand in a series of horrible analogies, I'm very excited about that, too. That's that! The other thing of significance that's happened to me this week, I suppose, is my second rejection from a literary agent. It was polite and, of course, not unexpected, but even after my first one I was still surprised by the sting. I thought I was mentally prepared for all of this, having read about querying for years and understood that rejection is an inevitable part of a writer's career, not just in the beginning but all the way through. But there is just something so primally ugh about a rejection, isn't there? We tend to want to be liked, and no amount of telling yourself rationally that a rejection like that isn't an attack on your character, emotionally it's a different story. Still, this whole thing is not a sprint – much like this slow recovery process my ankle is undergoing, it's going to take time, effort and care.