Category Archives: publication

Submissions Game Stats for 2025

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Still reeling from the news cycle, but the advice I took away from my trusty meditation app today was to soften into acceptance/resistance, rather than tensing up and making myself crazy, or giving up and crumbling away into some useless ball of powdery nothing.

So, returning to “my little life” with hopes that some of this will inspire others who are also playing (or thinking about playing) “The Submissions Game”–and it really does help to think of it as a game unless you are someone who can’t stand losing, here are my stats for 2025.

In poetry, my biggest focus, 17 journals accepted 28 poems. Of these, 13 of the journals were new to me, and 4 I’d been published in before. Of the poems, 4 were accepted on the first try, 8 had been rejected less than 5 times, 7 less than 10 times, 7 others had been rejected less than 15 times, and 2 were rejected less than 20 times (I generally stop submitting a poem when it hits 20 rejections.)

As for poetry rejections, the grand number was 83, with 25 submissions from 2025 still outstanding.

Short stories and essays, as usual, were less successful, with one acceptance (of a story that had previously been rejected 12 times.) I could also count two of the poems accepted as “flash fiction,” as they were prose poems that bordered on both genres.

Two other stories were rejected 14 times combined, and the essays I submitted were rejected 9 times.

I did get 2 “send more” or “made final round” notes with my fiction/essay submissions. Three essay/fiction submissions from 2025 are still outstanding.

Bigger projects also made little headway. A chapbook I’ve been circulating got 7 rejections. (And 3 more in the first week of 2026). One submission from 2025 is still outstanding.

I didn’t spend too much energy submitting my piano memoir this year, as most of the time I fretted over conflicting advice on how to revamp it into more of a self-help book. Two revisions later, at the end of December, it became clear to me that the new format wasn’t working so I went back to the original version and sent that to seven small press just before New Year’s Day. So far I’ve only heard back from one: a rejection.

I also haven’t done too much with the eleven novels in the drawer, but I did send one of them to three agents. One ghosted me, one answered with a scam offer, and one was nice enough to write an actual letter of rejection. It’s still out at one small press.

So, my grand total of overall rejections for 2025 was 134–well surpassing my goal of 100!

And I’m hitting the ground at a good rate for 2026, with 6 rejections in the first two weeks–that’s like a rejection almost every other day! But two nice things, as well: an acceptance of a poem from a new journal, and notification from a journal that I was accepted in last year that my poem had won one of their prizes, which comes with a cash award and a Pushcart Prize nomination.

 

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As I’ve said before, while I’m compelled to keep getting my work out there–mostly so more people will read it than for any uncontrollable need for outside validation–I find I can soften into thinking of this as nothing more than a game I play with myself. So, if you’re interested in offering your work (and totally fine, if you’re not) I encourage you not to take the process too seriously, and certainly not as a judgment on the quality of your writing.

Now onto doing my part to change the world. If only I could approach that with the same softness and ease! Of course, the stakes are much higher!

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Rejection Blues? Avoid Crushing Out on Your Poems

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Last Friday at a workshop, I wrote a poem from the prompt, What is Home? My response went way beyond warm tea and apple pie into the grief, fear and horror I felt after hearing about ICE infiltrating a Chicago apartment complex in the middle of the night, dragging people out of their beds and zip-tying children. As I often do in my poems, I combined these bigger events with moments from my life: flashbacks to my own home as a child, a grief ritual I’d participated in the previous day on Yom Kippur, and a precious innocent moment with my three-year-old grandchild, who, so far, has been sheltered from the onslaught of anxiety-provoking news stories that further threaten the tottering foundations of the country we call home.

I thought the poem was good. Quite honestly, I was smitten with it, as I often am when I feel I’ve been able to use poetry to expel what’s deep inside me in an artful, not-too-didactic, and not-too-ego-driven way. So, even though I generally like to let first drafts sit for a while so I can revise them more objectively, I decided to send the poem to Rattle, which publishes a new poem every week that responds to that week’s current events.

Problem was, the deadline was that night, Friday, at midnight. And I had commitments most of the rest of the afternoon and evening.

10:00 pm is not my ideal writing time. But that was when I got home on Friday night. So I forced myself to sit at the computer and consider the poem, doing what I generally do in revision: cutting out things that didn’t need to be there, condensing lines, considering each verb and each noun image, determining if there were places I could use more metaphors, making language choices to improve the sound and rhythm of each line. As I worked, I felt even more in love with the poem, even as its flaws began to peek through. But, I reminded myself, justifying my crush-like state, if I only sent out poems that I thought were unflawed, I’d never send out anything at all.

At 11:15 pm I decided I was too tired to do anything else to the poem, so I sent it.

I knew that no matter how polished or unpolished the poem was, the chances of it being chosen were pretty slim. Rattle gets hundreds of poems each week for this feature and they publish *one* of them–sometimes two. Nevertheless, on Saturday, the day they respond to all of those who’ve submitted that week, I kept checking my email. Even as I told myself it was unlikely they were going to take the poem, my little fantasy brain couldn’t quite click off. What if they do take it? Wouldn’t that be amazing? While I knew this wasn’t a perfect poem, I still thought it was an important poem, with something crucial that needed to be said–or, at least, something I felt was vital to say.

At about 5:30 pm on Saturday, just as I was getting into my car after a hike that featured a visit to my favorite “best friend” beech tree I checked my phone. There was the rejection–a form one I’d received several times before, kind, as always, reminding submitters of the number of poems received and encouraging people to try again.

I wasn’t crushed. Hard, even, to be disappointed with a result I totally expected. Oh well, I thought, as I backed out of the parking lot and headed onto the road. But I know that for many, a rejection can feel far more more devastating–and even worse if you’ve let yourself fall too deeply in love with your own work.

Later, I looked at the poem again. It still felt relevant and important, but it wasn’t the most amazing poem I’d ever written. As the glow of the poem-crush began to dim, I realized that with a little time and distance, and feedback from my poetry group, I could do more with this poem. And while it was kind of fun to work myself up into a frenzied, deadline-induced revision session, sometimes impatience is really my enemy–like when I can’t even wait for the tea water to boil and end up with an unsatisfying lukewarm cup.

And as with the the other deep loves in my life, things usually get better once the crush phase wears off and I begin to see and appreciate people–and poems–for who and what they are.

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Protest Poems

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Today I woke up to some good news. Two more of my poems were today’s offerings on the Substack site Second Coming, a poem-a-day protest against the threats to our democracy by our current administration.

And last night, I went to hear a writing colleague, Bill Mailler read from his new book of social justice poetry, Trauma, Truth, and Outrage. Bill’s poems tend to be gut-punches. He doesn’t shy away from horror or attempt to beautify it through language. His work is like that sign our small group of witnesses illuminated at the border in 2020: Don’t Look Away.

 

 

 

What I liked most about Bill’s work were the questions relating to our human capacity for meanness, a key component of the poem, Meditations on My Whiteness, where he asks directly:

For what possible reason
could good or well-meaning people perpetuate or participate….

before offering a long lamentation of possibilities including:

because we are cowards and cannot acknowledge
the consequences of our actions?

because we teach our children to deny their natural empathy
for others, themselves, animals, and the earth itself? 

I also think constantly about the issue of human cruelty. Though my own work tends to take a less direct approach to writing about political issues, neither is wrong or right. They’re just different. The point, I think, is to enter the world through a lens of empathy, rather than simply ranting or trying to be prescriptive about what you think should be done. Poet Kwame Dawes talks eloquently about this issue in his own writing: When I write the poems about Haiti, people living with the disease, I’m not writing poems so that people will give.. but so the person who experiences when they read the poem, they’ll say to me… that’s it. That’s what I’ve been feeling but I didn’t know how to say it.

As many of us are staggering through these times with deep and heavy feelings about what’s happening in the world, reading a protest poem or a political piece of artful prose can help us feel less isolated as we try to make sense of our grief and uncover a path through it into some kind of meaningful action. That’s why when I’ve read my own protest poems at workshops or readings, even raw and unfinished generative responses to prompts, I often got more positive feedback than I expected because I was able to verbalize something that someone else had not yet been able to verbalize–touched a nerve, so to speak.

This isn’t to say writing protest poetry is easy. While I do believe that all attempts at creative expression should be acknowledged, respected, and validated, it’s difficult not to fall into ranting, generic abstractions, slogans, self-pitying, etc. And the problems with these pitfalls is that it becomes easier to lose the reader, who’s likely heard it all before and can gloss over or check out. Keeping empathy in the forefront can help. So can paying careful attention to language–using sensory details, fresh verbs, and unexpected metaphors. In prose, this might mean creating vivid scenes where the viewer can watch what’s happening to characters and form their own judgments.

What has made the process of writing protest poems and stories slightly easier for me in the past decade has been my being able to more fully integrate my life as a writer and an activist. While this wasn’t true in my earlier life, I now feel the fallout from political issues as viscerally as the other subjects I feel urged to write about. Allowing myself to deeply feel the horrors of all I read about in the news has certainly made it more difficult to maintain emotional balance, but I do think it’s necessary. We need, somehow, to find a path into a more deeply rooted empathy if we really want to break the pattern of ignoring atrocities–often done in our name by a system in which we are all still passively participating.

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Best Rejection Letter, Ever!

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Nicolás Espinosa, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Recently I ran into an old acquaintance I knew through writing many years ago. She told me that she’d submitted a few essays to a few places and when they got rejected she gave up. It’s such a familiar story. I probably hear a similar version of it from someone nearly every month or two. But while I can’t counteract the argument that submitting work is a drain on time that might be more enjoyably spent on other things, I urge folks to expand their view of what it means to be rejected.

This week, I got the following letter from ONLY POEMS, a magazine with a 1.61% acceptance rate.

Thank you so much for trusting us with your wonderful poem. Although we‘re passing on this submission, I wanted to let you know that we received almost 600 poems for the Poem of the Month and your poem was in my Top 30.

I know “Meditating in a Heat Wave” will find a wonderful home soon, and I welcome you to share it when it does. I’d love to see it published, and also consider sharing it on our socials.

I sincerely hope you’ll try us again for our next Poem of the Month call.We will open again with a new themed call feature soon. Keep an eye out for that!

I’d also like to invite you to submit for our Poet of the Week series.  We’re also forever open for our new features: short poems, ekphrastic, and poets howl. Learn about them through our Submittable page/website/Substack.

Wow!

Out of 600 poems, mine was in the top 30! That’s pretty darn good. Problem is, for this particular call, they were going to only publish one poem. We need to stop thinking zero-sum game here, and get out of the “sports team metaphor” that if you don’t win the championship, you’ve failed. What’s even more important than my “ranking” is that my work touched these editors to the point of saying that if the poem eventually gets published in another journal, they would consider sharing it on their social media sites, extending legitimacy to my work through their good name, and enhancing its reach through their 37.8K followers on Instagram.

Of course, I’m now psyched to submit to ONLY POEMS again, but whether or not they ever publish my work, I’ll be forever grateful to their generosity in taking the time to write this letter, rebunking the insidious inner critic who lives in all of us and delights in promoting the falsehood that rejection means we are bad writers, bad people, worthless, useless, blah, blah, blah, blah.

So while the submission game may not be for everyone, I’m determined to keep playing it. The odds may be about the same, but it’s a lot cheaper than going to a casino, and the “prizes”–even when they’re rejection letters, are a lot longer lasting than whatever money might come tumbling out of a slot machine.

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Submission Milestones for 2024

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Each year since I’ve started this blog, I’ve included an end-of-year submission stats post, just to shed some light on the nitty-gritty of this murky game. Here’s what happened for me in 2024.

POETRY:

20 Journals/Anthologies accepted 34 poems. I also got 91 poetry rejections.

Of the 34 poems accepted, 7 were taken on the very first go-round; 8 poems were previously rejected 1-3 times; 7 poems were rejected 4-7 times; 4 were rejected 9-12 times; 3 were rejected 15-20 times, and 1 had been previously rejected 31 times! (The other 4 poems were previously published, so I didn’t track that stat.) This surprised me, as usually my poems circulate more before someone picks them up. I’m wondering if I might be getting better at selecting poems I send out and matching them to journals.

Another thing of note is that of the 20 journals that accepted my work, 8 of them had previously published something of mine in the past, so I may have been more of a known quantity. But this is a great point for anyone playing the submission game. Establishing relationships with journals and editors who like your work can be extremely gratifying and also help soften the rejections from some of the more competitive journals on your reach list. And as long as the journals you’re published in put out a good quality product, who cares that they’re not the creme de la creme in the journal world. Your work is still getting read and appreciated!

FICTION AND CREATIVE NON-FICTION:

My fiction stats are a bit more depressing. I offered stories and essays to 23 journals, and only 1 got accepted: an op-ed in my local newspaper.

Some analysis on this:

–Stories and essays are often harder to publish because they take up more room in a publication. (5-10 pages vs. a 1-2 page poem).

–Most of my better stories were already published in my collection, IMMIGRANTS, so I’ve been only circulating a few newer ones. Before the book was published I did manage to publish around half of the stories it contained in various places, but it was slow going.

–I still tend to feel overall more confident in my fiction, and therefore I submitted  to a greater number of “reach journals.”

AWARDS:

I’m personally very mixed on the “awards/contest” game for books because it seems like mostly a way of collecting a lot of exorbitant entry fees just to say your book won an award, but my publisher and I did submit to a couple of the more known ones. I was pleased to get a finalist designation (first runner up short-story and all category short-list) for the Eric Hoffer Awards, and a finalist designation in the short story category for the Independent Authors Network.

I also received two Pushcart Prize and two Best-of-the-Net nominations from various journal editors.

And I did not win a few other notable things, like an IPPY Award.

LARGER PROJECTS:

It was a thrill to have my poetry book, Here in Sanctuary–Whirling, which drew heavily on my witnessing trips to the border and the children’s detention center in Homestead, FL, come out in early 2024. With the upcoming administration’s about to take over and put their extreme deportation plans in gear, this book feels even more relevant right now, and I’m continuing to look for ways to publicize it.

I did not spend a lot of time circulating my music memoir or any of my novels. But I did receive three rejections (aka non-responses) from agents, and one non-response from a small press where I sent one of my older kid-lit novels.) So this might be an area ripe for New Year’s resolutions in 2025.

Nevertheless, I easily crossed the 100-rejection threshold (91 poetry rejections, 22 fiction/CNF rejections, and 4 agent/small press rejections) for a grand total of 117!

Onward to 2025!

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So What and Now What?

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I’m writing this post in conjunction again with my writing buddy Tzivia Gover, author of Dreaming on the Page and several other books, and all around encourager extraordinaire. You can learn more about Tzivia, her books, and her offerings on writing and dreaming here.

A few weeks ago, during the discussion part of our Zoom writing group, a participant said. I spent so much energy on getting published, and then, finally I was published, and it felt like a big ‘so what!’ So, now I’m struggling with what to do next. Why publish at all?

I’ve written a post on the down side of publishing, and I totally respect the reasons why someone might choose not to publish. Putting our work out there makes us seen and vulnerable, and subjects us to criticism–real (as in negative reviews) or imagined (our own inner judge at work dissecting people’s tepid reactions). But many of us write, ultimately, to be heard and validated. Publishing is one of the ways–though certainly not the only way–of achieving that validation. When we’re published, we cross an arbitrary line that society has determined as the mark that separates “real” writers from wannabe writers.

But, in my opinion, this distinction is faulty. As my mentor, the late Pat Schneider, always said, A writer is someone who writes, a claim she attributed to poet William Stafford. And even for those of us who can’t quite shake the values of our status-driven world, being published in The New Yorker is different from being published by some unknown journal editor in Kansas City who is dedicating a large chunk of their free time to promoting the work of writers they love in an on-line journal that will likely only be read by your friends and theirs.

And when you add in self-publishing, the wrinkles only get deeper.

So perhaps this was the “so-what” our friend was referring to after getting his first few stories published.  You get published in a journal. You share it on Facebook or Instagram, or with your family and friends. Some people say nice things. Some people say nothing. And then, nothing. You haven’t become an immediate celebrity. People aren’t hanging on your every word and treating you any more–or less–legitimately in your craft. (And this was true for me even after I published my first book with a major publisher.) There’s a let-down after the hoopla. An existential moment of why do it?

And all I can say to that, is at least, for me, the blank page still calls. There are still important things in my heart that need to be transformed into words. And I personally like knowing that someone else out there–whether it’s the unknown editor in Kansas City or the big name editor in New York–has resonated with those words, telling me that they were touched.

We write to touch ourselves. We publish to touch others.

Tzivia says:

Mealtimes became a challenge during the years I lived alone, after my daughter went off to college, and my then-partner left to follow a different path. Dinners morphed from sit-down affairs to sandwiches or bowls of cereal eaten while standing over the sink.

Then I realized that feeding myself didn’t have to be a chore. Instead, preparing new recipes with care and rediscovering what satisfied my taste buds became a ritual of self-care. Sitting down at a table set for one, with a cloth napkin and a candle on most nights, became an opportunity to enjoy my own com­pany. I even began going to restaurants alone, and when the hostess aksed, “Just one?” I’d stand up a little straighter and say, “Yes, a table for one,” consciously, and confidently, dropping the just.

Similarly, writing “just for yourself” doesn’t have to be the equivalent of standing over the sink at dinnertime scarfing down a PB&J sandwich. Writing begins as an act of solitude, but that makes it more valuable, not less. So, we shouldn’t treat pieces we compose just for ourselves like proverbial neglected step­children, lavishing all of our literary attention on the darlings we send out for publication.

The writing that is meant for our eyes only can be particularly nourishing because we cultivate our capacity to notice what inspires us, and what’s worth putting into words so we can preserve it, revisit it, and take the time to know it more  deeply.

Remember: Writing is much more than just a path to publishing! I write for the pleasures of the process, of putting words on the page. I like to see my words in print, too—but that’s not where the drive to continue comes from.

 

Pause and Consider

Searching for just the right word, spending time massaging a sentence until it sings, and rediscovering what inspires you can be its own universe of joy and fulfillment separate from seeing your work in print. And for some of us, that is not only enough, it’s a deliciously satisfying and complete creative experience.

Before deciding whether to keep your dreamy writing in the drawer rather than prepare it for a wider audience, pause to get clear on this point:

Are you writing only for yourself because you’re not sure your work is good enough to share with others? Or is this a conscious decision, lovingly made to cultivate a productive and solitary pursuit?

Journal about your choice to write for an audience of one, and talk it over with a trusted friend. If it is a choice made from self-regard, celebrate it!

But a familiar yet unwelcome voice is telling you that you or your writing aren’t good enough, consider taking even a small step toward making your writing public.

Today’s post is excerpted and adapted from Dreaming on the Page: Tap into You Midnight Mind to Supercharge Your Writing.

Writing: The Joy and the Oy

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I’m writing this post in collaboration with Tzivia Gover. Tzivia and I have been orbiting in similar circles for decades, and we’re both regulars at the same drop-in writing group in our community. We recently got excited about a question raised by another writer in our group. “People keep telling me to put together a book. But that would be so much work. I’m retired. I want to enjoy writing, not commit myself to a long slog.” This got us thinking about how to balance the joys of writing with the inevitable oys —the difficulties and discontents. So we decided to carry the conversation into our Substack newsletters. As you will find, having a writing community is one of the joys in each of our writing lives! We invite you to read each of our reflections—and join the conversation in the comments.

Dina …

Even though I’m often jazzed by the editing and revision process that’s needed for long, extensive projects, I’m also a survivor of several slogs–which had many, many moments of NOT FUN. So I immediately understood this far too familiar dilemma raised by our fellow writer.

“To keep going you’ve got to find the joy in the process,” I told him.

Sometimes, that joy can be envisioning the overall outcome and holding onto that vision. Sometimes it can be the pleasure of revising a single poem, or paragraph, or scene. For me that often involves focusing on paring down words I don’t need or substituting words and phrases with more heft and resonance and sound quality. I find it fun to look at the before and after and see how far I’ve come at chipping away at a block of marble to make it beautiful.

The hardest part for me–the “oy”–is when I have to conjure up details about a character/scene, etc., that I haven’t been able to conceptualize, or to clarify something that makes perfect sense to me but others don’t get. In my mind, I often compare this process to  giving birth. “Push, push, push,” I literally say out loud to myself. No, it isn’t fun–but that’s when it’s time to go back to the vision and trust that somehow, I’ll get there.

It just won’t be quick.  And that’s ok. Patience is a virtue—not one I have a lot of, but one that’s good to cultivate. Besides, while I’m going through these slogs, I can still get some instant gratification by writing short generative pieces that give me the creative rush I’m constantly seeking.

Tzivia …

Some years back, while writing my book, Joy in Every Moment, an inspirational self-help book about accessing more everyday happiness, I was scrambling to make my deadline and tapping out sentences through gritted teeth. The time pressure, the critical voices chiding me, and the overwhelm of everything else that was on my plate at the moment were crowding in on me

Photo by Tzivia Gover

Recognizing the irony of the situation, I stood up, stepped away from my desk, and laughed off my grim mood.

I promised myself I wouldn’t make writing a book about joy into a dreary job. To remind myself of my intention I placed a string of children’s wooden alphabet letters on my desk spelling out: J-O-Y. Each day when I sat down to write, that word smiled back at me, reminding me why I was there.

But writing with joy doesn’t mean that I’m going to love every minute of it. Daily writing is tiring. The transition from illuminating idea to words on the page can feel like mud-footed disappointment. Tedium and slog are part of the territory each writer must traverse. But with experience we learn that the effort is rewarded in the form of the well-earned satisfaction of having a reader sigh at the end of your poem, or seeing your work in print and knowing that you’ve said what you wanted to say, and you’ve said it as well as you can.

Meanwhile, I look for joy where I can find it.

Let me wax poetic about rooting into word origins, revising a sentence until each word slips, as if slotted, into just the right place, and of unraveling a knot of paragraphs to find the order that makes an essay sing.

And when the going gets hard, connections with other writers who understand the oy and the joy of the craft sustains me through storms of self-doubt and eases me around the rocky edges of despair when it seems nothing is coming together on the page.

Add to that the act of collaborating with other writers (as Dina and I are doing now) and the joys multiply.

Where are you finding the oys – and joys – in your writing life today? Drop a comment below.

Check out Tzivia’s Substack Newsletter—This Dream is A Poem here.

To subscribe to this blog, visit ddinafriedman.substack.com

 

Revisiting “Finished” Work

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Yesterday, as an offering to alums of my MFA program, I had the opportunity to meet with a literary agent to talk about my piano memoir, Imperfect Pitch. I’d sent her some materials in advance–an overview/summary and some sample chapters, but I had no expectation that she would open the conversation by telling me she’d fallen in love with the book and was happily going to take it. Those pipe-dreaming days are long over, and the book has already been rejected by more than 30 agents. The few who took time to actually write back (rather than simply ghost me) all said the same thing. The issue wasn’t the writing–which was strong. The issue was the marketability.

So, not wanting to waste my precious 15 minutes searching for compliments or reassurance, I dived right in. What could I do to make this book more marketable?

Apparently–though not surprisingly–it’s extremely difficult to publish a memoir with a major publisher unless you are already a celebrity. Of course, more people would rather read about Taylor Swift than about me. I know this. The only reason I’ve been trying the “big-time channels” with this book is that I believe its underlying message will inspire and help people who’ve lost their creative north star, as I did in my music life, succumbing to the pressure of perfectionism and performance and losing all joy in the creative process. So I’d like the book to get greater circulation than it would from a smaller press.

“You need to position this more as a self-help book,” the agent told me. “Have more about the overall arc in the first chapter about what the reader will find out, and make it clear to readers that the ultimate payback will be getting permission to go back to something they cared about. Also include some instructions—make them broad, so they can apply to other arts.”

What? Give away the arc in the first chapter? My fiction-writer self is quaking at that comment, which goes against everything I’ve learned–both in my MFA program and way before. It’s hard enough to develop the darn arc. Why would anyone read a book if they already know what’s going to happen?

“In non-fiction, the journey is in the destination,” the agent said. She also suggested not being afraid of name-dropping if I knew anyone in the writing world that I could say would help promote the book. Ha! I know many people in the writing world, but most of them, like me, are not household names. In the music world, though, I do have only a couple of degrees of separation from Yo Yo Ma. I wrote about the time he guest-coached my younger child’s chamber group in the book–but likely he has better things to do, like call attention to repressive immigration policies by playing cello on the U.S./Mexico border.

Oh well, I’ll tackle that issue later. First, I’ll have to think about the reframing. I’ll keep the current version, just in case, but in general, I like revision, which I think of as re-visiting, rather than correcting something that was previously wrong. I’ve recently discovered that in my piano life, as I re-visit pieces I struggled so hard with four years ago, like Beethoven’s Pathetique, I have a lot more facility in bringing them back. Frequent practicing has made my fingers stronger and more flexible, and I can focus less on the notes and more on the shadings of a piece, how I want to express it, which gets to the soul of the creative process–especially as I’ve learned to let go of the expectation that I’ll play every note and every rhythm perfectly and without bumps.

I think this is also true for writing. As I’m working on several projects at once, I’ve become even more aware of the difference in my writing confidence and fluidity between slogging through a first draft of a new novel, and revising a poem or prose piece where I already “know the notes.”

So I’m willing to dive in and try. Maybe this rewrite will feel too loud and brash, or predictable, but maybe I can strike just the right balance between memoir and self-help to please both the publishing gods and my own creative vision–and feel jazzed by the discovery of what my fingers and brain can do.

Here’s pianist Daniel Barenboim playing the Pathetique. Enjoy!