Irons in the Fire

An author friend of mine once commented that he felt the need to keep many irons in the fire. It worked well for him to rotate through stories. When one wasn't speaking to him he'd rotate out and work on another in order to keep himself writing.

I love this analogy. There is a bit of a geek inside me that would love to work a forge, but that aside it speaks of something true. A story and a piece of metalwork have a lot of similar properties. Neither are going to be perfect on the first try. Both need to be tempered, cared for, and worked carefully under a watchful eye. What someone who has just written their first short story sees as beautiful, someone who has put his time in at the forge will say that it needs work and can point out flaws.

I think the part of the analogy that I like best though, is both can produce a thing of beauty. The finish product can be beautiful, terrible, useful, or elegant. But once they're forged you can have them until they sell to someone who will love and care for them.

I bring this up because I've got a lot of pieces of work out right now that I'm waiting to hear back on.  Nothing novel length, only short and flash fiction pieces that I've enjoyed writing.  I know that my odds of success and my odds of failure are pretty much the same.  But if I get rejected I can always comb over it again and try for another sale.

The hardest thing you can do is to keep producing though when nothing is selling.  To keep practicing when success hasn't been around in a while.  Eventually though, it's bound to turn up, I can only hope that I have what it's looking to buy when it does.

Also, check out the new chapter of "A Wolf in Patchwork Clothing" which was posted tonight.  Plus, if you'd like to read more by me check out the self-published short story collection "Escaping Sanity" on Amazon.  There are many irons in there that taught me something about writing.