IWSG: The Insecurity of waiting

It’s the first Wednesday in March, so time for the Insecure Writers’ Support Group. If you haven’t come across this before, it’s a regular monthly blogfest where writing bloggers share their insecurities or post something to reassure or inspire others. 🙂

At this point, what’s on my mind more than anything else is waiting. There’s a lot of the waiting game in being a writer, waiting to hear back from others what they think about your work. Waiting to hear from agents, from potential publishers, from magazines, from contest judges, from beta readers and other volunteer critiquers. I’ve sent the revised copy of “Won’t somebody think of the Children” to two dedicated readers from the critters.org critique workshop, and I’m waiting to hear back from both of them, waiting to hear from somebody at nanowrimo.org about a possible manuscript swap.

And more than anything else, I’m waiting to find out if I got into any summer workshops. I got my applications sent to four during February: Clarion at UCSD, Clarion West, Odyssey, and CSSF Novels. I’m probably not going to hear from anybody for another two weeks or so, and suspect that I’ll be waiting on one workshop until mid-April. Sigh.

But I’m doing what you have to do when you’re waiting; I’ve made my peace with the work I put in, that what I sent out was the best I could have done with the tools I had at the time, and I’m focusing on other things. 🙂 Since it’s March, there’s plenty of editing to do!

Are you waiting to hear back from anybody about your writing?