Better When I'm Older

Lisa Batya Feld

 So here's the deal: you are looking at the official website of Lisa Batya Feld, writer and artist. By some standards I've already made it: I've been published. But to make those four sales, which have garnered me a whopping $74 dollars, I accumulated nearly 250 rejection letters as of 2/13/04. Not exactly enough to quit my day job. I'm using this page to chronicle my progress as I send out stories and hopefully get them published, both so that I can keep track of what I've done and to give other people some idea of what goes into 'making it' as a writer.

March, 2006: So what's the deal? Why are the numbers of stories (and rejections) dropping? Why no sales in 2005 at all? Well, there were a number of factors at work. The first is that in late 2005/early 2006 I had a couple of bouts of Lyme disease. Lyme disease pretty much saps your energy, makes it hard to concentrate or follow the thread of a conversation, makes your body feel like it just ran a marathon after pulling an all-nighter. Not exactly ideal for writing. But the other two factors I can't really blame on outside problems. The first was that, frankly, I got discouraged. I didn't have a lot of time to write, especially not long periods that I could devote to the novel-length ideas I was coming up with, but the truth is I wasn't making time, either. Part of me wondered, "What's the point? Whatever you write, it's just going to make the rounds of rejections for two years. Why bother?" The second reason was that most of my writing energy went into writing fan fiction, a guilty pleasure. I wrote twelve fanfics in 2005, 73,800 words. That's almost a novel, right there. I got a lot of praise and validation, plus I got to experiment with writing mysteries and humor while getting lots of feedback on my efforts, and one fanfic got changed around into a salable story. But overall, it's a lot of energy to put into stories that can't sell (without significant rewriting) so in the coming year, I'm going to try writing more original fiction.

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