Hummingbirds and going it alone.

First off, some good news. A flash piece of mine, “The Hummingbird’s Anti-Torpor,” will be in the fall issue of Spartan. More information coming soon.

This piece is now the third in my veterinarians series to be accepted for publication, and with any luck, a few more will follow in the months to come. In the meantime, I just have to keep plugging away at them. Two drafts are in-progress, and the list of ridiculous concepts grows.

But what’s most interesting about these pieces to me is that because they’re generally shorter, and because they’re a little on the quirky side, and because I have a very specific trajectory for each, I’ve written, edited, and submitted them all without the usual step of having someone read/critique it. It’s been a pretty enlightening exercise, if only to help improve my own self-editing techniques, and the ability to read a story objectively, even though I’m the one who wrote it in the first place. And, clearly, something is working. I haven’t had this much fast-and-rejection-free success on work in a long time.

I still have every intention on sending out longer work to my few trusted peers, but perhaps this is when I begin to trust my own instincts a little more, and learn to draw the line more clearly when I know exactly what I’m trying to do. Either way, it’s an exciting time.