5 Writing Lessons I Learned in 2020
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.
Life is weird.
I recently sat down, as I do every December, to take stock of my year as a writer. I assumed the outcome would be bleak. After all, this has been the year of OMG EVERYTHING IS AWFUL ALL THE TIME.
This was the year of COVID-19, of a seemingly never-ending presidential election, of George Floyd and Rayshard Brooks and Breonna Taylor and far too many other Black victims, of unemployment and the closing down of everything we love and previously took for granted.
As such, I figured my writing stats — my pitches and submissions — would be low. I don’t remember working much in the early months of COVID: When my son’s school closed and he had to homeschool. When publications stopped taking pitches and editors were furloughed. When my anxiety got the better of me and I spent more time sobbing in the kitchen than sitting at my computer.
But here’s the thing: I actually did okay.
In all, I submitted 151 pitches, essays, and stories to 93 different publications.
Of those, 111 were rejected (or just flat-out ignored), 13 were withdrawn by me (because they’d been placed elsewhere), and 12 are still pending (and will probably not be accepte — if…
