Prose, one month in – a thank you note

My wife works in admissions, and almost exactly a month ago, she came home from working a grad fair with a flyer for a low-res creative writing MFA program. I laughed, for several reasons.

The idea is incredibly impractical because money time children life. I also don’t need it; I’ve got my job, and I’m fortunate enough that it’s not going anywhere. Adjuncting someday could be fun, but financially speaking, I’d be better off doing quite literally anything else. An MFA is a lazy “maybe someday” daydream for me very similar to a monthlong European vacation. Hypothetically, if I bent my will and wallet toward it I could eventually make it happen, but am I? really?

Mostly though, I laughed because as I told my wife, “It’s been two years since I’ve written literally anything.”

Those anythings were one-act plays that I sent around to a few competitions in the hopes of seeing one staged. (One finalist status and a lot of radio silence.) Three years before that was the personal essay I actually worked on for real and sent around to a few literary magazines whose niche it seemed to fit. (It didn’t.) And before that was sixteen chapters of a novel I abandoned. Total readership: around 7 for the essay (people who I named in it and wanted an OK from, but who did say they liked it), X anonymous judges for the plays, and 1 for the novel (wife, though I don’t think I ever showed her anything past chapter 10).

That all did feel a little discouraging, but mostly, I hadn’t written anything in two years because I couldn’t think of a damn thing to say. So I laughed, but even while I scoffed at myself, I realized I missed having something to say.

The well still felt very dry, so I turned to the ol’ algorithmic witching rod to hunt for a contest that could give me a topic. Google brought back a bunch of uninteresting stuff, including a contest about the end of the world, and I dropped the matter until I decided that I was going to do this, I was going to write something. So I created a Prose account and wrote about toast.

And then somebody Liked it. And somebody else. And eventually 15 people liked “Little Things,” which means that with the work of a couple hours, I had gotten roughly double the readership I had in the preceding decade.

There’s that bromide about “if you reach one person” that people trot out to cheer up artists who fail to find an audience, and usually, I think the cliché just pisses said artist off more. I have to say, though, Jesus did 15 feel nice.

I’ve been trying to give as much back to Prose people as I’m receiving, reading liking and commenting both on random new posts and posts of people who do the same with my stuff. I’ve probably missed some people. And I’m going to have to slow down my Prose pace some, both writing and reading, because I have this bad habit of feeling most creative when I have a stack of dishes or grading that I’m supposed to be dealing with. But I wanted to write a post to express my appreciation.

I will now (and for the only time, I promise) obnoxiously tag the people who have liked something I’ve posted. Thank you. The reads and likes and comments and reposts and follows mean a lot. Keep on doing your respective things.