Race To Publish
Hey there!
Just before you dive in, if you find errors within, be it fragmented sentences, dangling modifiers, misplaced commas or whatever rocks your eyes, do ignore them. I am in a rat race to publish before June rolls away. I am sure you are pondering what I’m about but stay with me, and I’ll bear you up through this journey.
This month, I intended to post a written piece based on my target for the year and was almost hitting the mark. But the idea shifted too often that I wondered what the actual story was. When I remembered, alarm gripped my pen, inducing me to question my ability to create a more captivating piece than the last. A tough call that was. For here I was, struggling not to bask in the accolades of the previous write-up and become bloated by the praises, and yet I dreaded to compose a fresh one. At best, the front door to my creative process had resistance wedged to it. At worst, I had allowed fear to determine my current pace.
And so it continued, the dilly-dally game I played with procrastination to avoid the sheer work of confrontation. I tried being absent-minded. It worked until my memory failed me and brought up the matter. Then I flashed the trump card called ‘too late!’ and won the battle. Deep inside, I found that I wanted nothing more than to write, but the struggle was more than real. Then I tried imagining the story in my head from start to finish before beginning to write and ended up feeling edgy. Lastly, I conceded and decided to write, but after staring at the blank screen for days, I gave up and pretended not to be bothered. But I was highly bothered to a worrisome degree. I mean, how could someone have a great idea for a piece of fiction and not be able to birth it into actual words? Well, I was that someone.
Finally, an opportunity to buckle down and be productive came. I could see the story take some remarkable form in my head. Then life’s crossroads, wanting to have a part, strolled in through the same front door and spelt the end. I lost momentum and inspiration to the degree that I could not remember anything anymore, nor did I want to. So I trudged through the month listlessly, hoping to latch on to something, to someone to help me overcome ennui. I realized too late that there wasn’t any such saviour.
Today, I summoned courage and turned on the monitor, drawing strength from the fact that it was the 28th, and I had still not fought the battle of resistance. At best, I was involved in minor skirmishes, drawing little to no blood.
Sighing deeply, I turned to God and asked for His help after the private pep talk I’d had with myself yielded no fruit, in the sense that I did not yet write the story, I was supposed to publish. It’s still roosting somewhere in my mind. At first, I felt like He wasn’t listening to me, but then I remembered that taking a leap of faith was always part of His way, so I grasped at that for good measure. With a little confidence this time, I asked for help again and some more and would have given up if I’d followed my feelings. But with each stroke of the keys, this piece that you’re reading started to take shape. A word first, a sentence after, then a paragraph next. By this time, I was comforted and encouraged to string more of them together, which I did, gladly.
In the end, God helped me do what the archetypical hero would, taking the bull by the horns. So here’s me confronting the unknown by racing frantically to the finish line with this random story to cheer the month.
