Spoiling for a new project

Obviously I don't check in here terribly often.  I've been trying to figure out what my next project will be.  I completed, recently, a few screw-around projects that had been sitting around for far too long, and that was itself a nice slate-clearing.  The IWSG has a contest with the entry date coming up soon, and I wanted to write something for that, and even started writing it, and maybe will even finish writing it, who knows?  There was another contest I found out about, and thought about taking the IWSG story and using some of its elements for that, but...I didn't really want to deal with the prospect of winning that one, which was extremely unsettling to realize.  I mean, I want to be discovered.  I want to make a living writing stories.  But this contest...Aside from an obscenely generous cash prize, it expected the winner to make a lot of publicity appearances.  Talk about your insecurities...I didn't really envision myself as the kind of person they'd be interested in using for those appearances.  But what do I know?

Anyway, I've been writing comic book scripts regularly again for the past few years, short samples, which has kind of gotten me back into that groove for the first time in a decade.  Recently I found a couple artists who expressed interest in drawing up some of these scripts.  Who knows what will come of it, but I figured I'd document it.

Found out today that the agent involved in the IWSG twitter pitch thing hasn't had a chance to read any of the queries from that event, yet.  So there's always a chance, right?  Seven Thunders still has a chance!  But we'll see, right? 

My latest project may be a Seven Thunders spin-off, actually, another short story set in Space Corps, which is itself always a little thrilling, knowing I'm actually writing Space Corps material, after dreaming about it for so long...

I keep wondering how much of my struggle is because it was always going to be a struggle, and how much because of the way I've approached it.  They say persistence is always the key.  But what does persistence look like?  Obviously I've maintained this blog for five years, but apart from all the self-published material I've put out in that time (!), I haven't really made that much progress.  Persistence as in relentless?  Yeah, not so much.  I lack that kind of drive, and my relationship with the world always seems to be at least passively aggressive.  Writers ought to be in conflict with the world, to a certain extent, but it also seems as if some of them can get away with it better than others.  Recently I've been in a great deal of conflict.  I find myself wondering all over again how it is I could have reached a point where I have no meaningful connections, no one who truly understands me.

Woe is me.  Alas, poor Yorick.  We all end up as skulls, eventually.  What's to worry about?  All the minor tortures, really.  Try, try to keep perspective...