A Writer's Notebook, Day Seven-Hundred

I am enjoying working on that story far more than I had been.  The ending seems to be in sight, and is out of left field, yet also in line with ideas I had from the start.  It got to a point in the plot where I was sort of hung up on how to move forward.  I'd had an idea of where it was going, but realized that direction would not work.  I could have shoe-horned that ending in, but it did not seem authentic or satisfying, so I asked myself what the character should do, just for that moment, and followed that a bit, but was still uncertain about where I was headed in a larger sense for the plot, but at some point, an idea had emerged, and it took me in a new direction before I had even really recognized what was happening.  It feels a bit dangerous, as an ending, to be honest, as it does come from out of left field to an extent, but I also realized that it lines up with many ideas that had already been present in the story, things I'd considered from the start, and is also an opportunity to expand the story towards the kind of writing I am interested in, but in a way that might blend it more with traditional stories, so that a reader might be captivated by those aspects and discover the ending takes them someplace unexpected and keeps the story from being quite as simple as it might have seemed.

I've also received two more rejections tonight.  One was for a magazine submission and the other was a chapbook manuscript.  If I had received any sort of actual feedback, I would at least feel I had some direction, but a flat rejection does not carry any real meaning.  I don't know what to do, but I keep accumulating these rejections and waiting, and that is not an acceptable way to approach a career.  I need to figure out some realistic actions I can take in terms of getting my work published that does not leave me stuck in this situation with no way to even judge my progress.  Without something in that regard, I feel quite lost.

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