A Writer's Notebook, Day One-Thousand-One-Hundred-And-Thirty-Eight

I need to send out more of my work.  I still have a bunch that is out, but I haven't submitted much in quite a while, despite my continuing to write at a steady pace.  I sent in that short play, but aside from that, I can't recall the last submission I made.  It is a difficult thing for me to do on my own, as I have expressed before.  This is true in a number of ways.  First of all, I find the process and the tasks involved in the literal process of submitting and tracking the responses difficult.  This has caused me a good deal of fear, and I think that has fed my hesitancy in a way that makes me doubt myself in deeper ways.  I am never certain about what work is truly ready, which is, if I think about it, a problem that most writers probably know well, but I am more reticent to trust myself much of the time.  I wonder how much of this is inherent, is a reaction to the work and my general concerns as a poet, and how much is carried over from concerns that arise out of my more specific difficulties.  I can't really determine that, but I would like to be able to find a way to submit work that didn't feel inherently reliant upon areas where my neurodiversity causes me difficulty.  I don't know what that would look like, to be honest, at least not anything that would be practical.  At the same time, I know that the way the system works now, I really need to have a person who can help me do the most basic aspects of dealing with submissions and staying on top of any responses.  Even just attempting to track the data in my submittable profile is often baffling to me, but that is minor compared to the deeper problems I have on that site.  The entire interface for submitting work is based around filling out standardized forms, and I have documented conditions that impact spatial processing and reasoning, as well as my graphomotor skills in ways that make interfaces of that sort very challenging.  One of the major fears is that I can't always be certain if I am reading such a form in the right way or filling it out in such a way that anyone else will think it is absurd.  For example, I can easily misapply the labels that are connected to the various questions.  I can miss a space and not realize it, and write the answer in a completely wrong box, with a knock on effect that might render the whole thing meaningless to the recipient.  This is an extreme example, of course, but I always have the fear that this might occur.  I've filled out forms wrong before and it has caused some very real problems for me before, including presenting me in ways that were very unflattering.  I wish I didn't fear this so much.  I do not want to be reliant, again, on having someone who does it for me.  Finding a person who is right for that role has proven to be impossible, and I am afraid that if I did find such a person, it would be a temporary solution.  I need to get more work out, I know that, and I want, at very least, for the simple part of this process, the actual sending of the work itself, to not be something that feels so daunting and fraught, that seems designed to require skills I will never possess and which seem so obvious few others even realize they are skills.

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