Spits Day

I can't believe I missed Spits Day. June 28th has become sort of my "writing birthday," and I take a few moments to jot down my thoughts in my journal about another year of writing. About 15 years ago, on June 28th, I rode my motorcycle down a stretch of road out in the countryside, found a nice roadside hill, parked the bike and went up the hill with a notebook in hand. After a childhood full of writing, I hadn't written anything in about five years. It was partially due to the distractions of late-teen/early-twenties angst, but it was also because a number of writing setbacks, including a narrow-minded professor, had sucked the wind out of my sails. On that June 28th, I was in the death throes of a relationship that was comically dramatic in that young-twenties way, but it yeilded one good thing. She was a writer, and she rekindled my love of writing. So on that day I parked my motorcycle, climbed up the hill, and opened a fresh new notebook and started writing. I was writing flash fiction, which wasn't called flash fiction back then. It didn't have a name. Fiction didn't come in 500-word bits back then (or rather, it wasn't cool to do it back then). Some of the pieces weren't fiction, but more journalesque, and most were lacking in plot but heavy on emotion. I still remember the shortest piece I wrote. One whole page was taken up for the story, "Headaches." The piece read, "Headaches float." I didn't know what I was doing with this notebook, but I wrote flash fiction bits into it nearly every day. I knew this notebook and what I was doing was important (to me), but it was also blessedly aimless. I came to call the things I was writing, "spits," because they were just my brain spitting things out onto the page. It wasn't journalling, and it wasn't structured fiction, and since the moniker of flash fiction wasn't coined yet, I didn't know what to call it. So I called them spits, and wrote them into my spits notebook. The notebook lasted exactly a year, and on June 28th of the following year, I wrote on the last page. I realized it had been a watershed year for me. I realized that for some reason writing was part of who I was, like a limp or a bad liver, and I just had to deal with it. So every June 28th, I celebrate the revolution and reflect on what it means to be writer. That said, I can definitely say that last year's Spits Day was a lot better than this year's. Last year, I'd just sold my first piece of fiction to a professional market. A year later, despite having written several pieces that I believe are superior, I haven't sold a damn thing. I've organized a faboo writing group, am in the midst of starting a genuine writers organization in Rochester, NY, and I've been writing quite consistently, and though none of that has resulted in a single sale, I really can't complain. I'm changing my writing a bit to be more commerically acceptable - not because all I care about is getting published, but because getting established will allow me more freedom to write the good stuff later. As for the coming year? I will publish. I will qualify for SFWA. I will organize the writers of my city into an undead army to shake the foundations of God's own home (or at least get some respect for spec fic writers), and as always, keep chin up and learn to accept the affliction of having to turn every conversation, every bit of interesting info, every emotional response, and every conceptual idea into the basis of a story. That's just the way it is. Pahtooey!