Nothing is a Waste of Time.

No matter how small, every experience has something to contribute.

I haven’t had any desire to write recently. Which is okay.

I’ve been working on my mental health and needed that break for a bit. But I found out last week that there was an open submission window at Simon & Schuster on Saturday and decided that maybe it was time to get back to it and try my hand at submitting a pitch for a book, which is something I’ve always wanted to do, but never seriously contemplated before.

So I’ve been obsessing a bit over the last week about what to actually submit. I have so many ideas that I’ve never fully brought to fruition and a few that I’ve started but haven’t ever finished. I just couldn’t decide on the right one though.

Finally in the wee hours of Saturday morning I settled on something totally unexpected. I wrote and rewrote and rewrote the 200-word pitch to perfection, read it aloud multiple times and read it to my partner. Then an hour before it was due, I finally hit the send button on my e-mail.

I took a deep breath and thought, Holy shit, I actually did that! And it wasn’t actually that hard once I figured out what I wanted to do. The decision process was the worst of it. And I realized that it didn’t even matter if I heard anything back, I was just proud of myself for submitting something. So much so that I actually started to cry a little.

Then I scrolled back over to the website to re-read the details and dates when they would get back to you if they were interested and saw that they were only accepting submissions from people in the UK and Ireland. Fuck.

I immediately thought, I wasted my time and did all that for nothing. But that’s really not true at all. I did something really big and really awesome and even though I won’t hear anything back from them, it was totally worth it. Because now I know that’s it’s not that scary. I can totally do it again. And I think I will.