I have finally taken down an old post, a story that I am now submitting elsewhere in a far more polished and developed fashion. What I originally posted here as rough draft flash fiction under 2k words is now a story over 5k words long that has been through multiple rounds of edits and rewrites.

I’m not sure to what degree my old stories here are impossible to sell elsewhere. It probably varies by how strictly other publishers interpret the “first publishing rights” required of nearly all publications. But perhaps via extensive additions and rewrites, and pulling the original rough draft down, I can make some of my flash fic more salable.

This process is a bit dispiriting, in some ways. I found posting flash fic here quite satisfying, and I wrote a lot of it. The whole experience gave me good practice sharing things with the rest of the world (a frightening prospect, usually), and the structure and rhythm of it meant that I managed pretty regular output. Knowing that some people would enjoy seeing the story, even when it was only a few folks, was a nice incentive.

My hope is that I can instead (finally) reach the same feeling of regularity in submitting finished stories to paying outlets. But I’ve been hoping that for years, and it’s been quite difficult for me to achieve. My perfectionism doesn’t help, nor does the frequent rejection, nor does the difficulty of sharing the piece with excited friends beyond whoever helps me with critique and revisions. At least when I post on the blog I can send people an simple link.

And with all those issues, there’s also the simple fact that I can’t submit (or can’t bring myself to submit) the same one-and-a-half-drafts quality work to publishers that I would regularly post here. Even if I could bring myself to do that, I suspect it would scupper my chances of being published. This means that—where I had previously beaten out my perfectionism by allowing myself to be wrong on the internet—I now *do* turn more of my critical focus on my work before sharing it with the rest of the world. That critical focus is a huge stumbling block when it comes to producing anything.

In some ways, I taught myself to produce work consistently by convincing myself that the final quality of the piece didn’t actually matter. Ceasing to post rough passes of material here makes that belief feel more and more like the lie that it is. The final quality does matter, when I change the context in which it’s being submitted. All of that means I have to relearn how to make myself produce regularly. Funny, I hadn’t recognized the extent to which that’s true until now.