Every few months I reexamine my entire life and crawl into bed midday. Okay, every few weeks. And if not a midday nap, then an afternoon picking scabs in my notebook. I wait for the day introspection offers immediate pleasure rather than paralyzing regret. I get to the pleasure eventually, humbly, in the truth of the Gospel and my identity in Christ. And then I’m chastened to realize that

once again

I freaked out about stuff that isn’t worth worrying.

I’ve been thinking a lot about publishing. This is because I’m submitting a trickle of work to online magazines. I’m reading these magazines and thinking if my pieces would fit, what would my fiction look like in that font, how I’d word my brief bio. This is more modest daydreaming than years past when I pretended I was running the Olympic marathon on a ten-mile route through rural Wisconsin and, on that same run, designed the book cover for my first collection of fiction. The title was a toss-up: either Call It Fiction or Broken Plate Mosaic. I don’t think either are taken yet. Mine.

When I reread my last post: thank you for putting up with me. This blog is a place to chronicle process. So. Even when it gets whiny or a little too pep talky. I think about publication. I fantasize validation. When most of what I do every day is so incremental, I crave a giant whoop.

That whoop a ways off. I need to be okay small. I need to be okay with mundane practice. And in this moment, my words are not for an imagined bestseller, but for my drafts, notes, revisions, composts, weeps, whispers, arguments, prayers.