Run it Back

I hate making New Years’ declarations, mostly because I can’t imagine a worse way of starting the new year than immediately breaking a promise you made to yourself. “30 minutes of cardio every day”, right? Yeah, I caught a charliehorse in the back of my left thigh getting off the toilet this morning, so that elliptical is getting a little dusty today. And now I’m sad, because I made this big to-do about “getting healthier” and “identifying my waistline” and here I am, in the drive-thru at Dairy Queen, paying in cash so my wife doesn’t judge me as she checks the credit card statement yet again.

Happy New Year.

But my 2023 resolution was to get back into my writing, and the year turned out to be huge for me. I finished writing a novel in 2021, and I spent 2022 shopping it around to no avail, and so I got dejected. My passion project let me down, and I thought that I should spend 2023 reminding myself what it was I loved about writing. And that’s when I found Vocal. I saw the challenges on social media and started daydreaming about what I would do for each challenge. I saw one science fiction-related challenge and thought that I would try it out, mapping out something that, admittedly, never really came together for me. But I loved the process, loved it enough to go ahead and buy my membership into this exclusive circle of contributors. I immediately started diving in, grabbing hold of each contest and challenging myself to genres that I’d never experimented with before. And now, I can decidedly state that I will never leave this platform, as it has become a part of my weekly routine now. And most important: my writing brings me joy again.

My first success on Vocal came in the weirdest fashion, with a weird poem I wrote as an exemplar for the high school English class that I teach every day, a first-person narrative poem about a disgruntled tissue that, somehow, got picked as a Top Story just a few months into my time in Vocal. Imagine your first taste of success being a poem about tissue paper. Yikes.

Soon after, a buddy of mine went through a terrifying circumstance dealing with the health of his wife and his unborn child, and I found writing to be very therapeutic in handling that process. Things worked out miraculously well with him, and his beautiful child was born perfect and wonderful, and in dealing with my own fears and anxieties in his tense circumstance, I was able to channel that into a story for the “Reset Your Password” contest and my short story “Abigail Grace”. When I finished that story, I was proud of it, but my highest ambitions for it was simply to get the feelings out of my chest and onto paper. Mission accomplished, as far as I was concerned. But to then see it win first place in the challenge, to see my work at the top of the screen– it was unexpected, humbling, and it lit a fire under me, the kind of fire that I needed.

Recently I was happy to be a runner-up in the “Nourished” contest, writing "Chicken Parm and Chick Flicks" in the “online recipe” subgenre that I’d never written in before, but what made my day was the story that preceded it. You know those stories that you and your partner tell at couples’ dinners that you’ve told a hundred times that you’ve rehearsed down to a science? The story of my first Valentine’s Day with my now-wife is such a story. It’s cute, wholesome, and always leaves a smile on peoples’ faces, to the point now that my students ask me how the chicken parm was every February 15th. So being able to tell that story, in writing, to a community I’ve grown very fond of– it was a pleasure I’ll always keep dear. And then to have it affirmed as a contest runner-up really validated how special that story is to me.

So that was 2023, and trying to run it back for 2024 feels like a daunting task. I don’t anticipate getting into Olympic-level fitness or giving up soda, so I won’t waste time lying to you. But what are my aspirations for Vocal in 2024? Well, hopefully, that’s something I can stick with through to 2025.

#1) I want to submit something for more than 75% of the contests. I don’t really care about winning (don’t get me wrong: winning is a blast), but what I care about is challenging myself, and the Challenges do a good job of forcing you to write using styles, genres, or restrictions you aren’t familiar with. Last year I had to write a children’s fairy tale with a strict word count; though it was tremendously difficult for me, I ended up being very proud of the result. I’m so used to seeing a Challenge that is outside of my prescribed “box” and thinking “Nope. Not for me.” I want to stop doing that, and start embracing the difficulty more. No more fear.

#2) I want to find a way of getting more eyes on my content. I don’t know if this will involve collaboration with other members or establishing a regular publishing schedule or what. I don’t know. I know this will involve me putting myself out more, reading more works, making more comments, this, that, and the other. It’s funny: I have more fear of socially expressing myself than I have of putting my art out there to the world. I’m confident in my writing, but I’m less confident in expressing my opinion and putting myself out there. But my love language is affirmation, and if I hope and beg for affirmation from others, I should be willing to express some myself.

#3) I want to earn a Top Story from one of my non-fiction essays. I love fiction writing, and I’ve grown to embrace my romantic sense of poetry writing, but my favorite is my essay writing, where I can just write whatever I want about whatever topic I want and just try to be as funny as I think I am in my head. I would be over-the-moon to get one of my opinionated, nobody-asked-for-it rants to be good enough to get Top Story honors.

4) The last thing I’m shooting for, selfishly, is that I want to write more poetry for my wife. I’ve grown an appreciation for poetry writing since I’ve joined the platform, and I wrote a poem for a challenge that I grew quite fond of. It was called “Covenant”, and while even I’ll admit that it skirted the lines of the requirements of the challenge (the challenge was to write about something rare, and this was about the covenant of marriage; I’ll admit I was coloring slightly outside the lines), I was really proud of that poem. I felt it was very underappreciated, but thankfully, my wife loved it. It takes a lot to move her, and she was very much moved by the poem. I would like to do things like this more. I love feedback and comments and all that (in fact, I live for it), but to write something personal for one person who is near and dear to me gives me that same dopamine rush that a hundred comments would.

So that’s what I want 2024 to look like for me on Vocal. I want more eyes on my publications, no doubt, but what I want more than anything else is 2023 all over again. My first year on Vocal was better than anything I could ask for. Here’s hoping year two can run it all back.