Submission.

Here's the thing about blogging . . . it is way too easy once you get in the habit.

You write, you hit "publish," you see if any comments come in. It's a routine, like any other. And enough people read it that you don't worry overmuch about trying to hit a single target. If one person out of a hundred gets some joy out of it, you can feel like you did something. But tonight, I broke out of my routine for a change.

The John H. Watson Society put out a call for submissions for its October journal, and having recently joined said society, submitting seemed like something I should do. So I concocted something a little different from what you usually read here, ran it through a few reviews, a few changes, and then sent it off. And this weird thing happened  . . .

I actually felt nervous.

More nervous than any public speaking engagement I've done in the past five years . . . those have actually gotten pretty comfortable. And definitely more nervous than tossing something out to those stalwarts who read this blog on anything close to a regular basis. Anyone who returns to this stream of words is probably familiar enough at what's coming to not get to outraged.

I suspect it was the fact that, unlike what I wrote earlier about blogging, I was sending a bit of writing off to a single target, an editor-in-chief with a respectable writing ability of her own, in an area where my own skills aren't really proven. (Leaving out details in case I do make The Watsonian, to keep it a surprise.)

Submitting a creative work to a journal, publisher, or any place where a thumbs-up, thumbs-down is expected is another muscle that exercise builds up, and I fear all this blogging has let that particular muscle atrophy in me, leaving it in need of physical therapy . . . like a few that show up needing that as one nears sixty. (It won't be my first.) I do need to exercise it more.

This blogging thing is just so darned easy.