For whatever reason, I’ve mostly ended up writing fantasy and almost exclusively in the third person POV. So for the next quarter, I wanted to push myself to get better by doing something I was unfamiliar with. I was going to write a first person POV science fiction story.

I would say the results were… not great?

I still love the idea, and want to come back to it at some point, but man, I couldn’t execute it to save my life. The folks I was swapping with, most notably Kent and Robert were nice about it, but it was obvious it wasn’t working. Sometimes the critique can give you hard insight that the piece is broken as written and the better choice is to walk away.

Don’t throw good money after bad, as it were.

I was running out of time in the quarter and was presented with a familiar set of choices: Submit nothing, submit something I knew wasn’t good enough, or (a new option), submit something that already existed.

I opted for the latter. It was a good decision.