Over the past handful of weeks, there's been a subtle shift to my writing life. Several times a year I do book reviews for Colorado Central. When I started doing so, four years ago, it was by submitting unsolicited reviews. It didn't take long until then editor/owner, Ed Quillen, gave me a stack of books for possible reviewing; and the current editor/owner, Mike Rosso, regularly sends me books after asking whether I'm interested. But otherwise, all my submissions have been unsolicited.
Now, however, I'm being solicited to do work. There hasn't been anything out of the ordinary happening, nothing suddenly out of the blue. These solicitations have each been the logical progression of what's come before. And once these assignments are completed, it looks like I'll be back to making my own.
Perhaps it's due to the dramatic tendencies of a hope-to-be fiction writer that's made me envision there being some specific moment when all in a thunderclap the loose and stray bits would toggle into place. There would be the one moment when I would be recognized as a writer, and projects would inundate my lap. Silly moi, I forget too readily at times that life in general, and my life specifically, is a stealthy turning, and that my realizations tend to be a while after the fact. For instance, while there was a specific moment when I realized I'd become a significant thread in this town's tapestry, when I had that realization I also realized it had been so for some time, already.
No thunderclap. Just the persistent slow alterings wrought my steady time.
