Panel feedback

I certainly would never, ever want to be one of "America's hottest, and most feared, dates," as my fellow panelists were termed by a Times Online reporter, but...I was on this panel, too. I realize this blog is not all or even all that much about dating but still. Way to be thorough.

I used to worry that, as I told Viviane, "my blog's not slutty enough." But now I don't mind. If this blog were only about my dating life it'd be blank most of the time. I just don't date "recreationally." Either I'm not that into the person from the get-go or...my heart gets involved in a big way. I'm working on being the bigger person, trying to realize that people aren't all good or all bad, so when, say, I see their name in my inbox, I don't want to vomit.

Sure, I may never get asked to be on Howard Stern and may not get some of the big corporate gigs, but that's okay. I find it all a bit surreal anyway, and the mags I want to write for are ones like Babble and Cookie. And Cosmo and Glamour. All in good time, though, all in good time (at least, I hope so!). For now I have plenty on my plate, like, oh, a novel (I have to keep telling myself that I can do it cause it still seems so beyond surreal). Some of it's well-paying, some not so much, but all of it interesting. I actually spent a while this afternoon writing a story and had forgotten that feeling of getting lost in a story, of just letting it take me wherever it was going, of letting go of the pressure to make it perfect. The good thing about submitting to anthologies is that you don't have to. It's a voluntary thing and you're free to flake out on them. Nobody will ever know if you get rejected if you don't tell anyone. But you do have to force yourself when you reach that point of laziness/fear/writer's block, if you want to get the story done, to just work past it. I bailed on a few anthologies I'd wanted to submit to in the last few months, ones I'm 95% sure I could've been accepted into, not because of lack of time but because of procrastination and fear. That worry that what I'm writing is crap, when really, that's for the editor to decide (more on rejections later, because as an editor, I absolutely hate having to reject people's work. So much so that sometimes I don't want to do any more anthologies, but the rewards outweight the ickiness of writing rejections.) I had to learn early on (though am still learning) not to compare myself to other bloggers or writers, to not judge what I want to put out there by what they do. I think I've become a lot more private, a lot more protective of my alone time. I think there are a lot of reasons I'm single, and it's in part because I've chosen it, and in part because I've gone for the UFC fans wrong people over and over again. I'm working on learning from those experiences and being grateful for all the people I do have in my life.

When I said "bring on the sexless marriage," I was of course being facetious (at least in part). I will also throw out there that while I do still resent the fact that Natalie Krinsky got to say goodbye to her readers and I didn't, I would write my Lusty Lady column again in a heartbeat. I would make it a little (or even a lot) less personal and more about other topics, of which I have plenty to discuss. I'll just publicly throw that out there since I've also privately thrown it out there.