My writing’s not the best.
It’s overly flowery and convoluted. There’s too much humour that tries too hard and falls flat. There’s run-on sentences and not enough character description and overused, cliche plots.
But it really is like riding a bike. You get on and you fall over, maybe you scrape up your knees a bit and graze your palms. You cry and put on that stinging ointment stuff with bandaids and cry some more, and swear you’re never going to ride ever again. And then you get back on, gritting your teeth, and push off with one foot to start all over again.
With this in mind, I applied to a Creative Writing course in my program at U of T, for my upcoming third year, way back in May. It’s really, really select–there’s one section meeting with one professor for maybe a hundred students, and you have to give him a portfolio of your best stuff. Nerve-wracking like you have no idea.
I dusted off a chapter of a long novel-in-progress I’d been working on and polished it up, and then sent it in. Agonized over it for a couple of days, fretting, twisting and knotting my fingers together, then slowly let it slip my mind.
The summer wore on, and there was no word, and I figured I hadn’t gotten in after all. I swallowed my disappointment–you cry for a bit and then you get back on that bike–and applied for my other courses, and worked at my part-time jobs, and mostly forgot about it. Mostly.
Today, I was going downstairs for breakfast when I saw a thick package with the U of T postmark. I was mildly confused for a moment–then my heart started thumping like mad, and I tore off the envelope and leafed through the package inside.
It was a letter of congratulations. I got into the course. 
So my writing’s okay: it’s great in parts, but it sucks in other parts. But now it’s going to have the opportunity to get better.
Mundane and pointless, yeah, but I did have to share it.