What's even better than getting published?

Go congratulate Trista -- she and her partner are now the mommies of a gorgeous baby girl! I haven't been reading Trista's blog for very long, but she's awfully good at telling stories, so I suspect we'll be hearing some great baby stories very soon. :)

My poetry group met this afternoon -- we usually meet on a weekday evening but sometimes our schedules get nuts and the only time we can find is a Saturday late morning/early afternoon. We were out at D.'s house; she lives out in the boonies of Nashville, IN and you go down this rather steep and somewhat daunting gravel road to get there. Her house is a sweet little log cabin surrounded by trees -- green green green green everywhere! -- and bird feeders, and guarded by a big Rottweiler mix who'd be more likely to lick you to death than actually do anything remotely guard-doggish. I can imagine living out in the woods like that, stocking up on everything in the wintertime because you'd be bound to get snowed in a few times -- sometimes I think it would be lovely to live in a little cabin or cottage and get snowed in a few times a year. If, of course, you could happily light a fire and snuggle in with a blanket and some books and a cat or three and not have to worry about making it into town for work. Sigh. I can picture my ideal life so clearly -- the only problem is I can't figure out where money would come from! Stupid money -- it just gets in the way of everything, doesn't it?

And then, of course, when I imagine living out in the boonies like that, I catch myself remembering that I am middle-aged and getting older, and thinking it would not be terribly wise to live out in the middle of nowhere by myself with no ready access to emergency medical care or anything like that. I do love the idea of looking out every window and seeing nothing but trees and grass and green things, maybe a pond, the occasional deer or fox stopping by for a visit. I am tired of hearing traffic and ambulance sirens and motorcycles.

Yeah, so I just need to win the lottery, right? *grin*

Anyway, we had a productive meeting -- making plans for our annual reading in October and workshopping a pretty good-sized stack o'poems. I am looking forward to the reading; I think most if not all of my poems will be from Provincetown & after. I guess you could say it will be the World Premiere for most of them. Except then people would look at you funny, so you probably wouldn't want to say that.

Thanks, by the way, to everyone who congratulated me on the Calyx acceptance. I'd been working on a pretty long string of rejections, so it was nice to break that streak. It's back to normal today, of course, with another rejection in the mailbox. Oh well. Time to send 'em back out! The only way to get published is to persist. Oh yeah, and writing writing writing, writing as hard and as well and as much as you can. All you can do is write the best poems you can figure out how to write, and keep on sending them out -- the rest is out of your control. That, and not letting either acceptance or rejection go to your head. When you sit down and face the blank page, that page doesn't give a crap who's accepted or rejected you before. It's a fresh challenge every single time. And that's the beauty of it.