Sorry for the blog-absence. No, I didn't fall and break my neck trying to walk in my new boots. ;)
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I hope everyone had a good Thanksgiving! I celebrated by packing the cats into the car and taking them up to Grandma's... er, my mom's. They were Decidedly Displeased about the 200-mile car ride, but they enjoyed the visit and got along very nicely with Mom's cats. Which is good to know, because the only way I'll ever be able to take on more than about a ten-day retreat or residency would be to "board" them at Mom's, I think... though I'm not sure such a thing is in the cards anytime soon.
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Speaking of cards, big congratulations to this year's crop of NEA Fellows in Poetry -- especially fellow bloggers C. Dale and Corn Shake! Three cheers!
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I really, really need to get back in the proverbial saddle with the sending-out of poems. It's a funny thing, but if you don't send stuff out, you don't get stuff published... go figure. I've got the book ms. out to a bunch of publishers & contests (and just got a rejection letter today with a very nice note scribbled on it -- just a few words like "sorry, it's a very strong ms." can really make a poet's day, especially in these early stages of sending the thing out!) but I haven't been at all productive about sending out individual poems this year. If I make any New Year's resolutions (oh dear, is it really almost time to think about that?!), that should be number one, I think.
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Wishing you all warmth & light in this cold dark month (at least 'round these parts it is cold & dark). And good health. And houses that somehow miraculously clean themselves. Hey, as long as I'm wishing, right?
5 comments:
Good wishes to you, too, Anne! And what a cool note about your ms! :-)
word verification: allshine
we have missed you
i have been missing, too, but glad you left me something to read in the meantime. i hope that wish about house cleaning works! happy holidays to you, too!
Northwest winds out of Canada all week. Tonight supposed to get down to 3 degrees overnight. Ah, life in the tundra...
This time of year it's dark when I leave for work in the morning, and dark when I get home. By winter solstice we have about 8 and a half hours of daylight.
Many years ago, when I was first sending poems to magazines, I read some article about writing -- a sort of upbeat encouraging piece, about not being discouraged by rejections -- where the author at one point said "Paper your walls with rejection slips."
I decided to take the advice literally (more or less), and when I got rejection slips, I started putting them on a bulletin board on the wall across from where I often would sit and write. So they would be staring at me, and I would go ahead and write defiantly in the face of all those rejections.
It was actually a good kind of discipline at the time, though it ran its course after a couple of years, and I don't do that any more. Cool about the encouraging note you got about the manuscript.
Happy lights and warmth to you also.
(Word verification is "xemilin." Sounds like something that should have a list of possible side effects after it.)
Ivy: best word verification ever! :D
MM: Awww! I'll try not to stay gone so long. But no promises...
Emily: Let me know if the house cleaning thing works. I'm not overly optimistic, hehe.
Lyle: I don't paper my walls with them, but I do save my rejections in a file! It proves to me that I've been out there trying. That's worth something, I think.
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