Okay, silliness aside, Continue reading
Ankles in the watery muck!
We’re packed and ready to leave soon. Well, not ready but our time on retreat is up for now.
Last night we were treated to one last view of the Milky Way before the clouds came in. This morning it is a calm sort of overcast with a light breeze at just the perfect temperature. I’ll miss the water and the cottonwood that sounds like rain. I’ll miss running barefoot in the grass. Continue reading
Poor birdie flew into our door and was a bit stunned, but he flew off okay!
It’s the dawn of our last full day here. (Okay, it’s 9:30 am, but it’s the start of my day. This is vacation after all.)
I’m sitting on the front porch in a wooden rocking chair. The sun is beautifully bright reflecting on the surface of the pond and the tiny, rippled waves on the water are soothing to watch. The air is comfortably cool, the breeze is fresh, Continue reading
Sunset walk
Last night we saw the Milky Way. It has been more than ten years since I was anywhere dark enough (with a night clear enough) to see. We wondered aloud how could anyone live somewhere where the Milky Way is visible and not stare up in awe each and every night. One of the RRFS noted that people get desensitized to it over time like we do everything else. She then added, “and it’s a damn shame.” Continue reading
It’s hard to make the switch to going on retreat. It’s a vacation, of course, yet quite different. Once we’ve stopped by the local grocery store there’s no shopping to be done. There are few, if any, sights to be seen. Just a cabin and the noises that nature brings. It’s a hard stop from working the day job, running errands, and planting yourself in front of the TV.
I’ve spent the last few weeks so eager to get away, to breathe, to read and write… but there’s something to be said about waiting too intensely for something. Something to be said, but I don’t have the words. Continue reading
This post has sat in my drafts for over a year while I’ve thought about whether or not to post it. It’s been rewritten and tweaked multiple times, but I think it is time.
Let’s have a discussion. (Long post ahead.)
I am not a teacher. I don’t work for education. I don’t edit a literary journal. I have no writing degree, graduate or otherwise. And yet I am a poet.
I write this because it seems like nearly all of the poet blogs, poet bios, and poet anything I see about poets mentions at least one of those things. Teaching, editing, and fancy degrees. And these are all noble things. I am thankful to teachers and editors. We need them. Degrees of higher learning can be very beneficial. But they do not define the making of a poet.
Poetry is a notoriously low (or nearly no) paying job. There is no harm or shame in keeping a day job when you are a writer of any kind. Only the lucky few get to have “making up words” as their only job. Having a day job that has nothing to do with the written word does not discredit the writer. Having a degree in something other than language or writing, or even no degree at all, does not discredit the writer. And yet, it is easy to feel like it does. Continue reading
… and all the panic that comes with it.
Don’t get me wrong, I love NaNo-season, but this year it feels even more out-of-control. I’m still looking forward to giving it a try though!
I’m hoping for 50 hours of butt-in-chair time, just like last year. I fell woefully short of that last year (but was still happy with the progress I made) so hopefully I can do better!
I had a list of all the things I was going to finish before NaNo this year: my Christmas cards were going to be ready for mailing on December 1st, my house was going to be relatively cleaned/picked up, the photobook (a Christmas gift) I’m working on was going to be done and ready for printing, and hubby and I were going to have finished watching Stranger Things 2… at the minimum. (He hooked me on Stranger Things about a week before the second season released.)
I was also hoping to be caught up on letters to all of my pen pals, some of whom have been waiting for months now because, you know, life exploded. And I was hoping to have a few other side projects caught up too.
I finished absolutely none of those things as October turned in to a rough patch with me feeling frequently run down and then right about the time I started to feel better, I began nursing my best friend at the hospital. At least she is out of ICU now! Autoimmune disorders are a bitch, ya’ll. Then again if you have one or know someone who has one… you already know that.
So I’m going into this NaNoWriMo season with the goal I’d already set for myself, plus a long list of other goals to juggle in addition to a full-time day job and my own likes-to-run-down-this-time-of-year health. But is that going to stop me? NEVERRRR!!! So nothing should stop you from trying your best either.
Want to see what the rest of my writing group is up to for this November? 5 of the 6 of us are being rebels! Check us out at this post.
*Photo by user TesaPhotography at Pixabay, creative commons usage
I last mentioned where I was at in writing my first poetry collection about five months ago with this post. I’m still very much in the early stages. Where do the early stages end, anyway? I figure there will just come a point when I look around me and go, “Yeah, I’m in this one deep.” I’m not quite there yet.
(I’m laughing at the me that once said “I’ll make sure to spend at least a year on this so as not to rush it.” Oh you sweet, summer child.)
I’ve been doing a lot of reading this summer, which means not as much writing. After trying to juggle both for several years and failing at getting much read OR written I finally figured out that the best possible thing I can do is work hard on writing for a month or two, then switch to spending all that time on reading for a month or two. It keeps me from getting burned out on the blank page, it helps refill my brain when I’m starting to feel emptied of ideas, and it means that I get to more thoroughly enjoy reading and writing when not doing them together at the same rate. This is, at least, the system that works best for me. (For now.)
The time I have given to writing this summer has been productive… technically. Meaning I know it has been productive. I have the notes and pages that tell me this. But when it comes to finished content? Very, very little.
Nothing wants to wrap up for me. There’s a particular piece I’ve been working at rather hard that I finished back in July. Sort of. It reads in finished style, but the rhyme and meter is all wrong for not only what is in my head but also how the collection has begun to develop. It doesn’t fit. So I put it away for 2 months, let my mind clear some, and have been at it again this last week only to find Continue reading
This photo has nothing to do with this post other than it makes me happy and I’m trying to stay positive in life and with goals!
Personally, politically, and being-kind-culturally this just isn’t the nicest of years. All of the insanity (both that which I’m involved in and that which the news keeps telling me about) has slowed me down, not just in writing but in keeping up with all the aspects of this crazy thing we call life. I’m learning that keeping the end goal in sight is more important than hard-and-fast deadlines (at least the self-imposed ones) and that self-forgiveness is a pretty important thing.
* No more blog schedules around here. I’ll aim to post at least once a month whenever possible, and that will usually be possible, but if I disappear for a month or two I probably won’t be posting apologies. It’s just me feeling super guilty that I’ve ‘messed up’ another self-imposed goal and those begin to eat me up more than help me when I do that.
I hope I have regular readers of this blog, but I’m the first to say I don’t really know how to market this blog to readers, especially while I don’t feel like I have much to offer yet. But here I am, floundering at the blogging thing all the same! I feel like many of my posts are probably uninteresting and I want to improve on that front. I will always keep trying to do better here so we’ll see how it all works out on the long plan, right? Continue reading
If you’re following this blog, amidst the random posts on letter writing, kid lit, and other assorted things, you’ve seen a few posts about me working on a poetry collection. This is my first. I’ve written single poems for prompts, competitions, and personal ideas off and on for many years now, always thinking that one day I’d like to create a collection but never really sure what that would look like.
More than a year and a half ago I had an idea for a poem that slowly morphed into an idea for a themed collection based on the instrumental music of a single artist. I sat on the idea for quite a long time, thinking over possible ways I could approach a larger project like this, before I picked up the pen and began writing November of last year. (I also realized that a poem finished earlier in 2016 fit the collection, so wooo head start!)
But here’s the thing… while there are lots of wonderful blogs and vlogs walking writers through the process of novels, there isn’t so much material out there for poets writing a collection. I have articles saved with suggestions for submitting your work, organizing a collection (once the work is done), and promoting your book. Noooot so much the ‘here’s a blank page, now start your collection’ sort of references. Continue reading
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