The New Year

I always make a lot of virtuous resolutions at New Year's. I don't know why I bother, except that I feel like if I don't, I'm just stagnating. I think an important part of life is always seeking to improve somehow. Hence all the idealistic New Year's resolutions.

Still, I keep the goals flexible, so I don't have to feel like a total failure for not meeting them. They're sort of always under revision, really. That's life.

Most of my New Year's resolutions focus on publishing, and most of them tank after a few months. But we'll see. I've still got that great spreadsheet off of which I can work all year, if I can make the time. That's my main New Year's resolution: I will make the time.

Cheers.

Inspiration

I had a fantastic Thanksgiving, road-tripping with my hubby to see my dad & stepmom. They recently moved to Arizona, and my dad was telling me about a fat little lizard he'd seen hiding in the garage. He thought it would make a great kids' story. I agreed. On the drive back home, waking early in our historic hotel in Durango, I wrote part of the first chapter. I finished the chapter the next day and emailed it over to him. It's a fun story to write. Yay, Dad! It's always nice when one's parents foster creativity. :)

The photo's from a hike we took while visiting my family.

Progress

I suddenly realized, in the middle of pacing all aggravated around my house, that I haven't blogged in forever. That must be what's wrong.

Ironically, I've been doing a fair amount of work on writing & publishing. I haven't felt all that creative lately, though for a while there I was writing every day; lately my focus is on getting things together to start sending my poetry out for publication.

It's not easy. Good lord, it is anything but easy. It's funny how much of a practical, business aspect there is to the publishing process. Must be why so many of us writers go unpublished in the larger market - and why blogging's so popular. (Sure works for me.)

So I created a spreadsheet practically the size of Pikes Peak of places I can send my work, what the specifications are for each place and so forth. Well, I'm in the process of creating it. The first runthrough, I identified 52 places to send my work, with the goal to mail to one each week in 2008. (My mom calls this sort of approach "eating the elephant one bite at a time.") But when I looked more at the spreadsheet and the publishing process, I found I needed to reorganize and expand the spreadsheet (I mean seriously, I thought the spreadsheets I made for our wedding were complex, but this is ridiculous) and now it holds lots more data, which I get to go back and fill in for all 52 places.

To be honest, it's sort of a nice task. I don't have to be creative, I can just do a few at a time and still feel good about contributing towards my writing career.

The next task is to review the focus of each magazine, start getting samples, making inquiries, etc., and look at what poetry fits each magazine. I also need to figure out the whole simultaneous submission thing, and prioritize certain poems for certain mags. So, not all the work of an instant, especially since I can hardly look at a poem without revising it, if only to remove an unnecessary 'the'... which is fine, since the writing can always be made better, but takes more time. (This is why I started the project two and a half months out.) I also want to develop a couple of different cover letters and my bio.

Anyway, we're on the road to progress, and glad of it. I think the spreadsheet is key. My past attempts at taking an organized approach to getting published consisted of color-coded, labeled page-tabs and far too many dogears. So any time I would want to send something out, I'd need to look it up again, mentally process the information, look for poetry that would fit that place's needs... just not really time-efficient or very appealing. (For one thing, the book is a pain in the ass to try and keep open to the right spot while you look for something on your computer. Let's talk spiral bindings, guys.) Anyway, now I have all the info in the same spot and it's easy to understand and use. Sweeeet. And if I end up not having time to work on it, the info's still usable later and easy to update, as opposed to all those forlorn tabs in an outdated reference book.

The other challenging aspect: the budget. It can only help to get samples from each place; plus, how else will I know if my work's right for that publisher? But they all cost, and they all need postage there and back, and then there's mailing the submission and the SASE. I don't know about other poets, but I work for a non-profit, and I don't have a ton of spare cash. It's worth it to budget some, though, and that's another reason for my approach of wanting to spread it out throughout the year. I figure I can start now with the samples and stay a month or two ahead with those, to facilitate my weekly goal.

Seems like a decent plan, if I can keep making the time to do it. I think it's going to work. We'll see, anyway. But you know, it's times like this when my favorite Yoda quote comes to me:

"Do, or do not. There is no try."

Shelfari

My friend Noel (whose awesome photography you can see via the link in the right column) invited me to join this new site for book-lovers called Shelfari. You can pick out all the books you love to have on your shelf, write reviews, see what books your friends have on their shelves, etc. It's actually pretty cool, in a book-geek kind of way, which sure as hell works for me.

Also, they make it easy to put it on your blog, so there 'tis, in the column to the right.

O Happy Day...

So, I've started writing the story I was posting about below, and I'm so excited about it. It's a lot of fun. I've managed to start re-establishing some good writing habits, primarily by setting aside time on the weekends. Once I started sticking to that, I found myself more comfortable with writing at times during the week, as well. We call this "baby steps". Hey, I'm just glad to be writing.

The story I'm working on is based on an old folk ballad, originally Scottish, adapted in early America, and beautifully rendered in the early 70s by the Grateful Dead - "Peggy-O". The song tells such a good story, and I always found myself picturing the scenes so clearly, that finally one day it occurred to me to write the story out.

It's an interesting experiment for me, because I don't normally have such a strong plot structure when I start a book. One of my weaknesses as a writer - and probably one of the main reasons I have trouble finishing stories - is that I often start with a vague plot idea and a strong main character, and let the story develop. This leads to a bit of a meandering tendency. (Who, me, ramble? Never!) So I've got a whole new appreciation for the fully-fleshed plotline.

What Is Left to Us: In Memoriam, 9/11/01

what is left to us

I wish you could hear me from underneath that rubble,
as I stand atop a broken heap
to proclaim your death
valid, my words falling thin across this jagged gash of landscape
barely ruffling the thick quilt of dust.
I wish you could.

I wish you could hear me
when I tell you I love you,
I miss you, your eyes, your lips, how they’d curl
over breakfast at a sly joke.
that I never knew you
but how I sobbed, how I fell
to my knees for you, your eyes
your lips gaping in fear
and that is why I am angry.
because you died afraid
innocent
as I would have died.

and what would you say,
what if you were on vacation
or thought your day ruined
because you missed your plane?
only to drop your glass later
choke out “there but for the grace of god – “
would you wait till you were alone to cry?

The Taliban’s last stronghold
was once a school for girls,
you’d say, eyes calm and clear, laughing a little.
on the grounds of fecund learning
walled in, they gripped the last
few feet of Kabul
from its womb.
its sterile, beaten, exhausted womb.

when the Persian New Year came
Khatol Mohammad Zai
a female air force colonel
jumped from an airplane
floated to the earth of Kabul
Zai said
“as a representative of women
I have shown we can jump from helicopters
women can do something as good as men
even something that is so difficult”

the floating down is easy
it’s ramming an airplane
into a skyscraper
at 500 miles an hour
that’ll make you grit your teeth.
floating
from the 88th floor
did you ask yourself,
who said they could play god,
they have no right,
did you say,
it’s not their choice
whether I live or die
or were you too busy
with your own
final prayer?

the girls’ school reopened
girls peeking out of tents
on packed earth soldier-trod
the girls wait
for their gutted school
to be rebuilt.
they will have to go year-round
but just for the first few years.
just till they’re caught up.

would you say, I didn’t want to die.
yes. would you say
I’m sorry I left angry
or I wish for one last kiss –
do you watch me cry
alone in our apartment
the kitchen counter choked with memories
of cutting boards seeped with garlic
and tomatoes staining, waiting for the pan?

and I am supposed to let you go for this?
I haven’t even gotten to bury you yet.
they still can’t find you.
I got to sort through
a few hundred men’s wristwatches.
I couldn’t decide between two of them.
I just left them both there.

and how I wish you could hear me


Author's note: It's hard to believe six years have passed. We were living out in the middle of nowhere at the time, in a small city in the Mojave desert, and yet how profoundly I felt the attacks. I don't think I'll ever forget learning of it when I got to work that day, and then watching the towers fall on live TV.

I don't know if I just took it harder than the people around me, or what; but that day had a strong impact on me. It was really the thought of all the senseless deaths that finally brought me to my knees, sobbing, in front of the six o'clock news a couple days later, when they had replayed the plane crashing into the building, that terrible moment of NO!! time and time again. It was also that thought that kept me searching for all the good stories, the stories of "ordinary" heroes and the NYFD and heroic pets and all the millions of minor miracles.

As with any trauma, it took a while before I could write about it, even though I knew my 9/11 poem was inevitable. When the attacks happened, I was still working in the circulation department of the local paper, but a few months later I started working as a reporter, so I had access to the wire reports. Much of the information above is taken from AP wire reports, as is the quotation by Colonel Zai.

Should you wish to reprint, please post a comment for permission. Thanks.

the tangled web of research

O what a tangled web, indeed; this is the problem with writing historical fiction. It involves a hell of a lot of research. I've got the characters for my new story sketched out, and a plot framework, but I have so much flippin' research to do, it's ridiculous. I'm curling up with a couple of humongous tomes, which have most of the info, and just trying to take a bunch of notes. Right now there's too much information to really absorb it all, but once I've captured all the relevant info and condensed it all into one brief-ish spot, it'll be much easier to write the story with the right context.

It's still a pain in the ass, though.

I'm excited about my primary reference, though - it's a bullet-stopping book called "The Encyclopedia of Southern Culture", and it's just incredible. There's such a richly detailed picture to paint, though, that I find myself just paging through it from cover to cover, noting down everything from peanut farming to architectural styles. I thought instead of consciously trying to research certain aspects of the culture/time period, I want to keep an open mind and read anything that could help fill in gaps. Most of it's interesting, albeit a bit dry at times.