mimsy and outgrabe

This morning I revised the first stanza of the poem I've been working on all week. That's right folks, all week. And it took me an hour to "finish" with the revision, and I didn't even actually finish it (pushing aside all discussion of whether or not one is truly finished with a poem). I had to change the rhyme in the couplet at the end of the stanza, and even though I'm using slant rhyme, it totally stumped me. So now the first and third stanzas are hanging out all sloppy and unfinished. Which is NOT how I like them. (Shut up, Penna.) At this rate I should be finished with my manuscript in the year 2030. In the words of Charlie Brown, good f**kin' grief. This all sounds like griping, I know, but if you were a fly on the wall during any of my TRUE gripe sessions with Penna, WELL, let's just say you would feel mighty sorry for him. This is nothing! He WOULD tell you, however, that I am notoriously slow with my writing. (Notorious in, you know, all

Not every post will be a essay-ish in nature, I think. Today, for instance, I'm happy to report that I began the day with writing. I worked on my manuscript for about an hour. Then the boy woke up, and the dog took that as a sign he should burst into the girl's room and wake HER up, and then we were all up and no more writing was to be done. It was really wonderful, though, to sit down and have direction for once. I began with a poem that I'd drafted earlier in the year and set about trying to put it into meter. I was able to complete the first stanza -- an 8-line stanza in iambic hexameter with the last two lines being a rhyming couplet. So far . . . good. Not great, but it was something. It wasn't too difficult to wrestle the words I'd already written into the new form, which is a good sign, I think. And when I was finished with that first stanza, I wanted to work on the second stanza. That, too, is a good sign. I want (read: need) to stay excited about this m

I've made one or two attempts to write today. During the first attempt, I was interrupted by one of my children asking for something. Or he or she might have been telling me something -- my memory does not serve me well on most occasions, and certainly will not oblige today. Anyway, I was interrupted. I closed the laptop and shrugged off the irritation and helped him or her acquire whatever snack he or she desired (usually, they want a snack). The second time occurred after we'd been out of the house shopping. Shopping is an excellent way to interrupt oneself when one knows she should be getting work done, but the shopping was necessary and the children needed to be fed on something other than Nilla wafers, yogurt, and dry cereal. (I fed them pizza at Costco. The thrifty, homemaking part of me that does NOT get as much airtime as she'd like loves that I can feed three of us for under $5. And it doesn't come with a toy that clutters up the house. Bonus!) Sidebar: Did