Happy Solstice, You Hippies!

June is a slow month for blogging, I guess. Actually, it's a slow month for everything. My house is still disaster-ish. My article research is underway, as is the revision of the fairy tale poem, but I'm making progress very slowly. And this week has featured a special hiccup in the form of pink eye (both the boy and I contracted it).

It's kind of amazing when and where inspiration hits and a poem demands to be written. Take, for instance, yesterday. The boy was supposed to go to daycare -- his last full week -- and I was going to go into the office for a meeting and to take care of a slew of little tasks that need attention before the end of the month. But then the boy woke up with goopy-eye, which prevents him from going to school, and I woke up with . . . a poem forming. 

I began the poem after my husband left for work and while I still had a silent house to myself. I finished drafting about 12 lines, the first strophe of the poem, when the house awoke -- girl, boy, dog . . . all demanding breakfast and hugs and attention. Breakfast, hugs, attention were granted  . . . and then the usual mad shuffle to get dressed, teeth brushed, and to the bus stop ensued. 

I'd put the poem on the back-burner at this point, and thought I'd continue to write it today, this morning, when I awoke. But after the bus left with my happy little girl on it (the last week of school is very exciting, apparently, with circus-like events occurring almost daily), and while the boy played with puzzles on the floor of the living room and I began to empty the dishwasher, the poem came back. So even though the boy directed an almost constant stream of comments and questions my way while he built his puzzles -- like his sister, now that he's discovered language, he never stops talking -- I scribbled lines for the poem down.

I haven't looked at the poem today to see how I feel about it, but I think I'm considering it for the full-length Fabulous Beast manuscript. It's one of the myth poems . . . one of the ones rolling around in my head since the beginning of the spring semester, but that never really "happened" in early attempts to write it down.  There aren't going to be many more, if any, of them, I think. I don't want to stretch the writing of this MS into perpetuity . . . but I don't want to resist fleshing out and more fully developing that section of the MS, either.

But it feels good to know that, if this poem passes muster, I'll have a stronger, better developed MS to present to publishers in the fall. I'm gearing up for the Great Submission Flood of Fall 2012. I've selected about ten publishers I'd love to see publish the book . . . and I'll be sending out the MS accordingly. Most are through contests . . . the article about contests in Poets & Writers' May/June issue was fairly interesting, in that three publishers revealed (because they really had nothing to hide) their budgets for their book contests. Two demonstrated that reading fees for the contests supported only a fraction of the costs of running the contest, while the third was able to support the contest entirely from its reading fees. 

The point of the article was that we, poor suffering artists, are not being bilked out of our dollars when we submit to these contests and pony up the reading fees accordingly . . . as long as the contests are not being rigged in favor of the judges' former students or friends, which is supposed to be less rampant now that there's a Code of Ethics via CLMP (reprinted on Gival Press's site). 

So . . . we'll see how the ol' MS does on its first round of submissions. I'm kind of excited to send it out into the world, even though I've conditioned myself to expect rejection. (As much as one can condition oneself for rejection, anyway.)

Today is a half-day for the girlie, and I'm watching three of the neighborhood children whose mothers will be working when school ends, so I'm not expecting to get much done today -- writing, cleaning, or otherwise. And right now the children need to be bathed and fed and dressed, so blogging must come to an end, too.