Waiting for the Fog to Burn Off: What I'm Doing With My Summer, Part II

I feel like I should put some kind of disclaimer on this blog . . . not much is going on lately. I've been incredibly sleepy lately, and indulging that sleepiness, so that I'm actually logging about 10 hours of sleep a night . . . which is just incredible for me. (Usually I get about 6-8 hours  . . .)

I've had lots and LOTS of kid time lately. Little Girl's camp doesn't begin until next week, so I've been full-time mommy for about three weeks now. Because I've been sleeping in until I hear the pitter patter of little feet (or, more aptly put, the stomp stomp stomp of those little feet), I've relinquished the two hours of quiet, in-my-head time that I find necessary to do any real writing or reading or reflecting.

It's not terrible, though. I'm finding it difficult to push through this exhaustion thing -- hell, I'm even napping when The Boy naps during the day, so that's about 1 to 2 more hours of sleep -- but I've been spending good quality time with the kiddos  . . . making up (in some small way) for the chaos and absent-mommyness of the spring semester. 

And I'm chipping away -- very slowly -- at the disaster zone that is my house. Yesterday I managed to clean up these papers that had been collecting in a corner of our living room for the past three months. (I deserve a medal or something, don't I?)

Yesterday A.P. and I met and he provided me with some valuable feedback for the poetry manuscript. Tiredness or no, I've got to push through and finish my MS revisions soon. There's a first-book contest I would like to send it to, and the submission period opens at the beginning of August. I'm really trying to avoid last-minute, right-before-the-period-closes submissions. I'm not sure those last-minute manuscripts get much of a chance . . . so while the MS doesn't need to be submission-ready on August 1, it had better be ready shortly thereafter.

Also, I need to get crackin' on my AWP article. But you knew that, right?

Writing/reading-related things I have done in the past week:

1. Finished 2/3 of Glyn Maxwell's "The Boys at Twilight" (I am not going to finish my summer reading list at this pace.)
2. Scanned up to Chapter Nine of my fairy tale. Almost finished! Then begins the real work . . .

Although to be honest, the scanning is so tedious that the rewriting of the lines will feel like play. But even though I describe it as tedious, I feel like this is an important part of my process in writing this poem. I'm not doing it so that every line can be perfect, metrically. I'm doing it so that I can get an accurate sense of what I accomplished during those 6-or-so-months that I worked on the poem. 

 

And, of course, to see where I "became tired" or less stringent with my application of the pattern when I wrote the poem in the first place. There are moments where I'm short a stress or where I've worked four substitutions into a line, and the important thing, for me, is to see whether or not the line of poetry warrants that kind of risk with the meter -- i.e. does it fit? Does it work? In almost every case, it doesn't. But I've noticed one or two lines where the aberration in the metrical pattern suits the content of the poem. Moments like that will stay in, most likely.

Today's major accomplishment will probably be weeding the vegetable garden . . . which is beginning to resemble a jungle. And grocery shopping. And maybe, just maybe, working on some article research and some . . . *sigh*  . . . scanning of the fairy tale.