Good News: I'm Still Here! Oh, and Publication News too ...

Yesterday I received a phone call from my one and only C.C., and she reminded me that I'm disappearing into work again and forgetting about other important facets of my life. (Oddly enough, though, yesterday morning -- well before the phone call -- I worked on a poem, and that was something I hadn't done for weeks. Yesterday something in the stars must have shifted and the universe was shouting, "Hey stupid! Wake up and do something else with your time!)

Thanks, Fjords Review!

I mean, I *have* been doing something else with my time, but it's mainly involved the kiddies. Now that school is back in session for them, too, we're all sorts of busy as a family. There's a lot of negotiating between different activities and attempts to get small people to places without losing one of them or what's left of my mind. It hasn't been a bad couple of weeks, just very very active.

I'm trying to stay on top of things, and remember that most of the time I'm trying to squeeze a 40+ hour work week into about 30 hours of office time. That means I have to try to get the other 10+ hours in where I can, and sometimes that means elbowing my writing time out of the way. 

I don't like ignoring my writing, but I think I'm beginning to learn it's sometimes necessary for my sanity. I have to compartmentalize and use these morning hours for grading or prep or emails if I can't get that shit done later in the day . . . and I suspect I'll get my writing time back in October, when a lot of my duties for the union will be slowing down/coming to an end, and I can use office time for grading/class prep/email.

Anyway, not to bore you all with the minutiae of my workweek. Instead, I'll leave you with a link to Fjord's online Women's Edition. The guest editors chose one of my fairy tale poems (it's actually two poems from my manuscript under one title that gives both context) and one of my myth poems. I'm pretty pleased, even though there was a snafu on their part and I'd actually withdrawn those fairy tale poems because Menacing Hedge wanted to publish them. (It worked out, because the editor of Menacing Hedge is wonderful and understands this stuff happens and will still publish them, with Chapters 1-5 of the fairy tale, in their fall edition.) (Oh, more than one snafu -- they also published my name as "Sarah Gutowski" and not "Sarah Kain Gutowski" -- which shouldn't be that big a deal, but c'mon, people -- I'm trying to keep my maiden name alive, peeps. Throw a girl a bone.)

Anyway, stuff like this makes it look like I'm still writing, but the truth is that this material was written almost five years ago. Ultimately, I am looking forward to elbowing the committee work out of the way and getting back to writing poems . . . if the muse hasn't left me entirely by the time I'm ready to sit down and get to business.