A Plague of Metaphorical Crickets and Other Ridiculous Not-Real Problems

Writing here last week about "weird blotches of language" prompted me, this week, to revisit those pieces and shape them into something looking more like poetry. Next step: have them sounding more like poetry. 

It's good to have some drafts of poems building, albeit slowly. It's been too long a time since I've done this, really.

Exhibit A: How I torment my teenager

I've been looking a little bit at submitting, too, but just the MS because I don't really have enough individual poems to send out (and I'm trying not to simultaneously submit -- for some reason I can't exactly remember, I made that decision a few months ago . . . ). 

Of course, for the past two years, I've more or less thought, "this is the last year I send out Fabulous Beast," and then I come across some publisher or contest and think, "hey, it's worth a try." But I'm doubting more and more that it's worth a try. I have a good number of friends who hate and decry the contest model -- but then, they all have books published. I feel like it's easier to criticize the system when you already have one or two books under your belt. And I do want to avoid the contest model, I am hyper-aware of its flaws -- I hate that I've spent so much money and time throwing my MS at readers, editors and publishers who may or may not have an aesthetic that matches my own -- but I want too for my writing to have a chance, and it has NO chance if it just stays in the memory banks of my computer or in a dust-gathering copy on my desk. 

Exhibit B: How my teenager torments me

Last year I thought I would submit my MS to as many places as I could manage (in terms of time AND cost), and while it resulted in a good number of semi-finalist and finalist placements, ultimately it reaped little in terms of direction, or an answer. So this year I've been less driven to submit, and there's nothing but crickets chirping. 

Normally, I find cricket song quite lovely. 

Anyway, this is all to say that things are much the way they always were. But I'm thinking that aside from submitting to a very select few opportunities in the remaining months of this year, I may retire FB if it isn't picked up by someone after this round of submissions. Maybe I've given FB, this particular collection of writing, enough chances. I just can't keep doing this. I need to move on -- I mean, I AM moving on in terms of writing projects, but I need to stop having this MS hang over my head. If it's not out there, I can't waste time worrying about it, right?

We just had almost two weeks of family visiting from both A.'s side and my own -- it's graduation season, and it was my nephew's birthday, so we had lots of aunts and uncles and grandparents around. Now things are settling down a bit, and I'm feeling the need to be really reclusive and hermit-like. This isn't entirely possible with three children who are incredibly chatty and social and have ALL THE PLANS for their summer and want me to be available to taxi them and host their friends, etc. Also, I'm going to Virginia next week to see my sister and my adorably squeezy niece and nephew, as well as one of my oldest and best friends, L.M., and possibly other friends who live in the Washington, D.C./Northern Virginia area -- HOWEVER, I'm looking forward to more down time and quiet time now that all the school nonsense -- both the kids' and my own -- is over.

What I've been reading this week: Continuing with Akademie X; some parts of Crapalachia: A Biography of a Place, a memoir-ish work by Scott McClanahan, and the first pages of Ada Limon's Bright Dead Things. And some back issues of the New Yorker, all of which are meh.