mimsy and outgrabe

Sometimes -- okay, most of the time -- these things (submission & publication statistics) can be depressing. They are helpful, however, when you're trying gain an unbiased, more or less accurate perspective of where you stand -- or if you stand, period -- in the writing world.  For instance, in 2017 I submitted my book manuscript to 41 contests and small publishers and garnered zero acceptances. Yes, that's depressing  -- particularly because of the rejection of a little book I love and believe in, but also because of the amount of money I spent on entry fees. Out of those rejections, however, I managed to gain some acknowledgments or recognition. The manuscript was a semi-finalist in five different competitions and a finalist in three others. (Making a total of eight semi-finalist and five finalist nods since I first began submitting the book.) And for more on the topic of spending $$ for a chance to publish, please read Rachel Mennies' excellent article ...

Still working on that damn sonnet. I suspect I'm the last person who should be writing in the sonnet form, simply because I lose track of my arguments so damn quickly. Also, I stop caring about making the argument. That combination isn't great for someone working in a form that is, quite often, rhetorical. Nor is it good for someone who is about to teach rhetoric in the fall.  Anyway, as more proof that I'm the world's slowest writer, I've spent each of my mornings this week reworking the sonnet at a rate of two lines per day. It's not great nor is it extremely productive, but at least it's consistent writing practice.  I was very close to shutting everything down this summer -- no more blog, no more submissions, no more participation in the shit-show that is publishing in the U.S. (Not that I have any kind of international publication chances; it's just that publishing here seems fraught with more nonsense than in other countries.) I'm...

I managed to work on my verse play every day of last week, so something is going right. On Tuesday I created a schedule wherein I outlined the parts of Act I that I will revise or create in order to have a complete, working draft that I can submit to the Southampton Theatre Festival in early June; the schedule itself had to be drastically revised on Sunday when I discovered I'd taken nearly six days to revise one scene. I am not a fast writer nor a prolific one. I'm trying to come to terms with this. Even when I have more time than usual, like I do right now, while the older kids are in school still but I'm not teaching classes, I can write at a snail's pace. It doesn't mean I'm not working -- in fact, I believe I've spent more hours writing over the past week than I have, collectively, over the past year -- but much of the working consists of trying lines, words, whole stanzas and then scratching them out and starting over . . . or staring at the page a...