mimsy and outgrabe

And just when I thought I'd finished the Fabulous Beast: Poems manuscript, another poem appeared Monday. It was rather startling -- I was saying (to anyone who would listen) that there might be one more myth poem in the collection, but I thought that was just something you say to make yourself feel better about inspiration running out. Apparently, daylight savings knocked a poem loose from the tight, confused knot that is my brain (when it threw every other part of my life off kilter). So I'm not complaining about the loss of an hour -- although trying to get the kids adjusted to the new schedule is a test of my fortitude, to say the least. A.P. and I met on Monday, too, to discuss his excellent new poems and the order of poems in my MS. I'm not sure he got anything out of it (basically I just babbled about how good his new poems are and drew hearts and checks all over the pages . . . because I'm a thirteen year old girl ), but his feedback about my work was reall...

This is not a good way to begin the week, I suspect. Last week was a major hiccup in the writing/sabbatical process. The Doodle became sick with a fever around Monday evening -- and so he was home from school until Thursday, and I didn't get much accomplished on Tuesday and Wednesday. I struggled with revisions of old poems in between playing with Legos and completing puzzles with the boy, so there was some writing done, although honestly I don't know how productive it was. My major accomplishments ended up being 1) lit-mag research -- I found some really interesting new magazines (more on them later) 2) submissions and 3) the organization and "clean up" of my computer files (I had multiple drafts of poems saved between my laptop and my zip drive, and this clutter was a source of major confusion lately). I had about one day of good writing -- Thursday -- and, true to form (no pun intended), I spent the entire day focused on working out a stanza to one of the ...

Yesterday I worked myself into a frenetic, worried mess. I spent my writing hour(s) doing more reading than writing, which in itself was okay -- I was reading critical essays about fairytales, and taking notes and thinking about how my own fairytale poem should be shaped. But then, after the quiet period of the morning was up -- the boy and the girl having decided between themselves at some point that this would be The Day of Fighting and Not Listening -- I attempted to write out a schedule for my sabbatical. The results were rather disastrous. That is, to my apparently fragile psyche they were disastrous. If you look at it from the standpoint of my house and the kitchen cabinets I gutted and cleaned throughout the entire afternoon, the results were fabulous! (More overwhelming stress, please! I'll have this house whipped into shape in no time!) I went kind of bat-shit crazy on the inside. This sabbatical scares me. I think I've voiced that as a joke before, but I'm jus...