mimsy and outgrabe

I really should expect by now that with Good News comes News I'm Not Quite as Excited About. I received my first rejection from the contest circuit for the full-length ms of Fabulous Beast , and I'm not going to pretend I'm overjoyed about it. It put a depressing final note on yesterday, which was filled with conferences and grading and a really deep kind of exhaustion, as I didn't sleep very much the night before. My eyes were red and swollen and I'm actually thankful to the three or so students that stood me up, because it bought me more time during the day to grade and get myself organized for the week.  I was leaving the office, still really tired but feeling a little satisfied, knowing that I'd managed to get a good number of things done, and then I received the email form rejection. I don't mind the email rejection -- a true child of the information age, I definitely prefer the speed with which I can find out that a journal or book doesn't wa...

I've had a good writing day. I managed to write for five nearly-solid hours (give or take an interruption or two) -- and I "finished" three stanzas of the fairytale poem. (I feel like the word "finished" should always be in quotation marks when used to talk about the state of one's writing.) Compared to my work over the month of August, that's like fitting three days into one! It's nice to be able to finally appreciate the sabbatical. Days like this would not occur without a semester off from teaching. Or they might occur, but there would be only one -- maybe two -- of these days that actually happened over the course of three or four months. That makes me sad, briefly, and then I shake off the sadness, force myself to remember that the spring semester and my eventual return to teaching is a long way off, and that perhaps my writing life will look somewhat different after having experienced this grace period. Today, that's what the sabbatic...