mimsy and outgrabe

While there is, of course, plenty of room for improvement, and while I could certainly use a little more discipline here and there (particularly when it comes to idly staring at effbook when I could/should be getting to work in the mornings), I feel as though I've traveled miles when it comes to my work habits as a writer. I'm not even sure I had what could be called habits as a writer, for decades -- if I had any, they were bad habits -- despite having attended graduate school for writing, despite having some brief luck with publishing a poem or two, despite naming myself a writer even though I certainly didn't, by my definition, act like one. Since the inception of this blog -- since the summer before my sabbatical -- I've developed the habit of waking and making some movement toward my writing -- be it through the act of writing itself (working on poems, or writing a post here), or reading (which, as my students will tell you, because I beat it into their head...

Well, I've officially begun work on the verse drama. (Two weeks before the sabbatical report deadline! I am GOOD!)) This past week I finished revising three scenes and putting the language right, to some extent. All in the all, the experience was rather like rearranging furniture in a room, and it made me realize -- or re realize (sure, let's pretend that's a word!) -- that something written in meter does not a poem make. Or something like that. Anyway, writing a play with poetry is difficult (to which statement, my eloquent-as-ever-inner-critic says duh! ) and will take me much longer than I anticipated. I don't see it as an insurmountable task, but I do see several drafts in my future. Right now, each scene is very brief, very sparse. I don't have that many extended speeches or monologues, and that's something that needs to change -- not simply because they'll help each scene last longer than a blink of the eyelids, but because there are moments that n...

The surest way to keep a project going is to make up your mind that the project is finished. At least, this is the way of things in MY world, which is a contrary world and a confusing one at that. Yesterday I resigned myself to certain facts: one, that poems for the fairy tale (those "interruptions") and the myth section of the manuscript were not coming as easily as they did a few weeks ago, and two, that the deadline for my sabbatical report was fast approaching and I needed to print out whatever I had so far and begin writing the report. These were fictions more than they were facts. Actually, "fact" number two is still pretty much true -- I DO need to start writing that report -- but I woke this morning thinking about beginning my revision of the first two scenes of the verse play, and ended up writing another interruption poem. I'm happy with the result, but I find the situation laughable. The verse play is never going to be written, at this rate. So...

This week, Bernadette Geyer and Molly Spencer both blogged about being a parent who writes . . . or being a writer who raises children . . . I'm sure we could get into a semantic argument about which designation is more appropriate, or should be more appropriate, but I don't have time . . . I have to write before the kids get up! (Har, har, har . . . crash of symbols/cricket chirps.) I've been wanting to post something here for a while, but life/children/school and yes, my writing got in the way, and that's something Spencer speaks to in her blog post , which is kind of an answer or addendum to what Geyer posted over at She Writes . I was really, really sick last week -- not deathly so (as my tired joke about the plague would have you think), but enough to make everything other than the most basic tasks seem terribly unimportant. Even still, because I'm neurotic whether or not I'm infected with some savage virus, I woke up early every morning to write and...