December
I meant to blog last night. I liked the way NaBloPoMo made me sit at the end of the day and think of something to recapture, something to convey. I liked the way it made me take the time, if only for five minutes, to think about what might have been inside my head that day. I meant to blog last night, but it was one of those days. And, since it was December first, I took the opportunity to fall onto the couch at the end of the day and watch the first episode of The Starter Wife, which just started on Swiss television.
I was thinking about my writing goals for the month, the goals I set out on my little sabbatical last week, and I’m starting to think about my goals for next year. I had a lot of goals for this year, poetically speaking, and I didn’t come close to the half of them. I lost a lot of the year to post-partum depression. Sitting here now, realizing it is December, realizing that my baby has turned one, I’m beginning to understand how much of the year I lost. I’m glad to be on the other side of it, and I’m ready to turn the page and be done with it. I think I need to sit for a day or two over the holidays, when R is around and I have the time, and process how much PPD really stole from me last year, but after that I am ready to turn the page.
I’m forgiving myself for all the goals I missed this year. I got by. My sons got by. My baby is thriving and looking at him nobody would ever guess that he started his life under a cloud of sadness. He is one of the happiest children I’ve ever known. His default setting seems to be “Wow! This life stuff is going to be so exciting!” I’m eternally grateful for that. My older boy – well, it was different for my older boy. He was old enough to know something was wrong, to see me cry, to understand all the different emotions that passed over my face. The PPD rolled off my baby like water off a duck’s back, but I think some of it stuck to my older. To my sweet Small Boy. I need some time to think about that.
I’m letting go of last year. I wrote some stuff. Some of it was good. Some of it was bad. Some of it got rejected. (Most of it got rejected.) Some of it got accepted. Under the circumstances, that’s maybe more than I could have expected. I’m looking ahead now. I’ve got a plan, a sense of how to move forward. Carolee – who’s mostly password-protected these days but I’m all about the link-love – has been posting her weekly or bi-weekly writing goals for a while now; it’s been motivating and enormously instructive in how to go about the practical side of submissions and market research and thinking about how to get there from here.
I’m not in a position to make weekly goals – I’m still trying to find the 12.5 hours a week I figure I need in order to achieve the bare minimum of what I hope to achieve. But monthly, monthly I can do. I’ve got quite a list for December. For somebody in my position it’s ambitious but I’m learning that falling short and forgiving afterwards brings me further than setting “realistic” goals that I acheive every time. So I’m aiming high. I’m sure some of you could tick tick tick off the following in a day-and-a-half but the thing about goals and ambition and what’s hard and what’s easy is that it’s all relative, conditioned on the life of the goal-setter. For me, for my life, this is a big list for a month.
- I’ve got a poetry submission still pending – as of December 8 I’m allowed to inquire as to the status. I need to find a secondary market for this package so that if it’s rejected by the people holding it now I can turn it right around and get it out the door the next day.
- I have two poems that sit nicely together. They need a market, and a companion. (Two poems is generally too few for a submission.)
- I have a submission package ready to go out the door. I need a good cover letter and I need to just send it already. I’m holding back because I think this is a journal I have a good chance with – I mean, we feel like a really good fit – and I’d love to know about that pending submission I mentioned so that, if it’s an acceptance, I can put that in my cover letter. The fact that this journal’s reading period is open until May is not helping my inner procrastinator.
- I’m revising a prose piece to submit to Brevity. This, my friends, is hugely ambitious but it’s a good piece. A really good piece.
- I’m working on a prose piece to send here. Their deadline is 15 December.
- I want another poetry submission out the door by the end of the month. New or newly revised I don’t care. That would make a total of three packages out this month, which is low for somebody who actually wants to publish, but it’s three more than zero as my father would say.
- I have got to organize my market research. I’ve got lists and excel spreadsheets and journals and piles of sample pages from on-line archives scattered between desk and filing cabinet and computer.
- I want to order sample copies from five or six journals, now that I have straightened out the disaster that was my US bank merging, or being acquired, and setting my account to “dormant” without, as far as I’ve been able to determine, actually telling me, resulting in my bouncing checks to no fewer than five literary magazines. Can you begin to imagine the horror of bouncing checks written to the very journals with which I hope to place my work? Can you?
- Can you?
Looking at it now it doesn’t seem all that ambitious a list even to me, the one who right now has a feverish child coughing in his bed and the bowl he vomited in sitting in the dishwasher. And yet I know it is. Ambitious. For me. Baby steps.
The Boychen walks now. He loves to walk just for the sheer pleasure of it. He’ll make it ten feet until he plonks down, then he’ll get back up and keep on going with a huge grin on his face. I’ve never seen anybody take so much pleasure simply from being ambulatory. So when I say baby steps, I mean it in the best possible sense. Teetering and tottering and landing on my butt but smiling every bit of the way.
Filed under Goals goals, Post-partum depression, What makes me tick | Comments (6)6 Responses to “December”
Leave a Reply
It’s great to hear that you’re feeling better and that you’ve got these goals to work towards!
And as hard as it is to do, you probably shouldn’t worry too much about the effect your depression had on Small Boy. Kids are so resilient, and the fact is, we all go through times when we’re happier than others. You may have been depressed, but you have pulled through it– that’s a valuable lesson to him that sadness is neither permanent nor something that only happens to other people. This might even be a comforting thought whenever he’s feeling blue…
Thanks, Betsy – that’s a useful way of looking at it, actually. Something I wouldn’t have thought of myself – one of the nice things about blogging.
It’s always so interesting to get a peek inside someone else’s process for making writing & publishing goals. Oy, given that I work in the market research biz, any time I hear the words “market research” used in reference to poetry, it makes me want to cry inside.
The language I use myself is “finding a home for this poem.” A topic of enduring interest to me, the way our lives manipulate the way we think about and frame even the smallest details of our creative work. (Maybe my disinclination to think about poetry is in these terms keeps me from thinking about it as strategically as I could.)
I love what you said above, about aiming high being a more effective strategy for you than setting realistic and attainable goals. That’s how it is with me, too. We should open this topic (goals) up over at S&S… I’d love to hear from everyone about the different ways people tackle this.
Last night, I wanted to comment and say how much I understand where you’re at… the PPD newly lifted but still disillusioning, the missed year, the difficulty of goals outside of mothering, the frustration of spending hours of precious writing time doing market research ONLINE. Oy vey. But then, I have to admit, you sound so organized and hopeful and bursting with inspiration that I just couldn’t comment for feeling 200 shades of failure. I’m back a little closer to sanity this morning and realizing that even if I’m struggling to hold onto 5 writing hours per week and swamped with Christmas preparations and lagging in the inspiration department, we’re still very much in the same boat. There will always be ebb and flow, and I’m so glad to have found someone on a similar path — untangling the gorgeous mess of mommyhood and writing dreams. Best, best wishes for your December writing goals, and listen: you have my full permission to take a day or two off around the holidays to reclaim your year. This blogger hath spoken.
Ingrid – I like to think of it as market research – I find it gives my inner anal-retentive type A personality something to do, something to look forward to, a job of her own. Then, because she knows she has this REALLY important job – heck, without HER my poems would never make it out into the world, she’s the brains of this whole operation – she doesn’t sabotage my dreamy writer side. She just waits until it’s her turn to do her thing.
I guess that sound all Three Faces of Eve-ish, but it seems to be working.
Bethany – come back at the end of the month as I make a public assessment of how I actually did. It’s six degrees of failure every day around here, don’t you worry. About on-line market research I do have to say all hail the internet and all hail the kind journals who put samples of their work on line. Thank you, journals and the authors who agree to do this! Boooo other journals.
We are very much in the same boat. We should form an expat post partum writing mama support group.
Jen
[...] my children, at any rate. I think I’ve had a sum total of 14 seconds to myself since I wrote this, so the December goals, they are not looking good. And there are things, writing related things, I [...]