Morning

Wednesday morning. The Small Boy goes off to Kindergarten with R. (Have I told you? Can you believe it? My Small Boy goes to Kindergarten four mornings a week.) I walk across the driveway with the Boychen, knock at my mother-in-law’s door. It’s Wednesday, she is taking the Boychen for the morning. I walk back to our house, come down to my studio, pour a cup of coffee into my sunshine yellow mug with the white spots. I put on some internet radio, open half-a-dozen tabs, see that Crab Orchard Review is accepting submissions for a special issue featuring Illinois writers. I’m an Illinois writer; far-flung, it is true, but I lived there for the first 21 years of my life. I think it would make an interesting line in a cover letter: “I am an Illinois native now living on a farm in Switzerland…” I think it would be enough to make somebody keep reading. I have my task for the morning, the boys are away, I have these two quiet hours in my studio, and I have a task. I close the windows, go to work.

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Well how about that

I found a little notebook today. Actually Boychen found it, pulling it out of a desk drawer along with a roll of clear tape, a black binder clip, a sheet of labels, some correction tape, and a 2008 agenda. I don’t remember when I used this notebook – I didn’t date it – but it was inspired by this post, so it would have been some time after that. So May or June of last year, maybe. I spent about a month listing each day a small handful of things that I really, really wanted. The very first line in the notebook?

“I want to publish my poetry.”

And here I am, one year later, with two poems in an on-line journal, four more coming out later in the year, and six currently under consideration.

Tonight, when the boys are asleep, I’m going to flip through the book and see what else I asked for. See what else I got.

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Real

I’ve got two poems up at Asphalt Sky (in volume 1 issue 2).

I got a rejection letter on Monday.

There are three poems winging via Luftpost towards a little journal I’ve become too attached to. 

I’ve got two poems awaiting judgment.

This writing thing, it’s starting to feel real.

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January wrap-up

My experiment with listing out my writing goals in December went so well that I’m making it a regular part of my writing practice. At the beginning of the month I type out my broad goals for the month, print them out, and tack them to the cork-board hanging above my desk. I can keep track of my progress and make notes on the page as the month rolls along.

January was a strange month; it started with a burst of energy and ended with me falling into a wordless lull. Experience has shown me that something is going on under the surface during these seemingly quiet periods, so I’m trying not to push too hard, but at the same time I don’t want to give myself over the down-turn completely. Experience has also shown me that I can use a lull as an excuse to get lazy. It’s a balance I still have trouble finding.

Nevertheless, I did meet most of January’s goals:

• Follow up with [magazine still holding a submission]. I sent a follow-up email but haven’t received a reply. Now what do I do?
• Write short prose and submit to this beautiful journal. Didn’t get to this one.
• Begin piecing together a post-partum depression essay I’ve been avoiding.  I’ve started the “thinking out-loud” process on this one.
• Revise a submission package I’ve been sitting on and write a cover letter. I even put it in the mail!
• Write four new poems. Almost; I made it to three.
• Continue revision work on three or four poems.

That’s a really good month! Especially for one that includes a lull and a poor poor Boychen cutting three molars and a canine at the same time. Seriously, Mother Nature, you couldn’t have tweaked the timing there?

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Keeping pace

I love when my poem for the week comes to me on a Monday. Not that I can’t write poems every day of the year, of course, but the fact of the matter is with two small boys running around the house playing fireman I’m not very likey to. I’ve set a goal of fifty-two poems this year – that works out to one a week. I know there will be dry weeks and I know there will be times when the river is rushing but still, it works out to one poem a week and I wrote a decent first draft yesterday and that sends me off into the week with a certain peace of mind. I also did the recycling – we only have curb-side pick up for paper and cardboard so we have to bring the glass and aluminium to a collection station; there are two within five minutes so it’s not that hard, it’s just a matter of actually thinking to do it – and made a double-batch of bolognese sauce. Yum!

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December wrap-up (updated)

I set some goals for myself this month, wrote them down and put them out there on the internet for anybody to see, goals that were, for me, pretty ambitious. The month is drawing to a close now and it’s time to check in and see how I did.

1. 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’ve found the next journal for these poems, but I haven’t followed up on their status. I’ve never done that before and I’m not sure how to word the request.
2. 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 think I’ve found the market, but I haven’t found/written a companion piece. Updated to add: Actually, I think I do have a complete package here.
3. 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 didn’t send this package out; still waiting to hear about some poems and now waiting until a prose piece that’s been accepted is actually published.
4. 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. Discretion is the better part of valor. This was an overly ambitious choice and I decided not to burn any bridges. Perhaps next year.
5. I’m working on a prose piece to send here. Their deadline is 15 December. I sent it. And they’re going to publish it. I’ll let you know when it’s out.
6. 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. Didn’t happen.
7. 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 did a lot of market research and organizing and it will make my goals for 2009 that much easier.
8. 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? I straightened out my banking mess, wrote new checks to the journals I’d ordered off of the old checks, and sent for some additional journals as well.

A modestly successful month. I could make excuses, like the holidays, or the fact that my entire family threw up more than once in the week leading up to and including Christmas. Even the cat! But instead I’m just going to say that for somebody who is still new to all of this, for somebody who is still figuring out the writer-mother-wife-self balance, for somebody as thin-skinned and thrown off stride by “thanks but your work is not for us” letters as I am, I did fine.

I’m doing fine.

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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.

1. 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.
2. I have two poems that sit nicely together. They need a market, and a companion. (Two poems is generally too few for a submission.)
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. I’m working on a prose piece to send here. Their deadline is 15 December.
6. 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.
7. 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.
8. 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?
9. 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.

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