What I want to be doing right now:

• gardening
• vidding
• sitting on my couch with a cat on my lap

What I should be doing right now:

• writing 900 words on an important project (which, because it's me, means writing 3,000 words and then trying to find the 900 right words buried in there somewhere)
• writing 2,000 words on a different important project (see above ( Read more... )

For the past week, I've been stuck on an important piece of writing -- the difficulty exacerbated, in this instance, by the limited word count: I'm a rambler, and though I do always try to revise my formal writing to a state of acceptable concision, word limits annoy and unnerve me. The submission deadline is approaching, and my anxiety levels have ( Read more... )

So I've been working on this conference paper, and it's been driving me nuts. The proposal I sent in is very smart, but gave me very little to work with in terms of setting up a step-by-step argument I can advance in under twenty minutes. So I've been sitting here, Mr. Earbrass-style (sans sherry), with a pile of slips of paper that say things like ( Read more... )

Swiped from truepenny:

If you happen to be working on some creative writing project, post exactly one sentence from each of your current work(s) in progress in your journal. It should probably be your favourite or most intriguing sentence so far, but what you choose is entirely your discretion. Mention the title (and genre) if you like, but don't mention ( Read more... )

Okay, draft revised. It went from two pages to one and a half just from cleaning up the prose. I'm a pretty good writer, but my early drafts (I wish I could say "first draft," but no) inevitably suck ice cubes through a garden hose. Why use one word when seven will do the trick? Why use active verbs when I can use inappropriate nominalizations? Why ( Read more... )

Here's the thing: If I were more consistently a perfectionist, or more consistently high-strung, Friday's poetry reading would now be looming ominously on the horizon of my week, and I would be frantically working to get some poems into shape because I would be anxious about what people would think of me if I didn't seem smart, prepared, etc ( Read more... )

It's snowing out. Well, it's not so much snow as sleet crossed with hail. The roads look terrible. I'm actually rather fond of nasty weather when I am inside with a cup of hot chocolate rather than out in it. So I'm quite happy. I like living where there is weather rather than just climate ( Read more... )

I've had a rejection letter (from the first round of poetry submissions, sent out last month) sitting on my desk since Saturday.

( yeah, yeah, poor me. )

So I was part of a poetry reading tonight, and it went okay. I'd hoped to have a chance to revise some new stuff to make it readable, and that didn't happen, so I ended up reading slightly older stuff, including a poem that I initially wrote in praise of jerusalem artichokes (although it ended up going somewhere a bit different later on, and is not ( Read more... )

Yesterday I got an e-mail from someone (an intern, probably) at the little press that's publishing some of my poems next year. She explained that the press is putting together a catalogue of their titles, including forthcoming ones, and she'd like my suggestions for "two or three sentences" about the chapbook, as well as a short bio ( Read more... )