Furious Toad

March 29, again

Nice day, today. I have a deadline tomorrow, so I'm going to be cranking all day at work-- that might be less nice. Maybe I'll take some music and headphones and just rock out as I make edits, though. That could be bearable, if not fun.

I'm still getting good poetry submissions. I'm in a very poetryish place right now. Tonight I wrote one called "Euminides," dealing with much the same vision of past-their-prime Furies that I had in my story "Meranhu's Gifts." It's a nice piece, and it's speculative, so I might actually get money for it at some point.

I'm reading sort of widely and strangely... Adrienne Rich, Samuel Delaney, Nancy Kress. Dipping in for stories and poems and paragraphs. I'm paying a lot of attention to language-- a focus on construction rather than content. This used to happen to me a lot, I'd go through poetry-and-prose cycles. In recent years the prose has predominated; this week, at least, I'm thinking more in terms of poetry. The practical effect? I haven't been doing much on Rangergirl. But that's okay. There's a reason I'm not posting nightly word counts or doing the novel as part of a Dare. I'm trying to trust the process a little, and let the novel emerge in the peculiar fashion it seems to prefer. The story has stayed in my head, vibrant, for many months already-- I started the novella shortly after I arrived in Santa Cruz. I don't think the blush is going to vanish from that particular desert rose any time soon.

It's kind of late. I ran into a horde of grad students and prospectives at Pergolesi (one of said prospectives is currently sleeping on my couch; Scott's hosting her), so I didn't get home as early as I'd expected. I drank beer and hung out instead. Nor did I entirely clean out my poetry-submission-inbox. Ah, well. A 2-day response time isn't exactly slow; I'll respond to the remaining submissions tomorrow. At this point, I'm holding three or four poems for further consideration. The first Speculon issue containing poetry won't go up until June, so I've got a bit of time before I need to make final decisions.

Hmm. Not too much to say tonight-- it's been a pleasant, stressless day. I didn't even have trouble finding parking after work. I ate fried rice and chicken for dinner. I do this sort of thing often-- find a meal I like, and eat it three or four times in a row. I mean, I have all the ingredients here in my house, and every time I have fried rice, it's one more day I can put off going to the grocery store...

Yeah. This is fascinating. I'll stop. G'night, lovelies.

Poetry is an imaginary garden with real toads in it.

-Marianne Moore