My weekend involved a recovery period, hanging out with friends, eating good healthy food (mostly), and resting when needed. The resting bit involved sleeping for twelve hours Saturday night. Astounding since I haven’t slept past 10 a.m. since high school. I guess my body needed the rest.
I’m feeling more energized going into this week…. We’ll see if it lasts.
What I’m Reading
Baba Yaga Laid an Egg by Dubravka UgreÅ¡ić is not what I was expecting, not that I really knew what to expect. But being based on folklore, I guess I was looking for something a little more of that kind of feel rather than the this-is-real-life tone I’ve gotten so far. It’s still interesting, though, in how it looks at older women and how society perceives them.
I’ve started reading Everyone I Love Is a Stranger to Someone, poetry by Annelyse Gelman. I saw her read at Writers with Drinks one night and the poems are just as fun and witty as her performance.
More slow and steady progress on Don Quixote.
What I’m Writing
Up, up, and away! I knuckled under and sent out a chapbook of poems to Paper Nautilus last night, biting my knuckles the whole time and pretending I wasn’t nervous, not at all.
(eeeeeeeeeeee!)
No. Not really. No.
Goal(s) for this week: Submit the chapbook to a few more publishers. Gather together poem drafts and submit to lit journals.
What’s Inspiring Me Right Now
Last week I mentioned starting a new eating plan and so far it’s been going great. I’m not torn apart from cravings and am actually feeling drawn to fresh veggies. I feel cleaner. I don’t know how else to describe it. Since my sister has dropped out of the plan, I’m easing up on my restrictions a hair by letting myself have a splash of milk in my coffee, because mmmmm, coffeeeeee.
As I’ve cut out the added sugar and grains, I’m looking into what I can cut out in other areas to be more focused on the things I want to accomplish. Two of the main things that come to mind are TV and my iPad video games — both of which either need to go entirely or limited to an hour or so. Cutting out the TV is the hardest, since my roommate likes to have it on as background noise; that’s fine, I just need to put headphones on and listen to music while I write or retreat into my bedroom for quiet time.
Linky Goodness
In Fallacy: The Primer for Surprise, Lancelot Schaubert talks about how mystery and any writers are able to surprise their readers, noting that it comes not from withholding information, but forcing the reader to the wrong conclusions. A very interesting concept that has me thinking about how I approach my own storytelling.
Also:
If someone tells you singular ‘they’ is wrong, please do tell them to get stuffed, Â by Tom Chivers, who writes, “Actually, “their” has commonly been used as a singular possessive for rather longer than either Allan or I have been alive.”
Science Shows Something Surprising About People Who Love to Write — an interesting and we-are-awesome post for writers.