Adjusting to New Conditions

In many of my previous weekly updates have noted that I’ve been feeling a wee overwhelmed, which has lead me to skip weeks — like last week. When I started off posting weekly updates, it was an effective (mostly) tool to check in with myself and see where I’m at, particularly in regards to my writing progress. It helped me keep forward momentum on my work for a time.

Its easy to get locked into routines and to beat yourself up when you fail to follow them (like I do). It can take a while to figure out that things are not working like they once did.

With all the projects I have going on the weekly updates (and the website in general) can sometimes feel like a distraction from the work I need to be doing. I won’t be giving up the updates entirely, but I’m likely going to allow my weekly updates a little less weekly as needed.

At some point, I’m going to need to explore my goals for this site and what I’m hoping to accomplish with it.

What I’m Reading

I’m *this* close to being done with The Obelisk Gate by N.K. Jemisin — and I’m hoping to finish it off by the end of today. So many revelations about this world, it’s amazing. Really. I love this series so much.

What I’m Writing

I’m still trying to find a home for my Pantheon chapbook, so I binge submitted it along with a number of individual poems all at once. I’m . . . hopeful, somewhat?

Another chapbook is sitting by ready for a good edit and then a send out, almost ready to face its own slew of rejections.

The 30/30 challenge went well. I completed all 30 erasure poems on Instagram, all using Trader Joe’s Feerless Flyers. It’s been a fun journey down a number of different roads in terms of themes and erasure styles. My personal favorite of the month has to be “Naval,” pictured below.


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The Running Life

No runs over the past two weeks, but I got myself out the door and took a long walk with a friend. We strode through the trails near her house and talked and talked. It had been a while since I just took a really long walk. It was wonderful just to be out there with a good friend in nature and enjoying the trees and the stream near the reservoir. Starting to feel the itch to get back into my running routine again and/or adding in some hiking.

Longest Run walk of the Week: 6.1 miles
Total Miles for the Week: 6.1 miles
Total Miles for 2017: 68.64 miles

Linky Goodness

Ayana Mathis in her essay On Impractical Urges:

“We have a cult of success in America. We believe that if we just work hard enough, we will achieve. It is certainly better to hold these beliefs than a fatalist vision of the world in which fortunes are determined entirely by factors outside of oneself (social position, nepotism, economic status, etc.). Nonetheless, there is something naive about our way of looking at things, and cruel too, in the way children can be cruel because they are too young to have anything but an absolutist vision of the world. It isn’t always true that failure has direct correlation to insufficient grit or ambition.”

Marci Vogel on Publishing a First Book at [almost] 50:

“In the years before I was 50, I placed a manuscript in a drawer because I didn’t know what else to do with it. I might not have written again for a long while. I might not have started writing poems ever. But unhinged desire did lead to poetry, and it was because of the support I received from others that the drawer didn’t shut completely.”