[Seen at Mer's, Bear's, and lots of other places on my blogroll.]

Publications

"Coat." In The Bedside Guide to No Tell Motel - Second Floor.

"Present" and "Punk Mermaids." [GROWLING SOFTLY] (Blood Pudding Press).

"Bad Girl" and "Miss." Defenestration (Volume 4, Issue 9, August).

"Hard" and "Ninety-two-year-old Singer." San Diego Valley Poetry Quarterly (Age Issue, Spring).

"More Than One Plus One." In
To Have and To Hold: Poems, Blessings, and Prayers for Newlyweds.

Two haiku. Scifaikuest, print edition (Issue 16, May). "a crumpled ribbon..." was selected for the 2007 Dwarf Stars anthology, which is available from the Science Fiction Poetry Association.

One haiku. Scifaikuest, online edition (May).


Also scripted 9.5 eLearning courses, delivered six sermons, and wrote three essay-length encyclopedia entries.

Poems currently out to editors: 29

Forthcoming (maybe):

1 sold (and paid for) for a project indefinitely on hold

3 reprints for another project indefinitely on hold

3 provisionally accepted (i.e., made first cut but inclusion not guaranteed) for two other projects

2 poems and 3 drabbles accepted for a charity anthology

Current commitments: 2 encyclopedia essay-entries, 1 academic paper, and a couple of gift-fics. And another eLearning assignment appears to be on the horizon.

Plans for 2008: Taking it (relatively) easy, actually. I routinely ran up against my limits both sleep- and speed-wise during 2007, and I'm vain enough that I don't want to look like a 60-year-old woman before I'm 40 -- not even for the sake of art, attention, or influence.

Also, at this point, I have dozens upon dozens of "To Revise" files both on my hard drive and scattered around the house. It's past time to turn the stale bread into pudding or toss it to the birds, as it were.

There's also a part of me that's currently inclined to really take the year off, defer working on anything that's not already a commitment, and just read. There's so much out there, and it sometimes feels pointless to be adding more to it.

(The flip side of this is that I can't not write: as a panacea, it's cheaper than Scotch, and as an itch, it's worse than mosquito bites. And it's not as if reading vs. writing is an either-or proposition to begin with.)

Modus scribendi: Less time online. More time paper-journaling, revising, and reading. The goal ultimately isn't lots of sales, although sales are very nice indeed - the goal is creating pieces (poems/posts/stories/sermons/fics/whatever) that resonate with other people enough to be reread, shared, and/or make them laugh/tear up/swear/go read Sayers/look up Unitarian Universalism/put Handel on the stereo.

Granted, getting published helps with that. It all circles back to the old ars longa, so many shinies! lament, as well as the perpetual conundrum of practice vs. performance. In so many of the things I do (music, calligraphy, poetry), it's fiddly finding the right balance between the two: to create work deserving of other people's attention, one needs to invest sufficient time and thought in practice (and studying others in the field), but there's also no substitute for the real thing - at some point, one has to stop with the drafts and the rehearsals and put whatever one has out there - to go on stage, to get the lettering framed, to submit the damn poem - no matter how much more polishing and tweaking could be done, and no matter how unsound or clunky some measures or strokes or phrases are likely to come across.

[*rereads* Now why couldn't I have come up with that when I was working on "manifesto" poems last month? Oh, what a turtle-brain am I. At any rate, it's time to get on with the rest of my day: bacon, oatmeal, the Times, church, chores . . .]