Margaret Fieland: Poetry and Prose

It’s been a few days since I checked the comments flagged as SPAM for this site, so I was up to 110.

Yup, that’s right, I generally look over the spam comments to see if any were flagged wrongly. And how often has that happened, you ask? Once or twice since I set up the site.

Yes, I also often check my regular email spam, and the “wrong hit” rate is far higher. I have a separate email account for my writing partly for this reason — it’s not on the same scores (probably) of lists my personal account is, so I get virtually no spam — and I still get “real” mail in my bulk mail folder on my writing email account.

Oy!

I just realized this morning how much I dislike long paragraphs in email. It must be a visual thing, because the words would be the same regardless of  how many extra paragraph breaks there are, but it seems I’m inclined to skip any non-essential email containing, say, an entire page of long paragraphs.

It’s something to consider in my story writing.

I’ve been making an effort recently to read more poetry, and it’s got me thinking about what draws me to a poem and what causes me to say, “Um, that’s just okay.”

Language and humor are, I think, near the top of my list. I’m also drawn to  quirky ways of looking at the world and a certain surreality.

When I figure out more, I’ll let y’all know.

The weather continues to be very, very hot around here, to the point where we’ve been running our air conditioning far more often than most. The problem is, we have central air in our so-called “primary residence,” which means that when I’m there alone, as happens fairly frequently during the week in the summer, I won’t run it.

We do have a room above the garage with a window air conditioner, a fact which usually escapes me when I’m getting ready for bed …

A couple of days ago I wrote a poem that feels right. Today I wrote one that doesn’t. I haven’t yet found the right way to approach what I’m trying to say, and I may not for a while. This feels like one of those where I end up writing and rewriting until finally I’ll find a whole new way of looking at it that works.

At least I hope I do.

There is an art in picking venues for one’s writing that I have not yet mastered.  Yes, I do read the journals, but I still don’t really “get it” at some level. I can and do learn by experience — journal A liked the piece enough to comment on it, so maybe I’ll send them something else. Journal B accepted a piece — put them on the list, too.

There’s no way to learn except by doing it, so I’ll just keep plugging away.

I’m still doing a fair amount of submitting and not much writing and revising. A piece of me thinks that I should stop with the submitting already and get back to more writing and another piece thinks that, hey, I did a lot of writing in the past few months and now it’s time to send it out into the world.

{grimace} Clearly,  I’m still struggling with “load balancing” in my writing life. If anyone ideas about this, please do comment.

I made the contest deadline (just!) and got it in the mail on June 30th. I also mailed another copy to a publisher in Canada. I still have two copies left, so I get to pick two other places to send it.

I’m on vacation this week and have been quite idle.  I’ve made some submissions and a bit of revising, but that’s about it so far. The week has gone by awfully fast — I feel like I could quite happily be on vacation for several more weeks. But alas, this coming Monday it’s back to work.