National Poetry Month 2023

I usually do something to mark National Poetry Month, so here we go again.

In the 2021 edition, we talked about form, structure and experimental works. While that post didn’t share any examples, I did recommend a number of poets whose work I was reading at the time. The post prior to that I shared some of my poems, and wrote about which of my influences or life experiences led to the inspiration to create them. One of those posts was before my first collection was published, and for this blog I’ll try for a bit of both approaches with some examples from Counterfeit Collective. So, to start off, here is “New Words” inspired by a Robert Frost poem, but contemplating what happens when an idea inspired by an old poem takes a new form and collides with technology.

 

A poet once walked by a place

and noticed windblown papers

from days past piling up outside.

He knew he must have read some

of the words they contained

on other days in another place,

but he also recalled the days

he had missed the paper,

only talked about the weather

or by chance hadn’t seen

another living soul.

Nowadays when I read the poem,

I wonder, where do the new words go

when our will-o’-the-wisp gazes

scroll past them on whatever device

we have handy while we wander

our attention past

everything around us,

fast becoming relics of an age

we can’t see passing until it’s gone…

There is no corner of the Internet

where all the news articles and

blogs, editorials and advertisements

can be blown by the wind into

piles of memories waiting to be

clipped or recycled

The most commented upon comment

or retweeted tweets are as

ephemeral as any other that

were never liked or shared

Where do any of them go

when we power off the PC

or drop our phones

or find the host has vanished?

Perhaps now they have come full circle;

they were all always just words on a page,

but now that pages are not necessarily things

we can hold in our hands, but ideas

that require other ideas to access,

we may be right back where we started.

Needing scribes and translators

just to scribe and translate

what everyone was thinking and saying

on these virtual platforms

that will inevitably really crumble

as stone tablets did before them.

With all these ideas that need

other ideas just to be able to

parse the data and cast these

hieroglyphs onto our screens,

how theoretical are we becoming?

All those words on stone

that could be deciphered

were dutifully translated

and discussed on paper.

Now everything on paper

is being translated into

the matrix where everything

we know is electrified

Our new words

will need new scribes,

new archaeologists,

to carefully sweep away

the dust of code and formats

caked over digital fossils

and the scrawls of sentience.

I hope it’s as messy

and haphazard as the last

few leaps of evolution…

Even if only virtually so.

 

It is a little ironic that this poem is available only in the ebook format in Counterfeit Collective, and you literally cannot access it without an e-reader! If that collection ever sees print, it will be the first time this poem ever appears on a printed page. The formatting looks a bit off in this block quote, but the words are the words. “The scrawls of sentience” is one of my favorite bits in that one, but there was a lot of good wordplay in the piece.

For a more spare idea, here is one poem that came from a challenge I made up one day. It’s called “threes” and that was the challenge idea. Three words. Three lines. Three stanzas. Take that as your structure and try to paint a picture. It can be about anything, but those were the rules, so this is what I came up with on that day:

 

A longing gaze,

looking to nowhere

often these days

 

what minds wander

why wonders mind

where none ponder

 

They aren’t real–

things we want

We are real.

 

That one reminds me of e.e. cummings. It can’t elaborate beyond the third word, so it naturally is a little limited in what it can convey. It is still possible to create a scene and make us think though, so that one actually made it into the collection.

 

To keep to that theme of “threes”, here is one last example. My editor liked the title of “sCrying” so at least one person is fond of my puns.

 

You don’t know where it started

and you don’t know where it’s going

but the genies are out of the bottle,

the rumor mill has disincorporated

and our social lives are evaporating

into a kaleidoscope of mirrors.

Back in the day we had to show up,

find the most happening place,

work the room, show some grace.

Now there is no room, it’s nonstop

from every angle in cyberspace

that magic once reserved for cinema

scattered everywhere.

We don’t know where it’s going

and we don’t know if it can be stopped

All the world’s a stage, it was said

when plays required you to attend.

Now illusions sustain themselves,

with every hack at the helm

and every actor in the lead.

If the sage of his fabled cave,

or the bard with his vaunted quill

could see the Paragon of Animals

vie to go viral in an outbreak,

sharing his licking the toilet seat

with the world watching the world

wondering what will break the spell…

But we don’t know where it’s going

and they don’t know if it can be stopped.

That one also was pondering technology and its impact on us and our society. It an illuminate, or obfuscate. It creates more stages for presentations of anything at all, which can lead to more opportunities for connection, or it can be fragmented and awkward in a dozen ways on myriad platforms. Recently, I found out that this website and all my posts were part of training an AI, which was not something I opted in to do. In the future, if we set things up correctly to opt out of such things, that only works on ethical participants in this world wide web. Any of the probably many, many unethical operations will likely still scrape the site and take my words and the words of any other website, blog, forum, or other social media to instruct their budding artificial intelligences no matter what any of us might think about that. We need to set some standards to discourage that kind of thing.

The other day, I saw a campaign announcement video. Someone in the media commented that it seemed to them to be the first such campaign video aimed directly at the “Tik-Tok generation” in its editing. It was very fast moving, with lots of different footage from various scenes, so I can see where they are coming from in that description. And then, their political opposition released a response video…featuring mainly AI generated video. I’m not going to get into their content, or who I endorse, or anything like that…but I will say that Tik Tok itself and some of the trends and things that did go viral was what inspired “sCrying” among a couple other poems.

These technologies are amazing, and how we use them is very telling. It’s like the light and dark sides of the Force. One is using words and images to inspire connection, creativity and encourage others to get involved, either in the cause, or to create things as well. That’s where the poetry is. The other side is using AI to do your homework for you. Or write your song, or generate video for your commercial so you don’t have to. The quick and easy path to the Dark Side,  is using this tech to stifle creativity, to avoid paying artists, cinematographers, editors, to discourage connections by generating dystopian imagery to fill the viewers with fear, anger, and hate. It’s damned easy to tell which is which.

I hope you have read some great poetry in this National Poetry Month. I know I’ve seen a lot shared in different places on social media and in forums. Some of the poets I’ve been reading this year include Leonard Cohen, e.e. cummings, (as always!) Langston Hughes, Edward Arlington Robinson, Herman Hesse (a favorite novelist) and many others. See my previous posts for those I’ve read and recommended. Go write some yourselves!

’23 & Me

Happy (Belated) New Year!

It’s been so long since I’ve posted, there have been two.

I didn’t celebrate western New Years and unfortunately couldn’t do anything for Chinese New Year this time either. There has been entirely too much going on, and we are still recovering from the Holidaze. Our Xmas tree was trimmed down a bit this year with a new cat that likes to climb things, but it did survive the twelve days of Christmas, and also hung around for twelve days of New Years while I procrastinated putting it away. Maybe next year we can add a glass ornament or two back on.

I’ve been working on a couple of things since last checking in on the blog. After the website crash, we found that not all of the posts in the backup file were able to be recreated, but we did find some alternate sources for all of them, including in the internet archive. Once we’re further along in bringing the old posts back I’m really going to have to throw a few coins to the Witchers over at the Wayback Machine for preserving them!

So in the first half of 23, I’m sending my editor the manuscript for the follow up to Counterfeit Collective and will start work on it again when I’ve received the edits. It may be about twice as long as the first collection, if most of the pieces I’ve written for it stay in. Besides that book, there are a couple of projects in gaming that should see some progress this year. One is a series of interlinked table top roleplaying campaigns, and the other is an indie video game concept I’m writing for.

It’s been challenging to keep moving forward with any creative impulse with everything else going on. Things are improving, but other things often come first. Once there is more to share about any of these projects and where you will be able to find them, I’ll post a more detailed update.

Wishing all a happy and prosperous new year!

 

 

This is a Regeneration Episode

Good morning!

Friday morning there was a critical failure and this website went down. Admin got it back up, but had to reinstall some very important things in the process. As a result, we’ve lost five years worth of blog posts and over seven thousand registered readers. We should get most of those back in due time.

So, this is a regeneration episode. Not as dramatic as the one my wife just watched while I was gaming, but an episode nonetheless. There was no viable back up for the site on our host’s servers (not their fault, that’s on me) nor was there a secondary backup in any of our external file storage places. Fortunately, I did download a back up fairly recently, so recovering the old posts and user data should be possible. This place will be under reconstruction for at least a little while. Old posts should begin resurrecting themselves sometime this week, and I’ll look over them as they come up, if some are corrupted, or break anything, or are just wonky in some way, I’ll just delete them and try again. 

In other news…well, there really isn’t any news from me at the moment, but I am preparing to flee Twitter along with several million of my closest total strangers, acquaintances, and friends. I’ve started a Mastodon account to check that out, and so far I like it. It’s doubtful I’ll host my own instance here, but it is nice to know that it is very possible to do that. For now, I’m @phantasmagician over there.

I hope all of you have a happy Thanksgiving!

May the Force be with you.

Site Outage

Hello,

 

Just a quick note–the site went down early today. We are working on the problems and will update further as things move along. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause. Please be advised that users will be unable to login until this work is complete.

 

Thank you for your time and attention!

Striking Thoughts

“Pride is a sense of worth derived from something that is not organically part of us, while self-esteem is derived from the potentialities and achievements of self. We are proud when we identify ourselves with an imaginary self, a leader, a holy cause, a collective body or possessions. There is fear and intolerance in pride; it is insensitive and uncompromising. The less promise and potentiality in the self, the more imperative is the need for pride. The core of pride is self-rejection.”

–Bruce Lee

I keep coming back to this quote.

Bruce Lee is one of my idols. He was one of my inspirations to begin training in martial arts, and later–more importantly–the example I followed when trying to rehab my back injury. I needed his example when I was going through physical therapy in 2004, 2007, 2009 and 2012. Not just his wisdom, but his embodiment of the possibility of overcoming that kind of injury to become an even better martial artist than before.

Back in high school, I was studying Tang Soo Do, Moo Duk Kwan, Fook Chin Kenpo and Kung Fu with a very good teacher. We went as a school down to El Paso for a tournament which turned out to be enlightening in more ways than one. I won some, lost some, watched the rest, met my future favorite kickboxer Cliff Magic Thomas and got his autograph. It was a good time.

When I was paying my dues the next week, one of the higher ranking students commented on some of the women we had seen at the tournament and expressed some dismay that several were dating black guys. “Do you believe in that?” he asked. “Believe in what?” was my thought at the time. That was when I started feeling like I didn’t want to be around that school anymore.

That experience has been repeated at times whenever I’ve come across someone that is prejudiced. I knew even back then that I did not want to associate with people who were like that. Many of the people I’ve distanced myself from were not necessarily raging bigots themselves, but they were all bigot adjacent in some way. They were either raised by racists or did associate with them and had their own attitudes warped by that xenophobic worldview.

The pride that Bruce Lee was talking about manifests itself in many ways in all of us, and in our society. I used to try to persuade people when we disagreed, but I’ve long since given up on that. Some can’t be persuaded, even when they are as wrong as they can be. It’s the pride factor. Some of us can never admit when we are wrong. Some of us are so dependent on external approval–or in being a contrarian– that even when it is proven that we were incorrect, we can’t change. If you took away the flag, the church, the political party, what is left? At their core, some don’t have much else.

How does this happen? I wish I knew. But as Lee pointed out, it may be that there is not much promise or potentiality in them. Many of us don’t excel in anything. The sheer numbers of people who aren’t the smartest, strongest, fastest, or most skilled in any area of expertise is stunning to consider. Some of us then struggle with self-esteem vs. pride in the ways we go through life. Some blame convenient scapegoats for all of their problems.

If someone didn’t reason their way into whatever opinion they have of something, they can’t be reasoned out of it.

It is times like these that I’m grateful for the different perspectives and view of history I’ve been exposed to through studying Kung Fu and Capoeira. It is helpful to consider some of the problems of today through the lens of what we know of our predecessors in history. The Boxer Rebellion, and all the political strife of China in those days, the realities of the slave trade and the roots of Capoeira in Brazil. In the book Capoeira: Roots of the Dance Fight Game, there are many tales of Capoeiristas from the old days and the troubles they faced.

It was all the same back in those days. Rich people exploiting others for profit, peasants doing whatever they had to do in order to survive, etc. Racism, sexism, homophobia, superstition, all of it essentially just as we see today. The modern world has made many advancements, but we have yet to update our software. People who haven’t studied these things won’t see that much of the propaganda today is just recycled prejudice from an earlier age.

They won’t know that a number of slaves in Brazil once earned their freedom by fighting–and winning–a war for their former masters. The song “Paranue” tells a part of this story.

“Paranauê! Paranuê, Paraná                                   “Paranauê! Paranuê, Paraná                
vou mi bora desta terra                                             I am leaving this land
eu aqui não volto mais paraná                                  Here, I’ll never return, Paraná
“Paranauê! Paranuê, Paraná                                    “Paranauê! Paranuê, Paraná 
eu aqui não sou querido                                            Here I am not loved,
mas na minha terra sou , paraná”                            But in my Land I am, Paraná”

This is one of the examples I like to point to whenever someone mistakes the art for a dance. Those who made it through this war credited their survival to training in Capoeira.

This episode of history shows that it has real world applications as well as the games that are played in Capoeira. There are many interesting characters throughout the history of the art, Besouro is probably the most famous. He was known for locking the police in their jails and escaping his own arrest a time or two.

One of my favorite historical Capoeiristas is Joao Francisco dos Santos. More popularly known as Madame Sata, his drag persona. He was an illiterate son of former slaves, and gay. He was a skilled street fighter, and became something of a legend for his battles with the police. It is said that he often fought bare handed against police patrols of four officers who were armed with clubs and won. There is a Brazilian film entitled Madame Sata released in 2002 that tells this story.

We don’t know what Madame Sata’s pronouns would be, because they lived from 1900-1976. A generation or two before pronouns became a thing.

All this has happened before. It is not a Hollywood production. It is not a conspiracy, or an agenda that is being forced on anyone. Humanity has always been this messy and diverse. There have always been people who refuse to do anything but be true to themselves. There have always been petty tyrants and cowards who try to rabble rouse and turn communities against people who live their lives in the way they choose.

For many years, I never understood why anyone would side with petty tyrants. Now I think I see one of the original, primal reasons. As noted earlier, some people don’t have much inside them once you take away their flag, their church, or any other external association they have in their lives. These people don’t have much of an individual character of their own. They are threatened by those who do. For such people, conformity is their comfort zone. When that is disregarded by others, they feel challenged.

It will be a while yet before we evolve past this. I believe we will, and sooner than many may think.

This individual will be working for the freedom of all. Like any good Capoeirista would.

National Poetry Month 2021 Edition

“Truth is like poetry…and most people fucking hate poetry.”

–Overheard in a Washington, D.C. bar

 

The above quote was the tagline of a meme I saw online and it made me laugh. It has also been said that “even poets hate poetry”. I don’t know who said either of these things, but they make a point. Like Captain America exclaiming “Language!” to admonish a team mate’s choice of words, we are all always editing what we are hearing or reading. We might fixate on a word or turn of phrase that is problematic for us and miss a point that we might not grasp at first glance, but might come to better understand later if we reread the piece, or talk about that topic again.

These statements can’t be literally true, of course. Take song lyrics for example. Songs are simplified poems, and vocal music is hugely popular and influential in every culture. Songs that resonate with people express things that many of us can relate to. So while poetry as a genre in publishing these days may be a niche market, it is still poetic language that drives a lot of what defines our popular culture. Everything from songs by our favorite musicians, the jingles that are still apparently a thing in advertising, great dialogue in movies and television, rhetoric in speeches that are aimed for mass appeal, they all take something from poets. Rhymes, alliteration, similes, the mechanics of the language in these compositions or productions are poetic.

It is interesting that there is this sort of dichotomy, we rarely see a book of poetry on the best seller list among other works, but it does influence so many things. A few years ago I read about a self published volume of poetry entitled “The Princess Saves Herself in This One” and how it had then gone on to be published by Andrews Mcmeel publishing and placed in bookstores. I bought a copy at a Barnes and Noble when I saw it and enjoyed much of it. Those poems were about resilience among other things, and the author clearly worked through some traumas to compose her work. I’ve read glowing reviews and criticisms that completely dismiss that book as bad poetry. The thing is though, it resonated with a lot of people.

What else is there? I can agree with some critiques of a lot of the poetry that I see posted online (and printed in some journals), but I’m also a big fan of e.e. cummings, whose free form shenanigans are well known. Ultimately, all poems are just words on a page. Sometimes I’m just playing with words. I doubt I’m alone in that. But whether it is just wordplay that gives the spark to an idea, or if it is a much more personal experience that the poet is trying to relate, they are still just thoughts put into whatever form seemed most evocative at the time. Dreams given form, as another saying goes.

That includes experimental forms, in my opinion. In some of my e.e. cummings inspired poems, I’ve tried all kinds of things that are way outside the bounds of traditional rhyme schemes. Some have featured backwards text, words spaced out all down a page, some verses left aligned, some right, some centered, some very much not-even-verses, etc. But even in those cases, the idea was the thing. In those cases, what I wanted to do was experiment with the form as much as I wanted to get whatever idea I had across. In some other cases, form brings out better word choices, more interesting detours that you may wind up taking to express the idea in the more fixed format of some rhyme schemes.

As my other favorite poet once said:

“I’ve always been interested in form, maybe because I don’t trust my own spontaneous nature to come up with anything interesting, and form imposes a certain opportunity to get deeper than your first thought. There’s a school of poetry that believes first thought, best thought. That would have condemned me to an inauspicious superficiality if I had followed that, because I don’t have any ideas. Irving Layton once said to me, ‘Leonard is free from ideas.’ I don’t have an idea and I don’t trust my opinions. I think my opinions are second-rate, but when you submit yourself to a form, then something happens and you’re invited to dig deeper into the language and to discard the slogans by which you live, the easy alibis of language and of opinion. And if you’re looking in the Spenserian stanza, for instance—which is a very, very intricate verse form—you have to come up with many rhymes of the same sound; you’re invited to explore realms that you usually don’t get to in ordinary, easy thought. I’ve considered my thought stream extremely uninteresting, and it’s only when I can discard it that I find I can say something that I can get behind.”
–Leonard Cohen

So, either way can lead to magic. Some ideas just catch fire and become something interesting in a flash, some we have to struggle with over and over for many days/weeks/months/years. …decades. However long it takes. Sometimes I’ll borrow a conjoined word from you know who, sometimes I’ll make up my own word. Other occasions may find me on Rhymezone at 2 A.M. while also flipping through an actual thesaurus to find just the right word for one line. You never know. But the idea is the thing.

I mentioned a few of the poets I was reading last year at this time, so I’ll do so again. Be sure to look into some of their work during this years National Poetry Month: Fatimah Asghar, Andrei Codrescu, Billy Collins, Ilya Kaminsky, Amanda Lovelace, Eva Xanthopoulos, Erin Belieu, Sandra Hochman. Also be sure to listen to some songs by Leonard Cohen, Gordon Lightfoot and Bob Dylan.

National Poetry Month

In the spirit of National Poetry Month, I’ll share a few of mine, what ideas or situations inspired them, and which poet’s styles influenced them. When I was growing up, there were books by e.e. cummings, Leonard Cohen, Edgar Allen Poe, Yeats, Frost, Kerouac, Basho, Rumi and others lining the bookshelves. So many styles of poetic expression to explore and learn from. Add to that the books of songs from many of my parents favorite musicians, and the poems and songs in the Lord of the Rings books I started reading at an early age, it’s no wonder I dabble in all these things.

Here are a few of my own, some previously published and others not.

time delay

had I had a handy handle

on anything at the time
my i might have missed
the fallout from the line

whereas

without the wherewithal
to withstand

the demented demolitions
in psycho culture landmines
its
explosion
was
extraordinarily
effing
ERUPTIVE

&

I was quite concussed.

 

“Time delay” received some positive feedback from a literary journal, but was never published til now. It is probably the most obvious which of my influences is at work here. There is a poem in the book “100 Poems” in which e.e. cummings describes a slow motion explosion and that was the part of that poem which inspired this bit of wordplay. In mine, I’m toying with words that begin with the same letter or sound, and describing my allergic reactions to the culture in my country in my younger days. Now, it is safe to say that I do have a handy handle on things. TD was written in 2016.

Intangible

the ghost that walks

through this venerable house

is long past gone

–yet it walks on

 

the places it made for itself

fallen into ruin, crumbling day by day

it dreams old dreams, retraces old steps

where other spirits fade away

 

the deep bells toll

the cemeteries fill

with every other soul

it strides onward still

 

the haunts change

but the fabled weight of ages

finds the stubborn wight unchanged

where other spirits fade away

 

the ghost still roams

through this weird world

it’s long past gone

–yet it walks on

 

the dreams it dreamed for itself

fallen into ruin, crumbling day by day

it finds new places, learns new steps

where other spirits fade away

Intangible first appeared in the Fall 2017 issue of Dark Gothic Resurrected Magazine, and later on Instagram where I posted a picture of the poem in print. It is harder to say which of my favorites influenced this one, and it is about the feeling I’ve sometimes had as I’ve grown older. As friends or family members or people I’ve known pass away, and I’ve somehow kept going, despite some serious situations that might have gone the other way.

“Sonnetra”

Though it flows in the course of honeyed words
Or silent, certain gestures ever thus made
Akin it is to fabled springs in enchanted wards
Ambrosia in our cavernous world of shade
There are two truths that define it forevermore
It may flow from lie and return to lie
It flows in spite our desire that it die
Felt, unfelt--it writes all our tearful lore
In all the days that will define our time
Its storm rolls in, and passes beyond
Ere the days diminish, this much is clear
Hold fast thy course, or by phantom lights steer
Onward, ever onward where thou desires't remain
Above all, have a care, in thy travels here
That thee does it thine way!

“Sonnetra” was one weird idea. The last line came to me first, and the title is kind of a pun. I don’t know where these ideas come from, people…I just roll with them. I’ve only written a few of these in my life, and there is not much call for sonnets these days. It is the age old observation that love sucks, and you might as well just love yourself first and do what you need to do for you. For this one, I really tried to channel Edgar Allen Poe for the style and just to carry the idea to its conclusion. It is obviously a riff off Sinatra’s “I did it my way” and it amused me to imagine either Chris Hemsworth or Tom Hiddleston singing this sonnet to that tune in full Thor regalia. It is almost as “out there” as the poem “Contrast” which appeared here some time ago.

So, there you are. Just some poems to celebrate National Poetry Month. One day, they will all be part of a collection, even the weird ones. Until then, I recommend some of the other poets I’ve been reading lately. Billy Collins, Andrei Codrescu, Erin Belieu, and Sandra Hochman.

Poetry can be profound in a few lines. Three, or one hundred and three. It is also sometimes just fun to play with words. It is great to read at any time, but is especially helpful if you find yourself in a rut. Then you can turn to the mystical musings of Rumi, or just experience the raw thoughts of someone else, and see your own humanity reflected in whatever kind of fun house mirror that person has going on. If nothing else, it will probably give you ideas.

The “Other” other story project

A few nights ago I printed out the first script of the story drafts of  another project I am working on whenever time allows. This is an A/V project that I hope one day to film and put out there. It has a diverse set of influences, so the project will involve an original Urban Fantasy storyline, some martial arts choreography, a design aesthetic inspired by Steampunk/Cyberpunk–but is neither, and  a few other experiments I’d like to see happen with special fx and drone footage.

This will be an Indie project, and I am hoping to be involved in every aspect of its development and production so I can learn as much as possible. One of the first steps I am going to take after finishing the next two scripts, is to show them to two of my old martial arts teachers who have both worked on multiple Kung Fu movies and get their opinion on what challenges we might face in realizing the vision for the story on screen. After that, I’ll be moving on to working out the specifics of some of the choreographed fight scenes I’ve been imagining, and commissioning some more high level concept art of some of the design elements that will be well beyond my ability to create.

For now it’s just one of the stories I am working on. When I take the binder with the first three episodes of the story to my advisers for feedback, it will start to become a much more ambitious project with multiple collaborators. I’m looking forward to that.

The story has been building itself in my mind for  a few years now. It has influences from Babylon 5, to the Dresden Files, Bruce Lee movies, Warehouse 13, and some very impressive Indie productions that made themselves look amazing with very little capital behind them. The quality of independently produced entertainment has skyrocketed in recent years. From DSLR cameras that can film cinema quality imagery, to special FX software that is more affordable than ever, effects that were very high end years ago can now be replicated at your house with enough time and effort. It’s an amazing time to be alive!

When it reaches the point that it is more than an idea I have in development at the hacienda, I’ll be sure to let everyone know. Whatever form the project takes, once it’s more than just me and the narrative of the story, it will get its own social media channels, website, and whatever else it needs to reach the audience that might enjoy it. Until then, it may be the subject of the occasional blog topic, because there is a lot that goes into realizing a story in film. One of my primary motivators in considering the idea was that there would be so much to learn, and the opportunity to collaborate with other artists in a variety of areas to realize the story in a multimedia format. That, to me, is inspiring. In this story I have much more to look forward to than just sitting alone in a room pouring words onto a page. There will be other people involved! I hope I remember how to talk to people that aren’t only in my head. That could help. 🙂

Now that I’ve blogged about it, I have to get back to writing the first draft of the next script and then get back to work on the second novel that is making itself difficult for me to finish.

Until next time, true believers!

 

7/7/17

Today is an empty box on the calendar. It’s Friday, which is great, but nothing is scheduled to happen today.

Things that are in the process of happening:

Writing the first of the final chapters in novel #2.
The Nook release of Hidden Leaves will be soon.
Ten poems are out on submission, five are ‘in progress’ in Submittable.
Three scripts are complete in another project. (Story drafts)

My first beta reader has read through all of my current manuscript and pronounced it good. She reads a lot of mysteries, and her comments were encouraging. It’s important to me that it works as a mystery, leaving aside the elements of the story that are more urban fantasy or paranormal. There will be a few more beta readers added after the manuscript is complete.

That’s it!

Time for more coffee and typing.

I hope everyone has a great Friday and an even better weekend.