Grumpus Fail, Novel Scheming, Poetic Reunion

My post this week won’t be nearly as ebullient as last weeks. I’m no longer riding the high of having sewn a tote bag from scratch, (although I’m still exceedingly pleased with myself) and I’m grumpy about my knee, which has lead me to feel grumpy about a whole host of other related injustices that I have made up in my head, having to do with our generally able-ist society and our ingrained attitude that health equals moral virtue, and how the reason why I’ve never been able to get proper treatment for my knee is because it’s not quite damaged enough to be profitable. But I’m suddenly out of energy to rant about any of those things, so on to other topics.

I managed to steel my girders and sail a few more hopeless novel queries into the void yesterday. Since the beginning of the year, I have sent out a total of twenty-two queries, which I understand from my online research is a laughably low number. I’ve read about authors who send out as many as twenty-five a week as a matter of course, but I just don’t have that kind of strength. In the far reaches of my mind, I have dimly considered the possibility of submitting it for a Kindle Scout campaign. I did some more research this weekend, and the possibility has moved from the realm of “vague pipe dream” to “option under serious consideration”. But there is a lot of pre-work to be done on the social media front, and if it gets selected for a campaign, I will have to nag all of you to go and vote on it, and I dread being that person. The whole thing just seems completely exhausting. But it might be worth a shot. It’s not like anything else I’m doing is moving the needle.

In the meantime, I’ve been slowly weed-whacking my way back into poetry. I think writing the novel may have helped make me a better editor of my own poetry. I was ruthless with a poem I wrote last weekend and whittled it down to three lines, with a nothing but a cold eye towards perfection. It will now need some beefing back up, but I’m perfectly happy with those three lines. The rest of it could easily go. I’ve also been reading poetry again, and appreciating it. I still get a Poem-A-Day in my e-mail box, and I’ve been enjoying them rather than dreading them. I used to save every single Poem-A- Day, but I stopped doing that recently. Instead I made a folder called “Poems Worth Saving” and I save the ones I like best from the week in there. The first one to go into to the folder was a poem called “Reason” by Robin Coste-Lewis, which pretty much sums up my feelings about God, especially the last two lines. You can read it here. (It’s short.)

--Kristen McHenry