Tuesday the 13th

Not much to report today. I’ve been going through boxes, trying to trim down my collections of old junk. It was a failed effort for the most part.

It was part of a larger failed plan. You see, I have this urge to put together a new manuscript of poems to send out for some of the fall contests, but I don’t have enough poems and don’t have time to write enough. Or…I do have enough poems, but I don’t have enough in any single collection.

I’m not sure who made the rule, but after the first book, you have to think like that. You can’t push random samplings of your work out there for the rest of your life. You have to start organizing them into collections that make some sort of sense as collections.

Currently, I have three different new collections started, but I don’t have enough in any one collection to constitute a book length manuscript. That’s why I got this idea that I’d double up on housework and writing by culling poetic material from old notebooks.

Fail.

My old notebooks are full of crap. I hope never to have to admit to writing any of that stuff. No poems to be stolen from myself there.

I did, however, read a random journal entry that made me laugh.

My friend Shelley and I once spent 15 minutes waiting on the wrong side of the road for the bus because we couldn’t figure out which side it would be driving on. This was a rip roaring hilarious experience for us according to the one existing account.

I assume it happened in England where buses do pick you up on the other side of the road, but I won’t rule out the possibility that it may have happened in Oklahoma where Shelley and I both lived at the time. I’ve done stranger things than that right here in Mississippi.

Meanwhile I’m resigning myself to the fact that I’m not going to write 30 pages worth of new poetry in the next few weeks. But that’s okay, I still have a house to clean and an embarrassingly non-literary novel to blog.

Look for Chapter 2 on Friday. I even wrote that on my calendar: “Blog Chapter 2.”

In which case, I better quit messing around with arranging poems and get busy working on some fluff fiction.