So since I’m closing submission to the first issue of Red Dirt Review today, I figured I would be spending my evenings this week working on that project. Then Special K reminded me that it’s time to do another recording session for The Gambling Tales Podcast, so that’ll fill in one evening. Then I checked my calendar and saw that there’s a meeting of the Charlotte Writer’s Club Tuesday night, so that’s another evening. And Reservior Dogs opens Thursday, and I’m reviewing it for Charlotte Viewpoint, so another evening is occupied. Just Do It is taking place this Friday at Theatre Charlotte, so that night’s full as well. And there’s a poker game Saturday night. And I’m driving to Atlanta Sunday to get there in time to cover the Sunday Warm-Up for the PokerStars Blog.
Yup, life’s getting pretty much back to normal, which means I’m busier than a one-armed paperhanger. I did manage to get some submissions of my work ready this weekend, and sent a bunch of stuff out. I’ve been using Duotrope’s Digest to search through a bajillion places online that accept poetry, and I’ve started limiting myself a bit. As I get rejections (and a few acceptances) I’ve decided to start only sending out the stuff I feel the best about. I know that seems like a no-brainer, but in the rush to get submissions going, the temptation to send out mediocre product is pretty overwhelming. But that dilutes the brand, and since I am my brand, I need to make every effort not to have stuff out on the world that isn’t my best work. Unless it’s here, because it’s almost acceptable to be mediocre on your own blog. Almost.
So as I clear my current round of submissions, I’m going to focus on sending out fewer packets and making them stronger submissions. I’ve found that when I send out stuff that I feel really good about, it’s just a matter of finding the right market for them. For example, two poems that I wrote and got rejected from their initial 2-3 submissions I still felt were really good poems, so I kept slinging them out there until I found a place where they would stick. Dancing with Fireflies was picked up by Victorian Violet Press, along with a reprint of Gingham, from Returning the Favor.Those should run in their May issue. Now I might be the last person you’d expect to have a poem in something called the Victorian Violet Press, but the stuff they run makes them a very good fit for those particular pieces. And Deuce Coupe has picked up another of my poems, called Death of a Small-Town Sports Hero, which I really like because I think I got the imagery right in there. I’m not sure when it’s running, but it’ll be soon. Their turnaround time on responses and publication is pretty super-fast.
Now both of these poems had been initially rejected by the places I first sent them to, but I really felt good about the pieces, so I kept on plugging. But as I received a few rejection letters this weekend, I started to realize that I had submitted some things that even I didn’t like! So no wonder they weren’t getting picked up. So I created another sub-folder in my Writing folder, labeled “Meh,” for stuff that I’m done with, but I’m just not crazy about.
Oh yeah, folders. That’s how I work on stuff. I tend to hand-write my first drafts, because it just feels better to do it that way, a little more visceral. Then I type it into Word (I save everything as a .doc because some folks can’t open .docx, and it just saves me a step) and put it into a folder labelled Work in Progress. Then I typically let it stew for a day or week or whatever, until I get on an editing binge, and go back over and tweak things. Very, very few pieces do I consider ready to send out after just the second draft. The typing bit always turns into a revision phase as well as a transcription phase, which is probably another subconscious reason for creating the process that way. Even the pieces that I do think are finished after the second revision usually go through one or two passes in that draft.
So once I’ve gone back to a piece in the Work in Progress folder, and polished that turd until it shines, I move it into a folder labeled Ready for Prime Time, which in my head means it’s ready to be submitted. Once it’s submitted, if it’s sent to a place that allows simultaneous submissions (and unless the venue is typically very cool or very fast, I only submit to sim/sub venues) it goes into a folder that reflects that. If I send it to a venue that doesn’t accept sim/subs, it goes into another folder. Then I log the submission into an excel spreadsheet with the title, venue and date submitted. Once I get a response, I update that info and date into the spreadsheet.
If a piece is rejected, I take a look at it again to see if I think it needs more polish, and if I don’t think so, it goes back into the submit file. If it’s accepted, it goes into the Accepted folder. So this whole process takes some time to manage, and sometimes I get carried away in the whirlwind of that mess and forget to write and polish. So I’m going to cut down on my volume of submissions to no more than three submissions per week, and focus on only sending out work that is a solid representation of what I want out in the world with my name on it. After all, I have a blog to post drivel on, right?
But still, if my unspoken goal for the year was to have one piece accepted each month, and I’ve had seven acceptance letters by mid-February, I think we might be doing okay on our plan.
So last night I went to the monthly Open Mike night at Jackson’s Java hosted by Jonathan Rice of Iodine Poetry Journal, just to check it out and see what I thought. I took several pieces to read and figured I’d gauge the vibe and decide what to read by how things were going. Several people were working the Valentine’s Day thing, so I decided to go in a different direction. I read “Beer Goggles,” which is a piece that currently has found no love from any of the places that I’ve submitted it to, but is very popular whenever I perform it, which just goes to show that what works on the page may have little or no connection to what works in live performance. I also did a piece called “Better Home” from Returning the Favor, which I’m always a little nervous about performing live. It requires me to sing a couple of segments of the poem, and since I can’t carry a tune in a bucket I always feel like I’m taking the audience’s life into my hands when I perform the piece. But both pieces were very well-received, and I sold three books before the night was done, so that was great! I also swapped a book with Jessie for a copy of one of her chapbooks, which is good for both of us.
Here’s a video of “Better Home” that I recorded a few nights ago in my home office.
But I had a good time at the Open Mike and will definitely be back next month. Everyone was very welcoming, very supportive, and generally very good. I was concerned about the quality when I first arrived, because it’s hard to know going in what the level of suck will be at any open mike event, but there were only a few people all night that I thought couldn’t really write, and one of the best ways for them to improve is to be exposed to better writers. Several folks weren’t terribly good performers, but I might be a little bit of a snob there, with 20 years of theatre in my background. But most people were pretty good, and one girl in particular did a slam-style memorized piece that was just beautiful and made me wish I’d done video of the whole night so I could catch her performance.
She was one of only two people of color at the event, and it only reinforced the sense I’m developing about where poetry is sitting today. It seems like white people write their stuff down and read it out loud, while brown people tend to memorize their stuff and perform it. My friend Q is a member of the Charlotte Slam Team, and has been to the National Poetry Slam several times, and he’s one of the best poets I know. But I don’t know that he submits stuff to magazines and websites because I don’t know how much his stuff works in a written format. Watching him perform is fantastic, but if there’s no bridge between slam poetry and traditional written poetry, where is it all going to go? There are a lot of poetry events all around Charlotte every week, but they all seem to happen at clubs (and too late for me on school nights) that cater to a more typically African-American crowd. So I guess here’s my question – is performed poetry a “black thing” nowadays? Does that leave written poetry to be a “white thing?” And where does that leave people like me, white folks who are performers and writers? Is there a middle ground to bring the slam poets and the written poets together?
I hope all that doesn’t get me in John Mayer-esque trouble, but it’s kinda where my head is at with trying to figure out how to make poetry more vital to people’s everyday life.
So I’m a list guy. Not because I’m particularly organized, but because I’m not. I’m a scatterbrain, and I understand and frankly revel in this facet of my character. But because I also have a job, and a wife and other things that require me to actually sometimes finish a task, I became a list guy.
I’m also a whiteboard guy, but that’s just because sometimes I need to see the flow of information to understand how all the electrons are going to get from Point A to Point B in the stuff I design. The addition of a 4×8 whiteboard to the wall of my office is one of the greatest things to happen since I got the dual monitor setup. But I digress.
So since I’m a list guy, and since I have multiple aspects of my life, I’m a multiple list guy. And since I’m a technology geek, I use EverNote to manage my lists. I wrote really briefly about this yesterday, and the Doc made mention of it on his blog, so I figured I’d go a little more in-depth into why I think this free application is the best thing since sliced bread.
Basically EverNote is just a list of lists, and a way to manage them. But it is a living document that syncs between the application on my computer, my EverNote online account, so I can access it from any computer anywhere, and my phone, so I can access any of my lists even when I’m not near any computers.
I keep multiple lists at all times, for the different pieces of my life. One is a shopping list, which reminds me that I need to buy cotton balls. So I just open up the shopping list on the desktop and add cotton balls. Now when I get off work and go to the store, I can call up the shopping list using the app on my phone, and cotton balls will be added to the list. Easy-peasy, as they say. It’s not like it’s anything earth-shattering, but I’ve found it very useful to keep track of all my lists, and cut down on the number of annoying scraps of paper I’m carrying around. You can find it online here.
My newest scheme to actually get most of my work done, or at least be able to make some headway on my To-Do list each day (and really, if you don’t use Evernote for a to-do list that syncs between web, desktop and phone, I don’t know how you get anything done – ever) is to put things off. Well, thing, really. Namely, lunch.
You see, it might surprise the two people that ever come by here that I don’t know personally, but I’m a big fatass. And as a big fatass, I like to eat. So once I eat, especially in the winter months, I shift into my best impersonation of Fatassus Grizzliursus, or the sleepy-assed fat grizzy bear dude. So my productivity goes deep into the shitter after lunch. So this week, as I’ve been trying to play catch up after being home with Suzy for a week, I’ve been putting lunch off later and later. In addition to actually getting more work done, this has the added beneficial side effect of making the afternoon seem shorter, which is always a bonus.
The down side is that I’m not hungry early in the evening, which leads to eating a later dinner, which is not good for my other ongoing project – reducing the status of big fatass. I lost a few pounds last week when I wasn’t eating much, and now I’m just trying to inflict a little portion control on myself and get my gluttony under control. I also started lifting weights again, and I was so sore last week I could barely lift my hands to shoulder level. This week is a little better, so I’ll try to add a little more each week until I get back in a shape that isn’t completely round.
Last night I went to a local Tweetup, which was an interesting mix of web types, artsy types and elected officials. Everyone was nice, and I met a few people that were actually interesting, but it was a lot of people in a small space, which I don’t do well with at all. I left early, but enjoyed it. Unfortunately I likely won’t go back due to the level of discomfort that environments like that leave me in.
What I haven’t talked a lot about here, is at all, is that I really don’t do well in loud, crowded environments. When I was in college, I worked summers at the local amusement park’s amphitheatre, running spotlight for the bands that came through. I loved the gig, had a blast, saw some great concerts, but the cost was part of my hearing. Because of the way the intercoms were rigged, I lost part of the hearing in my left ear. I don’t hear the higher registers very well, and it’s a situation that’s exacerbated in noisy situations. My right ear is fine, so if you’re around me in a noisy room or at a loud concert, you’ll notice that I try to put you on my right side. I also try to do that at crowded restaurants, because otherwise I’m not going to be able to hear some of the conversation, and I hate to feel left out or that I’m ignoring someone.
This is pretty easy to deal with in a group of lighting people, because better than half my compatriots have some level of hearing loss. It’s just a matter of us lining up our “good ears” and having a pleasant evening. Since we all understand that it’s not a personal slight, but a physical malady, no offense is ever taken. But around folks with normal hearing, especially if you aren’t profoundly deaf and have none of the speech markers that go along with that, people think you’re just not paying attention, or worse, lying about it. Or women don’t understand why you’re leaning in so close when they talk, and think you’re getting in their personal space. It’s not any of that, it’s just that I can’t hear you. It’s embarrassing, and it’s a lengthy explanation when the inevitable “what happened” comes along, and that’s also embarrassing because it boils down to “I was young and stupid and thought that ear protection was for pussies so now I can’t hear out of one ear.”
So there are certain environments that I just avoid, and last night’s Tweetup, although pleasant for the company, was one of the environments that I’ll probably pass on in the future. So now you know why I don’t go to Haufbrauhaus, no matter how much I like the food or company, and why I can’t handle some other places or types of events.
Suzy’s improving every day – thanks to everyone who has emailed, called, visited or sent well wishes!
Yeah, that’s what I’m running around like lately. Despite the feminist nature of my wife, and the irrefutable fact that I hold true that men and women should be treated as equals, I seriously live in the Cleaver household. I go to work, bring the paycheck home each week, and when I come home I sit down in the den watching TV, while Suzy cooks dinner and brings it to me. She then sits with me while we eat, and then she cleans up. It’s not the most 21st-century of partnerships, but she takes care of everything in the house, and I go to work. It works for us, so don’t judge until you take a few minutes to think about how really fair the arrangement is. Suzy doesn’t work outside the home unless she wants to do a show. So her job is to keep the house. I go to work, and pick up a fair amount of work on the side, and in exchange for that I don’t have to clean up shit around the house.
Until my wife gets sick and can’t clean up. So now I’m living like most of my friends do – working a full-time job and cleaning house when I get home each night. And let me tell you, this shit gets old fast. Tonight I have a Honey-do list half a page long just to stay on top of things, and if Bonnie hadn’t stayed with us last weekend I don’t think it would have been possible at all. Having someone to do laundry while I was doing dishes let me get ahead, and I’ve managed to (barely) stay there. So my writing time is pretty limited, because when I get home I’m dealing with feeding the two of us, then cleaning up after dinner, then laundry, then at some point I need to make a run to Target to refill a prescription and pick up a couple of things, then maybe late tonight I can sit still long enough to scribble a little. And I understand that this is how single people, or people with working spouses, live all the time, so I’m not asking for sympathy. It’s just an adjustment for me, and I figure that about the time I get used to this, she’ll be healthy again and things will start to get back to normal.
In unrelated news, check out Jessie Carty’s blog for my video of Gingham, which is available in Returning the Favor. I’ve pretty much decided to wait until I sell down to about 10 copies, then order another 30 copies. They come packaged in 15-copy units, so that just seems to make sense to me. Unless there’s another monthly deal at Lulu that makes it more reasonable to buy more copies. But nothing right now, because I don’t have anything in the immediate future that will put me in a position to sell many copies, and I don’t need to have them sitting on the shelf.
Also, Red Dirt Review submissions are open until Monday, so send me an email with some good stuff in there. Bam Bam and Dr. Chako will both be featured in this inaugural issue, so join the cool kids!
Seems like that’s what adulthood (ick) is all about, right? Questions that you don’t really have an answer for. At least, that’s what a blog is for, anyway. So my current conundrum is book copies. I have 25 copies left of the original print run of Returning the Favor, which I’m pretty happy about. I’ve given a bunch away as Christmas gifts, given a few away in trade at book shows, and sold enough to recoup about 75% of the total printing and ISBN registration costs. I have one reading scheduled for April, and not a lot else in the way of readings coming up. Since I don’t sell more than five or so copies of the book per reading, I think I’m good for a while, but I don’t know how many copies I should keep on hand. What do you guys think? Does anybody out there have any idea how many copies of a book I should keep around? Lulu does a pretty good job of filling orders quickly, so it’s not like I can’t go out and get more with two weeks’ notice.
And while you’re giving me the benefit of your countless wisdom, my poem Deployed has been published over at Camroc Press Review. Check it out. The whole publishing thing is kinda funny. When I first started this escapade, I vaguely dreamed that if I could write one poem per week and maybe in my wildest dreams get one published each month, then I’d have 52 poems and 12 publications under my belt at the end of a year. So far this year I’ve had four poems accepted in the first five weeks of the year, and I’ve churned out way more than one poem per week. So I’m really happy with how that’s going, now I need to see where, if anywhere, it takes me.
Not of strangers, it hasn’t been that kind of a Blanche DuBois weekend, but of my friends and relatives for sure. I’ve always wondered a little at the Southern tradition of bringing food over at the home of the sick and the deceased, and that’s largely because I’ve never really dealt with being the one in the house dealing with all the shit that goes on with a sick partner. So the fact that our friends have supplied meals all weekend has been a huge help, more than I could ever explain to anyone that hasn’t been there. And I will never scoff at the casserole again. The ability to make a meal, meat, veggies and sides, into one dish and carry it someplace now seems nigh-miraculous to me.
Bonnie (my sister, who half-raised me) came up and stayed with us from Friday until this afternoon, and she helped with a lot of the little bits of cleaning that Suzy wasn’t able to get to before her surgery. Because God forbid anyone come into the house without it being cleaned from top to bottom first! And I am not exactly the domestic deity that my wife is. Honestly, I think I may have run the dishwasher more this weekend than in the first 14 years of our marriage combined.
But I gotta say, the people who have come by and brought food are saints among men and women. I couldn’t have made it through this weekend without a hellacious takeout bill otherwise, and I can’t thank them enough. I thought the road was going to smooth out when we got home, but I forgot about that whole split-level house thing. So the first night I must have made 20 trips from the den (bottom floor) to the bedroom (top floor) and back. But yesterday Suzy made it down to the den a couple of times, and she’s comfortable ensconced on the couch in front of the big TV right now as we wait for out last planned dinner to arrive. I’m still exhausted every night when I go to bed, because this whole nursemaid shit is not exactly my scene, so much so that I’m looking forward to going back to work tomorrow!
But her recovery is coming along incredibly well, especially for someone who had a defective organ the size of a football removed from her abdomen. She’s experienced very little pain, and is navigating steps like a champ. I still think our road trip in 3 weeks is probably off the table, but that’s a trip we can make at any later time – great thing about a road trip, the road will still be there. Ah crap – time to eat – I’ll finish this drivel later. Essentially – THANKS to everybody!
My poem Santa Fix, about a dysfunctional Christmas, was recently published in Deuce Coupe. I like this blog/journal because it tends to run edgier stuff, so I’m hoping it will be an outlet for some darker work for me. Not all poetry is pretty, and it’s a great thing to have outlets for the raw material.
Today is better than yesterday – her mobility is improved a lot and her pain is more manageable. She’s off IV painkillers and onto oral drugs, so she’s in a little more pain, but nothing that she can’t handle. She’s moving almost normally, and I don’t think there will be any problem with getting her home tomorrow. Her staples can come out tomorrow, and that’s basically the only thing keeping her here.
Then the challenges with living at home will begin. Obviously most folks don’t think about recovering from surgery when they’re picking out a home, but just for the record, a split-level is not the way to go. No matter what you wanna do, there are stairs involved. Now if we were a little smarter, we would have set the guest bedroom up downstairs, so that Suzy could move between the guest room and the den, but no, that’s my office. So we’re trying to figure out if she’ll be more comfortable spending most of her time downstairs or up in the bedroom. I’m guessing it’s going to be downstairs, just because that’s way more convenient for visitors to sit. It’s not like we’ve got a lot chairs in our bedroom. So I think most of her waking time will be downstairs, which is okay, because she can sit or recline either in the recliner or on the sofa, and there’s a little dorm fridge down there for snacks and stuff. My sister is coming up tomorrow to stay a couple of days and help out, and friends have volunteered to bring over dinner Saturday and Sunday (tomorrow night’s dinner is still available if any of you have an overwhelming desire to feed people).
The outpouring of well-wishes through Twitter and Facebook has been simply amazing, and we appreciate the flowers (and yes, Otis, I will provide photos of me drinking beer out of the smiley-face mug). This has been a rough week, but all of you guys have made it a lot easier. So thanks. A lot.
This poem started life as a piece of a song that came to me in a dream, and I suppose I should be thankful it was as short as it turned out to be, since the last thing I wrote off a dream ended up around 65,000 words. I’m not sure where it’s going, but I think there’s something in there. Let me know what you think.
Homecoming
And I’m not. Except in an SEO-building post title, because I’m a traffic whore.
So things yesterday could have gone better, but I don’t fault Suzy’s doctor for the things that went wrong. The plan was to perform a laproscopic hysterectomy, which would reduce her recovery time and leave her with only two small incisions on her abdomen, one in her bellybutton and one on her side. The ovaries would be left in place unless there appeared to be something wrong with them once the docs were able to make the judgement on site, as it were.
Well, the best laid plans and all that. Once the surgery began, the docs realized that due to the healing from a myomectomy Suzy had six years ago when she had several uterine fibroids removed (the largest was a benign tumor the size of a baseball) there were adhesions going on inside her abdominal cavity. Basically what happened (or at least as it was explained to me) was that as scar tissue formed from the myomectomy, the bowel, bladder and other things kinda stuck to the uterus with the tendrils of scar tissue. That made is very crowded in there, and in the process of trying to remove these adhesions, the surgeon cut Suzy’s bladder.
On the one hand, that’s a bad thing. On the other hand, if you are given a choice between having your bladder cut during surgery and your bowel, you’re going to take the bladder 100 times out of 100. So when that happened, the docs went ahead and opened her up to fix the bladder and finish the surgery. The decision was made at that time to remove her ovaries as well as her uterus to prevent the potential for ovarian cancer, because if they had to go back in later the risks would be pretty dramatic. So they removed her uterus, ovaries and cervix, fixed her bladder and sewed her back up. This added an hour to her recovery, and will lead to a recovery time of more than a month, with Suzy having to tote around a catheter bag for the next couple of weeks.
Now in our litigious society, one of the first questions that comes to mind is “can I sue anyone over this?” I don’t feel like there’s a real “yes” anywhere. Of course I could sue, but I don’t think there’s much point. Medical malpractice isn’t the same thing as an accident. If I’d smelled whiskey on the doc when he came out to tell me about the bladder problem, I’d have a lawyer already. But I didn’t. I honestly believe that this guy became a doctor to make people feel better, and to help improve and lengthen their lives. I honestly believe that he made a mistake in his procedure, just like people screw up at work every day, and the mistake was in not immediately reverting to an open incision when he saw the adhesions he had to deal with. But he made that mistake with my wife’s best interests at heart, and in the interests of shortening her recovery time and causing her less pain. And I can tell by the look on his face today when he saw her up and moving around and already on solid foods, that he feels like he dodged a bullet with this one, and that she is really healing much faster than he expected.
So while I’m probably not going to go out of the way to recommend him as Surgeon of the Year, I’m also not going to pillory the man, either. He’s got a motherfucker of a job, and I don’t begrudge him that one. But at the end of the day, Suzy’s going to be fine. She’ll be here in Presbyterian Hospital, room 767 until Friday, and then we’ll take her home where she’ll be on bed rest for another week before she’s back to doing much, but after that it will be life pretty much as usual. So that’s where we are, and where I am, and why I’m there. So thanks for all the Facebook messages, and tweets and emails and texts, I really appreciate it.
Join my Email list & get a FREE Quincy Harker Short Story!
Become a Patron!
Get Awesome Gear!
Get Signed Books Sent to Your Home!
The Misfit Toys of Fiction!
Custom USB Drives
Categories
This website uses affiliate links. Clicking on links to products may result in me getting a kickback from the site that you buy stuff from. It doesn’t cost you anything extra, and I get paid a little. So thanks!
