ENGL 024

My fantastic 024 class needed to be introduced to a blog. I'm showing them how to set it up. Say hi, class. Be sure to comment on this blog to get extra points.

Sailing, sailing, over the bounding main...

After a long wait, Duckworks, an online magazine for boat builders published "Down to the Sea in Ships". Check it out at www.duckworksmagazine.com. I've been waiting for months to see it online. It seems so long ago since I wrote it. I started to re-read it but I began seeing flaws, better ways to say it, etc., This is what it means to let it go, I suppose. Good-bye little story! Have a great life on the internet! Be well, be read, be enjoyed! The magazine has a very dedicated readership of back-yard boat builders. Now I need to figure out how to place it in the CV. This also gives new drive to get other stories out.

A tad ticked

Ticked at the FW paper that lists subsidy press publications along with legitimate press publication. For those who try to write and get published through regular channels have a rough time of it as is. Then they ran a release for "new authors" which should have been an add instead of an announcement. Pity the writers who show up and find they have to pay to get in print. And yes, I've heard of Thoreau and Grisham and all the other "successful" self-publishers, but that doesn't make it any less than a scam. Warn writers of these places before they end up in POD hell.

Accepted-I hope

Grace? Dame Fortune? God?
My first novel, a YA fantasy has been accepted by a small press--Blue Pomegranate Press. They're a start-up with a focus on Lutheran fiction, so my book is a perfect fit. No advance, but 20% royalties. Limited press run (OK the editor and his wife make the books by hand.) He has a marketing plan and has tapped into enough interested folks to buy.
This is in the early stages. More later as it develops.

From prose to poetry

A statement of the obvious: Prose and poetry are different. This mind-shattering verity hit me while I've been trying to compose a poem for an upcoming class. In prose, I could catch the wave of the story line ride the crest from one part to the next. The narrative would become alive as the characters gave it life. Composing this poem has involved more wrestling with the words. Through poetry the importance of a give word takes on a new importance. Each word bears many facets to the work, like the sound and shape, the history of use, the denotation and connotation, its ethnic and cultural heritage. Anglo Saxon or Latinized Old French? Concrete or abstract? Rich or poor? A recent migrant word or an ancient word with rooted meaning? A native or alien word? Hand-cuffs, manacles, shackles, restraints all do the same thing but use the word and see the difference. No neutrality exists.
For the poem I'm working on I have a beginning and an end. First line: St. Joe bleeds his martyrdom... Last line: Fort Wayne drinks up, unknowing. The middle has yet to be written, and that is what I'm wrestling with.
It will be written on time, to be reworked.
This poetry experience should be a good one.

Busyness

I've almost finished a basement renovation project: doing the room from top to bottom with new ceiling tiles, fresh wall paint, and laminate flooring to mask the error of asbestos tile. The task has held my focus through Christmas break and nothing else got done. It was a way of keeping distracted in activity. I have a habit of distraction. One of my favorite websites is Duckworks, an online magazine for amateur boat builders. I keep checking it because they are going to be running one of my stories. At least that is the reason I delude myself with. The truth is, I spend far too much time looking over boat building projects in the fantastical hope that I'll build one. I went so far as to buy a set of plans. Why the obsession? Perhaps a childhood dream of having a boat, the romance that comes with a boat. A boat symbolizes freedom, regardless of size. Of the two I built two summers past, neither hold more than two people and each carries freedom in its hold. The lone fisherman in a boat on a lake is different than a fisherman on the bank casting a line from shore. The one on the shore is land-locked, tethered to the earth. The one in the boat embraces the fluidity of freedom and can follow the water course wherever it leads.
Looking over boat plans also keeps me from other work, work avoidance, avoiding what else I could be doing, which includes writing. But writing is also a way of freedom. And I want to be free.

The decade ends and?

The decade ends in less than 24 hours. So what? We measure off time in neat and tidy increments that exist only in our creation of them. Millenia, centuries, decades, years, months, weeks, days, hours, minutes, seconds, nanoseconds. Time chopped in order to be measured and then discussed. And all of this created by us for our discussion. Does our dog know of time? Not even days or nights seem to matter to him. At midnight he might want to play as much as he does at noon. He dozes in the sun with the same alacrity as he does in the dark. Does he mark his years in ways other than the grey on his chin? Perhaps he knows of seasons. Seasons are independent of our timekeeping. The equinoxes and solstices happen of their own accord but the date of winter is open. When does weather's winter begin? The first killing frost? The first dusting of snow? Or must it be at least half of an inch and then stay on the ground past mid-day? What of summer? What marks the beginning of summer? Not the coming of green, that's for spring. Not the return of the robin for that too is spring. When then summer? The first time the temperature rises above 90? But then, temperature is another one of our ways of measuring by increments.
In all this I've been remarkably impersonal. My blog speaks little of me and mainly of what? Time and it's measurements. Perhaps it is because right now I feel old. I've been on my hands and knees all day wrestling with a laminate floor. The joints and muscles ache and I don't relish tomorrow's long drive to my sister-in-law's New Year's Eve party. Four hours there. A celebration. Four hours back. It has become part of the tradition. Repeat an event three times and it becomes a tradition. Some traditions are put upon me and I merely accept them. Or put up with them. As as midwesterner I've the talent of putting up with a remarkable number of things. Put up with and go along instead of making waves, rocking the boat, causing the discomfort of breaking the status quo.
My decade? The last or the future. Right now I sit at the midpoint between, having only past and future, lacking the present. The last decade brought many changes and shifts in life plans. Where I began is a far cry from where I ended. Somewhere, ten years ago, I was a Lutheran pastor serving congregations in western Iowa and I thought myself content. That was an illusion. Now I've returned to what I once was, only different: writer, student, teacher, occassional pastor, almost as if the past two decades didn't happen. My body tells me that right now. Ten years past, and more are in the future. I feel melancholy.