From 10-19

Ok. I'm a mess. I'm trying to rid my apartment of an avalanche of clutter, including tons of paper from my lawyer and social work student years. Which means ridding myself of 25 years of my life. So I got rid of 3 big boxes of my lawyer identity today. But there's more. You know how lawyers go on and on and on. And social workers too. And the personal shit: old bills, old love and loathe letters, birthday cards and biz cards from people whose names I can't recall, etc. etc. --- the detritus of life. I MUST be ruthless. Actually, I had a brilliant aunt named Ruth and she died way too early, so I've been Ruthless for years. Ok. Bad joke. No joke. Ruth was picked to appear on the $60,00O Question quizshow way back sometime during the last century, category Charles Dickens. She never made it to the limelight, as someones discovered the show was rigged. Of course. There was this great film about the show. Brilliant. Which reminds me YOU MUST SEE CAPOTE. MUST. I'm not a raver about films, just about idyot fascistic greedy evil bastards, but always armed with enough evidence to sink a tanker. So take this as an excellent recommendation.

I'm frazzled. I think this is my blog, but I haven't created it yet. Ok, another thing to do. Oh, I wonder how writers have the time to do blogs. So fashionable. Now I'm feeling like Andy Rooney. I often do. Andy and Groucho and Harpo and Gertrude Stein and Dorothy Parker and Margaret Cho and Sammy Beckett and Lily Tomlin. There. My true self is now revealed. Thrilling, isn't it?

Spent a couple of hours with a Mad Hatter subber yesterday rewriting the first stanza/par of the poem we'd accepted. Working sporatically on my play. Dillydallying. At workshop last night going through the beginning of my novel, 5-6 pages at a time each session (sounds like a therapy), getting lots of laughs (doesn't sound like therapy), panicking cause I think I'll have to join that NANO thing to finish the damn thing but if I do, I'll die a thousand deaths from anxiety attacks and I'll never be able to discipline myself to write all those words everyday, with these nutty characters driving the Edsel.

Ok. Today let's see. I started a new, unexpected bunch of rhyming fables... consisting of no more than one sentence each --- call them fables from limerick. Getting more and more absurd. Getting back to the play, which is taking turns I didn't expect; never know what the characters are going to come up with --- hey, it's not my life, it's theirs! Involved in discussions with an editor who accepted a piece and an editor who didn't. Thinking up a potentially very publishable collaborative project with the former; trying to bend the mind/heart/psych perspective of the other.

The Ed of a mag I was targeting implicitly dissed one of her editors who was pushing my story, "She was a Bellydancer; He was a Canadian Mountiem" by saying it was good but obviously not good enough for her, so many subs rattatat, so I'm yet again trying to figure out where to sub the story... lyrical and whimsical, with coinciding currents of "realism" and "magic realism." tough to place. Sent it to the Ed at print Pindeldyboz, who liked a story I'd thought nobody would like but suggested I send it to web Pin, with her recommendation; so that was my second webby Pinup. Thinking of subbing it to Prague Lit Journal or Review, as well. Thinking. Hard to place that kind of piece. Ok. Will also sub to Bitter Oleander.

Everyone keeps telling me to sub to Irreal, but I can't take zines with anti sim sub policies unless they promise to get back to contributors within a month. Fair is fair. These uptight eds are fowl.

Subbed a prosepoem-flash fic-prosepoem sandwich to Jacket.

Now very tired.

What are those saffron yellow daisies with the brown eyes called? Brown-eyed Susans? Lazy, brown-eyed Susans?