My main piece of good news is that I got wait listed for the upcoming MacDowell Colony Winter/Spring residency period. Wait listing may not seem like that big of a deal, but it’s better than striking out completely, which is what happened to my previous two applications. I also received my beautiful contributor’s copies of 32 Poems, in which I am honored to appear alongside no fewer than three of my Sewanee buddies! Oh and I had a surprisingly political poem accepted by The Lyric.I just spent a day and a half on a self-styled writing retreat, catching up on my NaNoWriMo wordcount. NB: it has been pointed out to me by several people that I am “cheating” because I picked up an abandoned draft with 25,000 odd words to its credit, and am working on adding another fifty thou, rather than beginning from scratch. Well, look, people–it’s not as if I am actually trying to win the contest. I’m just trying to finish a novel here! My standing word count is 47,000, which means I have “only” written 22,000 since the beginning of November, so not quite up to NaNoWriMo standards yet!
There’s a busy week of poetry ahead! The QNDs are meeting on Wednesday to discuss the latest batch of submissions for Up & Under. On Thursday it’s the Awards Ceremony for the Medford Arts Center Poetry Contest I judged for the second time this year, and on Friday the QNDs are hosting a reading at The Daily Grind featuring Linda Arntzenius and Nancy Scott.
Meanwhile I am supposed to be working on the Schuylkill Valley Journal website, and starting to think more seriously about the proposed panel for the Spring 2010 issue of The Raintown Review. Speaking of TRR, the draft pdf of the Fall issue should be hitting my desk any time now. Best get back to work and clear some room for it!
