b&e

...as in beginnings & endings, not breaking & entering, of course.

This week, my second full week of maternity leave, I drifted further and further away from any kind of recognizable regimen.

I slept in a few mornings but also woke up one day at 4 am, bolt-awake, thinking about the manuscript I want to compile instead of baby, baby, baby.

Given that baby is all I talk about - and all anyone wants to talk to me about, given my planetary girth, my satellites, and my space junk - during the civilized hours of the day, it was lovely to have the energy and the early morning light all to myself. So I waddled downstairs, parked my cosmic self on the exercize ball, and worked on poetry for a few hours...

...of course, those few hours exhausted me and I spent much of the rest of the morning in sleep so deep I drooled.

* * *

Another beginning and ending came in the fact that I finished off a notebook during that four am orbit. I'd known it was coming, given how few pages were left, but I hadn't flipped through to see how many 'few' actually was.

So I had one-two days of carrying around a full-up notebook, which doesn't quite work when you have more than a third-of-a-page thought. Which was followed by a day or two of carrying around both the old notebook AND the new.

I even spent a solid hour reading through the last half of the old notebook, to see if there were any poems that had been orphaned there, instead of making the migration from head to paper to screen.

I had a lot of satisfaction with the contents of the notebook - or, more accurately, the way in which it was filled. In addition to writing a lot over the past year or so, I've also found myself more firmly enmeshed in communities that I've enjoyed, both on-line (okay, especially on-line) and in person.

* * *

Another, more chagrin-filled discovery was that despite my recent spate of of one-off submissions (to Leaf Press' Monday's Poem, to The Guardian Review's Poetry Workshop, to the MWG's Poetry in Motion promotions), I have fallen behind in my submissions to print journals.

Normally, I try to have five or six submissions out at one time, given how long it generally takes publishers to respond to them...but over the last few months, I've only had the energy for one-half of the writing and publishing equation. Writing.

That has meant very little editing and little or no energy for the paper pushing that compiling and tracking submissions requires...

But I know how important paper credentials are, the dialogue they represent with those in the community (and in the wider world) that don't blog or troll the internet with the intensity and regularity of me and mine, so I need to get back on that treadmill.

I also think it's time to start compiling my first manuscript - or, rather, my second or third attempt at compiling a first manuscript.

But first, I want to jam my all-knocked-up poems (which, as it happens, were among the first poems I'd written directly and tangibly about my own experience) onto sixteen pages and submit them to GBH...

...that is, before I officially come to the end of being all-knocked-up and start with the sleep-deprived-human-feeding-station part of my life.