This week, I was able to finish up the last of the poems for the smallish series I started at the end of last summer after not touching it for the last few months of the year. It's a strange, surreal little romp through romantic history and intimacy and kind of just a little bit of humor and nonsensicality I appreciate. it also goes dark a few times, but I love it all the more for it. I considered possibly sending some of them out into the world, but realize that my desire to send out work is even less than normal. To write it, yes, that is returning, but I also feel like I serve it much better by just sharing things on social media on occasion.
This may no doubt change, since my satisfaction and dissatisfaction with the literary world, or at least the space I personally inhabit in that world, my little corner of it, changes on the day to day. One one hand, I love journals--both publishing in them, reading them, and for their sense of community building, On the other hand, I get impatient with the process of building submissions and waiting (not even the rejection part really, since that is woven into the process) but just the work of it for very little gains even when you're successful (and paid markets, while they exist are still tiny bits of income at best.) Ie, the rewards are nice and one of the major building blocks of community, but I begin to feel less and less over time that they are worth the energy, especially when time is short, of researching guidelines and keeping track of open reading periods and keeping tabs on submissions, to the point that there is almost a sense of relief when I don't have anything out in submission to fret over or keep track of.
It's also strange since I once loved the submission and publishing process, especially when I discovered the vast world of online journals. It also may be this vastness now that makes it a little daunting--so many journals to keep track of and who knows where to send . Maybe I just need to sit down and make a coherent list when I finally have some work to send out. I do have the granata poems, only a couple of which I sent out in 2022 (one of which was published in DARK WINTER). I still feel like they need to sit a while before I go back to them, maybe this spring.
So I will probably issue the new little project around Valentines Day for just a little zine fun with some visuals. I have multiple courses for what is next, including some humorous decor writing language things I've been plotting and perhaps a return to the starlet pieces I also abandoned quite a while ago. Also, the haunted hotel project that has been in the works for years. Since I've been spending so much time amongst the Greeks in my lesson writing, it occasionally makes me want to spend some more time with myths (as if there aren't enough mythology poems in the world, but somehow I want to write more. ) Each year, when I switch out my sketcbook/planner with all my tiny post-it notes, these projects and notes about them get moved, but somehow I keep getting distracted by new things. But then again, I should be happy there are new things, even as long as I've been at this, that I still find exciting projects to want to work on, or at least putter around with for years before they come to fruition...
