Went into overdrive on the list-making frenzy this afternoon, realizing that summer has half slipped away, or nearly so, and I've been severely slacking. The next two days, I'm planning on working a bit with revisions on some of the feign poems. There's something irking me about the manuscript as a whole...an emptiness to it...that it's poems are a whole lot more polished and driven than my other work, and individually pretty sound, as a whole they just aren't doing it somehow. I had a crazy thought to merge the poems into the older manuscript, lots of fleshy, ornate, more substantial poems intermingled with the crisper, cleaner, briefer, and more expediant poems. I'm going to look over the merge I managed to sew together this weekend, ripping the fever almanac apart and reassembling, adding two new sections, about another forty pages (initially feign was longer, but I'm chopping out the errata poems which will hopefully stand better on their own than only half stuck in a book). That version is close to a hundred pages now, and really three different manuscripts in all, or at least three whittled down to the essential and recombined. Again I thought--no way--they're not gonna work together--there are years between them, time-wise and stylistically. But oddly, it somehow works. If I keep doing this, I'll have a six hundred page poetry manuscript that still no one will publish. And yet I just keep plugging along...

I DO have to get my ass in gear on the Wicked Alice inbox, but today I looked at the number of messages and decided I'm poetryed out today. So if anyone submitted for the summer issue, you all still under consideration (probably meaning I haven't even read your submission yet.) But I suppose it's best to have a fresh head about me when I do that anyway--no one wants a cranky editor.

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