Fan-cee!

All I can say is "Wow!"Check out the groovy bookcarts from around the country. Absolutely silly. Makes my Sauder composite board bookshelves look downright sad (sadder than they already did, the poor saggy things.)

You know you wanna look

Ages and ages ago, I promised to set up a Del.icio.us account so I could post links to my clips. I did that quite some time ago and never posted the link. Here you go. Mind you, everything on here right now is for the Post Tribune, but I'll keep posting clips as I have them.

The Post Tribune has already given me 7 articles this month, which is fantastic. I have four to do next week, but it's definitely keeping me from focusing on more ambitious work. The money is not a small consideration, but still, I can't help wondering how I can be more focused on preparing a query. I want to accomplish at least one query for a national mag this month.

I miss Claire Zulkey at the MBToolbox blog. It's still a great place for info about queries, but she brought a lively, personable presence to the blog which is now a little dry.

I finished reading Fun Home by Alison Bechdel last night. It was so brilliant. She broaches some incredibly sad and fraught topics (her disfunctional family, her lonely, anxious childhood, the suicide of her father and her coming out) with humor and beauty and love. It's very literary and sophisticated. Yay! I highly recommend it. She is the author of the Dykes to Watch Out For comic strip, which is also fantastic, if you've never seen it.

Lastly, here's a blog I've recently discovered: Writer Unboxed. Tom, one of the members of my writing group, is always looking for new ideas about plotting, and one recent post features links to a couple of methods. Nice tone, well organized, thoughtful.

Skin

If you haven't heard of Shelley Jackson's work of human literature, Skin, yet, check this out. Here's her page: The Inderadicable Stain. Here's the Poets and Writers Magazine write up.

Get up and dance

This morning I'm listening to 12" remixes of 80's music on iTunes radio -- Erasure, right now, for the curious -- to help me stay awake. It's confusing. I don't know whether to get up and dance or put my head on the table and sleep. (And thus, the inherent conflict of the bipolar.) I'm not wearing anything sequined or see-through, though, so I suppose I better just write.

I am free of the university now, and significantly calmer, and once again ready to tackle the serious responsibility (smirk) of the blog. I was disappointed by how easily I fell off the wagon last semester. But now there are no more semesters for me, and I couldn't feel more relieved. So I'll just get on with it...

First up, a beautiful excuse for poets to skip the gym and stay home with a notebook. I'm not lazy, I'm dwelling in Possibility. Anyone have any great 2006 poetry recommendations?

There's truth in this piece by Jenna Glatzer, encouraging us to write about what terrifies us. It's marvelous advice, and certainly, for me, some really important stories have come out this way -- not necessarily publishable stories, but important. I also think that I shrink from it at times: my fiction tends towards the very dark. These stories are essential to me -- they are the terrifying stories I need to tell, but sometimes I just can't face them.

And one contest link for midwest poets: The deadline for the Poetry Center of Chicago Juried Reading is January 27, 2007. Get on it.

Until next week...