Plugging Away

I forgot to post yesterday. Here is Sunday's report.

 Submitted "Problem Solving" to 

• The Puritan  ( I read Uncle Samir by Aatif Rashid, and liked it - an inconclusive ending.)
  
• Touchstone (I read "Frog Pond" by Casey Jones, and liked it.) 
• CLACKAMAS LITERARY REVIEW
• Noctura 

Pretty sure I screwed up one submission. Which is what I deserve for trying to do too much at one time. The source for these submissions was Write or Die Tribe.

Big Joe Turner supplied the soundtrack.

This morning I woke before the alarm. About two hours before. I piddled with the email, read a few book reviews on The Guardian: The Philosophy of Modern Song by Bob Dylan review – an enlightening listen-along and Bournville by Jonathan Coe review – a bittersweet slice of Britishness. Read about the mayhem in Muncie: Police investigating Muncie woman's fatal shooting. 

The plan for the next two hours: more submissions, the pretrial journal while listening to Crap from the Past.

I read There’s Nothing Literary About Being Sad by Mairead Small Staid from The Millions. From the same source, I went to In Falling, I Learned to See: On Debra Di Blasi’s ‘Birth of Eros’, a review by Patrick Parks after seeing the first paragraph:

Debra Di Blasi’s Birth of Eros begins appropriately enough with a birth: the cinematic, slapstick delivery of the novel’s narrator, Lucy, who tells us she remembers her arrival in all its gravity-defying detail. Mishandled by the doctor and then squirted into the air by an over-anxious nurse, she is sent “high, higher into the air, my umbilical cord trailing me still… my body rotating to a perfect vertical so that I must have resembled a levitating Christ child depicted in old Flemish paintings.” When Lucy lands safely on a pile of soft white towels, her mother looks over the edge of the bed, sees her newborn daughter swathed head to tail in “monkey-thick hair,” and declares, “’Oh, God, she’s so ugly!’”

Using 5 Paying Literary Magazines to Submit to in November 2022, I submitted "Problem Solving" to:

• The Woodward Review
• The Pig’s Back (It is Irish, but after reading Molly Hennigan 's Liverpool Lullaby, I feel not so much scared and foolish but only intimidated - that story feels closer to my own stuff than what I have read in American MFA journals.

Although The Stinging Fly is not open for submissions right now, I find myself rather fascinated by the magazine. I read (yes, a bit of procrastination) its Strategy 2021-2023 and thought of how we have nothing like it in this state. Compare with the Indiana Writers Center. There seems to be less ambition here - and Indiana does have a literary tradition. Or am I being one of those persons who gets so swallowed up by novelty of the Different, they do not see the good of Home?

My two hours has gone by, and I still have not touched the pretrial detention journal.

12:06 pm: I have touched the journal. I have 3 pieces scheduled for next month. I still have a story to work on. I have been kicking around the idea of staying in all tomorrow, except I have enough groceries to last me until tomorrow only if I go out tomorrow. I need to type faster. 

 

Listened to WXPN and John Lee Hooker, and I took the time to read The Malice of Time: Neglect history at your peril. by Niccolò Machiavelli from Lapham's Quarterly.

 

Time for lunch. 

 

I spent the afternoon with Princeton Blue Ribbon and starting a new story, a ghost story of sorts.

 

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