Journaling Writing 24-03-23

I haven’t done a ‘Journaling Writing’ since March 16th because I haven’t had any journaling to report (unfortunately). No. That’s not true. I’ve journalled two or three times in the week but it’s mostly been screaming in to the void after this week of falling dominos. I’m hoping that the last one has fallen as the week winds down, so that I can turn my attention to righting them without banging the table too hard to make them topple again. I won’t know until tomorrow.

As a result, today’s entry was more diarying than journaling. What’s the difference…I think of journaling, even when it’s just getting things out, as something that unlocks the creative writing, if it is not itself creative writing. This wasn’t it.

But maybe it worked, as far as unlocking goes, as I worked on a story later in the day that I submitted to a contest, and I feel pretty good about it. The story, that is; the fortunes of this or that contest or submission is a crap shoot. You just have to keep submitting and hope that the right submission finds the right editor or judge on the right day. Today’s submission was my second of the week as far as creative works are concerned.

The autobiographical essay I have to work on for Sabga is, at this stage, mostly scattered notes and spurts of writing, but not anything that quite hangs together yet. I have some anxiety about it because writing about yourself, you know. But I have to say I’ve been reading the autobiographical essays by past laureates, especially in arts and letters, and have been finding them so illuminating, so introspective. My takeaway is tell your truth.

I am working on it (well, I’m editing a client book right now and I’ve been doing mailings and postings encouraging people to pre-order my forthcoming book To be a Cheetah, but I’ve been working on it) and trying to marry it to continuing work on my short story collection in progress as I don’t want to lose any more momentum than I have since my February project.

Good news, I got the Dappled Things with “Happy New Year” – my first published poem of the year, recently uploaded to my YouTube channel for World Poetry Day – in the mail, and started reading it (up to page 27) during a longish walk home after I decided to walk the rest of the way instead of taking the bus.

This isn’t a reading journal but another thing I started reading this week is Andrea Levy’s Small Island, which I have seen a stage production of,

at the bus stop on another day as it happens.

I’m at page 40 and the sounds it had me making right there at the bus stop. It’s so much funnier than I anticipated.