A Week On My Own again (again?)

My girlfriend was down in Puerto Vallarta this week, so I had so much free time to do my own thing.  Theoretically.  Aside from the days that were completely ruined by full-time job and commute.  So that left two hours on weeknights and then the weekend.

I was able to put together a new draft of the collaborative collection I have been working on, and get it emailed out.  This meant pulling out stories and poems that were not as well liked as the others, then putting in some new pieces of mine and splitting the whole thing into three logical (roughly genre delimited) sections to make it a bit more interesting.

The regular Thursday zoom call was a real treat.  Some of the new (to me) folks were there (JJ and others), but also two writer/publishers I have known for 20-30 years.  Between the host and those two, and I, we must have appeared together in 200 or more publications since the 80s.  We've all published each other's work when we working editorial roles.  So I'm afraid we took over, talking like old times, and the others slowly wandered off.

Yesterday, I drove down to Ocean Beach to work some more on that collection in person.  There was one piece that was a haibun in two sections -- each section a paragraph & ku, but we found that there was a time slip in there, and new in-between scenes were needed to tie it together in a tighter package.  So that was fun.  I was hoping to write several new pieces together, but a chunk of the limited time was taken up by computer issues and me having to loop 15 blocks back to my car because I forgot my darn reading glasses.  I could just barely read without them, but knew it would bring on a headache.  

So, it was a nice foggy day on the coast with some chill in the air.

Driving home, I had a head full of words.  And with certain instrumental pieces playing, I had half-formed poems where the words fit the rhythm of the song exactly.  But is that even a thing?

Back at Anne's place (totally quiet sanctuary, no cats or dog), I had to do my usual 2-3 hours each weekend of writing up descriptions for the stamps we sell online.  Anne does the scans, and there was a huge backlog to get to.  But since I am trying to keep my brain in writing mode, I ended up researching a few of those stamp issues, and adding four non-trivial blog posts about them:

Wendy Fitzwilliam (Miss Universe 1998)

Angola Classic Animals

An Industrial Nightmare from Saar

and

Selvage markings: Registration marks 

I have to admit that I work in bursts and after a big gap I will back-date the new stuff to make it look more natural.

And today, back in Escondido, it was mid-90s and sunny.  I got back to my place (2 cats but the dog is still in day care) and wrote up 4 blog entries for my games blog and started on this update to my Writer's Life blog.

I have no new sales to report.  No new submissions, really.  But I am still getting things done.  Collaboration work, a zoom call with other writers, and 9 blog posts, with other drafts in progress. 

The image is from our trip to OBCoffee: my pumpkin spice chai with a very Buddhist tree-of-life motif in the foam.