Ah, waking up at 5 a.m….

Ah, waking up at 5 a.m. -- I've missed it. Somehow I got off this schedule, and it's so satisfying to be back on it. Hope I keep it up. Made my tea, took my medicine, made a first pass at the e-mail (to which I will return). Now to settle down and work for a couple of hours...

I did manage to finally figure out exactly how to modify the mailing list that notifies people about updates to this diary. Hopefully this will take care of bounce messages. It was very simple -- funny how technical things often are, but we avoid them anyway. I have a feeling that my inability to approach fixing my vacuum cleaner (El's promised to have a look at it) falls into this category.

I have a new roommate, did I mention? El, Ian's girlfriend, has moved in. As she is not only incredibly handy (unsurprising, since she works as a theatre tech director), highly efficient at cleaning (years ago, she worked cleaning houses for a living), a good cook (she made cookies last night), *and* a highly cool, interesting and funny person, I have a feeling this is going to go very well, even if the house is a little more cramped now. If I can only survive her taste for puns...it's nice to have another female in the house. Balance the energy.

If anyone wants to give me a three-sentence introduction to the beatniks by 9 a.m. California time, I'd appreciate it. :-)

3:50 - I just finished Bastard Out of Carolina, by Dorothy Allison. I was sitting in a classroom, waiting to see if any of my students were coming to office hours today (none did). I was trying not to cry as I finished this book. She doesn't hold back. It is terribly real, and addresses issues of love better than anything I've read in a very long time.

The class I taught went okay. I ran through my material too fast, and was improvising for the last fifteen minutes; I was nervous, and could have taken it slower. I also didn't do a very good job of asking the right questions -- I asked too many questions with yes/no type answers, when I should have been asking more open-ended questions. I also wish I'd had more time to read more Whitman criticism beforehand, because I really didn't feel as if I had as good a handle on the material as I would have liked. I probably also should have concentrated on one passage instead of skipping around as much as I did, but we did manage to raise and discuss some interesting points, and my professor was encouraging, so I'm not entirely dismayed.

A cheering note came in yet another thank you for a rejection letter. I've gotten several of them, but each one still startles me. These authors are so grateful for an editor who takes a little time to explain why they couldn't take the story, and if possible, point them in an appropriate direction for either revision or other markets -- it makes me wonder if the kind of response I've been doing for this anthology is terribly rare. Maybe it's just because it's my first time, and I'll lose energy for it with future editing. Maybe it's because I'm an author as well, so I know just how much it hurts to have your baby sent back. I try to be careful, and so it takes a little more of my time, but it's well worth it in the kind of responses I've been getting. I hope the authors who are still waiting for responses from me (only a few left) don't mind the delay either...

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