Good morning. Y'know, it's really difficult to get out of bed when the house is cold. You probably knew that. :-)
I'm still in bed, but luckily the computer is right next to the bed (convenient for those middle of the night inspirations) and have been up for a while going through morning mail and revising poetry. I am starting to run out of ways to avoid the real work I need to do. :-) Current urgencies: revise Interruptions; restart novel; write two letters and a novella for Puritan. All that should really be done by the end of the week. I had an academic paper to write too, but that's been mercifully moved to next week.
Currently reading Toni Morrison's "Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination" for my fiction class. I think the teacher asked us to read it 'cause a lot of us are currently working with ethnicity -- it's definitely an interesting book, although only tangentially related to what I'm doing. Too complex to simply summarize here, I'm afraid.
Wrote two more poems last night -- I've added them (as well as a bunch of others) to the '96 poetry page. "Sweet Innocent Goes Hungry Again" and "Five Years Into It, She Considers".
Was a bit down yesterday evening. Just tiredness I think -- I worked fairly hard all day yesterday. My evenings are sometimes overly empty -- I think I spend too many of them on-line. Ah well. Did recently read quite a few of the Lloyd Alexander children's books -- none I liked as well as his Chronicles of Prydain, but still pleasant. While Kevin was here we spent a day up in Berkeley visiting a friend and bookstores. There's a fantasy/sf one there called, I think, Another Change of Hobbit, that has a very good children's section. Picked up quite a few books I'd been looking for. Now if I can just find those out-of-print Engdahl books, I'll be happy...
Ah well -- back to work. Have a good day, everyone.
5:15. Tired. Have a 6:00 Walrus (lit mag) meeting, and then I told Sophie that I'd work with her on the Walrus web page. Just want to go home and sleep. Oh well. Didn't do anything I said I would (well, got partway into the Interruptions revisions, but didn't finish), but did manage to finish "Endings", another short story. This is another one my family won't like, I'm afraid -- no sex, but lots of family specifics. Even if I change the names (and I did), and put in a bunch of fiction (which I plan to) people will still assume it's mostly true (which it is). Which is okay with me, but my parents are definitely not happy about it. Argh. Interruptions is even more of the same problem. Don't have anywhere to publish them yet, but when I do.... (y'know, it strikes me that perhaps I'm starting to think like a professional writer -- I no longer doubt that I *can* publish something -- now it's a question if I can get paid for it. :-)
Argh. Rambling. Anyway...currently reading a LeGuin short story, "the Eye of the Heron" -- she's so damn good it makes me almost angry sometimes -- a petty part of me hopes she had to work really hard at it. God, I'm hungry too. Didn't bring in any money to campus, what an idjit. Want to go home and eat....okay, okay I'm whining. Enough already.
Okay, I'm gonna go web browse and set my brain to autopilot for a while. Ellison said he'd cook tonight, so a nice dinner should be waiting when I get home. I can think pleasant thoughts of that.