A Faithful Friend Retires

The past year has been an extraordinarily prolific time for me as a poet.

In the Days of Sappho
by John William Godward

Indeed, I never really would have used that word to describe myself before. Technically, since I've written poems from time to time since I was about 14, I guess it is accurate, but in my mind, poets are people who have done something with their work, published poetry and established a name for themselves thereby, even crafted at least one poem that has touched the souls of and been beloved by many, many readers. I haven't done any of that, but in March, I did submit a completed manuscript of poems to a competition for first-time authors. And throughout this spate of creativity, I have had one devoted companion.

This little friend, produced by Peter Pauper Press, has received each poem I hammered out for nearly a year. It has suffered for my art almost as much as I did, poor thing. The scribbles, the wicking, the blotches! Each one tells a tale of the exhilarating journey we've taken together, as the small journal bounced around in my book bag, my crochet satchel, and on a few memorable occasions, any pocket available.

See what I mean?!

And now, only one blank page remains between its reliable old covers. I'm proud of us both, this journal and I, but I will miss its cheerful little face. Of course, I still have to finish that last page, right? Once I have, though, a successor is already waiting in the wings. Sentiment is all very well, but there are more poems to write, and I must be ready to chase them down to the page. I think any writing worth producing is worth wrapping in the breathtaking art of Gustav Klimt.

Wish us luck!

An Insecure Writer Keeps Writing

It's time once again for all of us insecure writers to band together and, through our solidarity, get some writing done. I must say, February was the most prolific writing month that I've had in years, and that is no exaggeration. I wrote an entire poetry chapbook in February. When true inspiration roams back into your life, it is the writer's high par excellence.

Still, there is no escaping doubt. No matter what I'm writing, how easily the words are flowing, or how excited I am about a WIP (work-in-progress), at some point in the process of creating the first draft, the niggling voice of self-defeat will creep in. Great authors have commented on the fact that it is blissfully easy to create a first chapter, especially if you feel really confident that it's good, and murderous torture to write a second. The better the first chapter was, the harder it is to live up to throughout the work, and it is at about the time that you finish that first installment that the Greek chorus grinds into its opening chords: "Who is going to read this, anyway? It'll never get published, no matter how good it is, so why should I bother finishing it?"

In those moments, I find that nothing helps but the work itself. As many famous writers have insisted to aspirants, Write! For the love of God, write! Take questions like readership and particularly publishers out of the equation, or you are doomed before you begin. And when you feel discouraged, write more and write harder. If I type myself through that "slough of despond," I come out the other side feeling productive and refreshed. If, on the other hand, I give in to those voices for one second, I can look forward to at least a week of inertia, unable to write so much as a phone message and sinking ever deeper into a well of self-loathing.

There's a sidebar on this blog that is my public accountability, naked and utterly exposed before the world, of whether or not I have been writing and therefore mentally thriving. Every day that one of the page or word counts on that bar jumps has officially been a good day. The second that I hear my self-talk become laden with thoughts such as, "Oh, what's the point?" I immediately scream out my mantra in my head.

For the love of God, write! Now!

Week in Review Omnibus

This post is a double-whammy, in which I will report recent progress on my latest writing goals, and announce the event from the week just past that I'm celebrating. First off, let's glance back at the goal I stated for myself at the beginning of February, and see how close to the target my aim carried me.

At the blog entitled The Five-Year Project, where author Misha Gericke recounts her publishing trials and triumphs, she also graciously hosts a monthly meme designed to encourage other aspirants, despairing or victorious. We announce our current ambition on the sign-up list for "Do You Have Goals?," and report back on our struggles to attain it. I listed for myself, "Get my first poetry chapbook published," and while that hasn't occurred yet, the first major hurdle is crossed, because I actually did finish writing it this month. The final count was 40 poems covering a total of 45 pages, including dedication page and similar materials. Sending it out to publishers is the next step, and I am currently awaiting the beginning of March and the arrival of my small monthly living stipend, out of which I will painfully scratch the $18 reading fee to submit the manuscript to Omnidawn Press' 2014 Chapbook Poetry Contest. Updates will be flying your way as events unfold, I assure you.

The other steps I have taken toward getting published may seem less obviously connected to that dream, but are a very necessary part of it, and constitute my celebration for the week. Thanks to the incredible generosity of a very dear friend, I once again have a roof over my head for the foreseeable future. I am still homeless, still sleeping in a friend's basement and therefore in more precarious circumstances than would allow me to be reunited with my daughter as yet, but she continues safe and happy with her grandparents, and I have a bit more stability in which to write, publish, and diligently seek permanent housing that will bring us back together. All of which I did full tilt this week; I am on a waiting list for subsidized rental housing, and I wrote roughly 10,000 words on a new prose manuscript (which muse has taken up where the muse of poetry has currently left off). As a fellow creative type advised me to recently, I will keep going until I succeed or die trying.

Celebration of Achieving Failure

Last week, I e-mailed three poems to an on-line poetry magazine for their consideration, hoping they would publish one or all of them. This week, I got a rejection letter--actually, a rejection e-mail; it is the way of our digital world. And you may be thinking to yourself, "If this is a celebratory post, why are we talking about a rejection letter? Are you really celebrating getting turned down?"

Weekly meme hosted by VikLit

I can honestly reply, "Yes, I am." The battle wasn't in writing the poems, and it wasn't in being told "no." My battle was against a "Send" button. I showed up. I ventured; only time will reveal all that I have gained. Meanwhile, tomorrow we hit "Send" again. Just another day at the office.

Time for a Hodge-Podge

Yes, my faithful band of readers, another Hodge-Podge post is in order, as I have a few things about which to update you at the same time that are unconnected, except in the fact that they are all happening in my life. I admit this post is a long one, but I hope you will come with me for the whole adventure. As you will see shortly, the day I've had so far makes the title of this semi-regular feature particularly apt. But first, a writing update.

---

A Finished Manuscript!

Ah, how those words roll trippingly off the tongue (or keyboard) of any aspiring author! The sense of pride, of accomplishment, increased self-worth, is boundless--for about 12 hours. Then the doubts set in. "These poems seem inexperienced. I sound childish and infantile! They're all too much alike, in both form and content. I KNOW that if they're combined into a single book, they should have a unifying theme, BUT..." and on and on it goes. So, I'm into the doubtful phase now, but ultimately, my opinion is no longer the one that matters; a publisher will accept it or not. My view of it is already set--I love my "little book" (nod to Louisa May Alcott, a heroine of mine), or I would not have bothered to keep going with it. I will always love it, for all the things it represents in my growth as a person and the memories it will always evoke for me. The only questions now are the subjective--Will anyone else be able to identify with my words and love them?--and the mundane--Will my efforts help me in the world of filthy lucre? I have no control over the answers to either, so I will simply send it out to see what, if anything, happens next.

---

Even for a woman who owns a blog called The Beauty of Eclecticism, I have had a particularly diverse day. It started--as journeys down rabbit holes so often do these days--with a link that a friend posted on Facebook. NPR conducted an interview with the prioress and choir-mistress of a group on nuns who have been taken on a whirlwind tour of secular popularity with their sacred music in the past few years. The Benedictines of Mary, Queen of Apostles, are a cloistered order, which means that they live their lives in community together but in near-total seclusion from the outside world. A common misconception about cloistered monastics is that they separate themselves from the rest of us because they fear we will contaminate them with our sinful ways. On the contrary, the best monastics gaze permanently and unflinchingly into the chasm of their own sinfulness, leaving no time to judge anyone else. They hide themselves away (as Christ instructed all of us to do during our prayer time) in order to devote as much time as they possibly can to praying for all of us, the entire rest of the world, as they know that not everyone can be cloistered, but we all need prayer, just the same. The sisters of Mary, Queen of Apostles, are dedicated to that mission.

The rise of the digiverse has been a God-send (if you'll pardon the pun) for secluded religious orders, because it allows them to have limited contact with the outside world on their own terms. They communicate with the rest of us through e-mail, websites, and in the case of orders such as this one, recordings of their beautiful liturgical music, which they also use to support and maintain their priory in Missouri. Videos about the sisters and their work, as well as other similar religious orders who produce music for the wider world, are available on YouTube, and if you are in need of a moment of heavenly peace right now, I cannot recommend strongly enough that you check them out.

From the sublime to the earthy we go. Somehow, my Facebook wanderings then led me to the home of fellow bloggers Amy and Kate, a mother-daughter pairing who have produced the enormously popular Homestead Revival. This blog chronicles the on-going journey of a family who chose the periodically fashionable path of "self-sustained living," "returning to the land," that sort of thing, and they are staunchly traditional Christians, talking frequently about homemaking and the Apostle Paul's injunction that wives should be submissive to their husbands. I think you'll agree that such a blog would not be my obvious choice of hang-out spot; I recently came out as a lesbian and divorced my husband, after leaving the ultra-conservative Eastern Orthodox church for the markedly liberal Episcopal Church.

That has been the theme of my day, what has made it eclectic and interesting--in short, a hodge-podge. I have been reminded that I don't have to agree with those I encounter to enjoy our common humanity, to learn from them and be spiritually nourished by their wisdom, and hopefully to be able to offer something in return in that exchange when given the opportunity. Moreover, I am officially an author with a manuscript soon to be under consideration by publishers; I have added to the sum total of artistic and emotional expression in human history. My life is little short of terrifying right now in a number of aspects, and these are interludes of peace at the center of my storms.

Finding Security as a Writer

Join us here!

As those of you who've read recent posts will know, it's been a profoundly and unexpectedly productive fortnight for me as an author, in this case limited almost exclusively to poetry. In the past two weeks, the journal I devoted to poetry back in July 2013 has gone from having about six occupants, to being a nearly finished chapbook. This truly descended on me out of nowhere. Moreover, I only vaguely knew what a chapbook was last week; serendipitously, I met a fellow struggling poet who clued me in, I began doing some digging on-line, I found several independent publishing houses that look like a promising fit, and I'm now shaping this poetry journal with an eye to publication. I submitted one poem to a magazine a few days ago, just dipping my toe back into the waters of potential rejection letters, and I don't know if my little chapbook will find a home once it's finished, but I'm going to put it out there and see if a firm claims it for their own. It feels so good to be writing again!

P.S. A few of the poems from my growing chapbook can be found on my new poetry blog, Trapped Outside the Body. Please go check them out and leave me comments on what you think!

When the Words Write You

Erato,
Muse of Lyric Poetry

The last few days have been an extraordinary experience for me, an effusion of creativity that has exhausted my mind and barely allowed me a few precious hours of sleep each night. Wherever the Muse of Poetry has been in my life in recent years, she has suddenly returned, and is seriously determined to make up for lost time. I would imagine that every writer has experienced the feeling, at one time or another, that the pen grips the hand, bends the fingers around itself, and moves the author with a force over which she has no control. This flow of words is no guarantee that the output will be of high quality; the poems I've been producing recently may seem flat, or trite, or entirely overblown, to the eyes of another reader. In Anne of Avonlea, our beloved heroine describes the characters in a short story she is crafting as willful, unpredictable creatures, who continually escape her control and wreck the story in ways that she must excise or correct heavily within a few pages. Still, there is no denying that when the words are writing you, it's some of the easiest writing you'll ever do in your life, and every author yearns for this state to descend upon her from time to time. Editing will wait until tomorrow; there is no muse of proofing, and rarely any ecstasy involved, either.

16th-century depiction
of Chaos

If the chaos and difficulties of recent months have been the slough through which I must wade to capture a single sentence on paper, the rediscovery of a self that had dreams, and confidence, and an ability simply to let the words flow as they would, in the past few weeks has been the force capable of navigating me safely out of my slump. No writer gets to enjoy the sensation of the words writing her for very long, but while it's happening, I keep my pen and dedicated poetry journal ever handy, my synapses crafting lines even as I'm drifting off at unholy hours of the morning. The reality is that no one but my dearest friends and my older self may ever be interested in perusing these lines again, but the feeling that I am capable of such output bolsters me through a time of cruel uncertainty in so many others areas of existence.

A Puzzlement

Recently, I was catching up on a backlog of reading blog posts from blogs I follow and the blogs of my own followers, when something I saw piqued my interest and gave me a whole new respect for the bravery of the blogger in question. She not only maintains her regular book blog, but also has a poetry blog, where she routinely posts her latest efforts in that genre. As I said, I stand in awe of her courage.

There's something about revealing my poetry that makes me feel particularly naked and vulnerable. Perhaps it is partly based on the length of the average poem; these aren't full-length novels, in which readers may find both aspects that seem implausible or annoying, but still some redeeming qualities that they enjoy and therefore save the work in their estimation. Most poems are short (despite what T.S. Eliot believed to the contrary), and fly or die with the first reading or two. People don't take a week to read and consider a poem, like they would a novel or non-fiction book. Feedback is usually instantaneous, and either glowing or brutal. It's just the nature of the genre.

Still, it's more than just that. If you've ever thought that I am profoundly forthright in my blog, that I do not pull punches even at times when maybe I should've done, and that I sometimes discuss topics best kept out of the public eye, then you really should read my poetry. You would then KNOW that all the above are true of me. For me, poems come from a place so intensely personal and emotions so overwhelming that prose simply will not do to convey them. Life has to be so sublime that I cannot contain it, i.e. I basically have to be in love, or so unbearable that I have to trap the pain outside my body, in order for me to write a poem. I hadn't written much in several years, until my pain and subsequent surgeries last year, and I found myself returning to it again over the summer months of 2013. The poems have been flowing freely lately, and I would love to share them out into the blogosphere, but I cannot decide if I'm that brave. Still, writers write to be read; it is our "precious life blood," to use John Milton's phrase, and unread work gnaws at my brain like a dollar burns a hole in a 5-year-old's pocket.

" 'Tis a puzzlement."

NaBloPoMo...Again

For reasons that elude even me, I stumbled upon a post from BlogHer about their December theme for NaBloPoMo (National Blog Posting Month, which actually happens EVERY month with a different theme), and decided I would participate for the first time in over a year.  It was the word "Work" that caught my attention.  I'm a stay-at-home Mom, a book blogger, a fledgling writer.  Currently, I'm also dealing with an "invisible illness," and indeed am actually still waiting for a definite diagnosis.  I don't work outside the home; I haven't had an actual paying job in over six years, and couldn't have if I'd wanted to, as I also suffer from PTSD, anxiety, and depression issues.  Sometimes I feel like I'm a weak individual whose defects have left her leading a small life.

But when I think about the fact that over 100 people now follow my blog on some form of social media, leave me comments and interact with me and tell me in many small ways that they connect with what I have to say...

When I remember that I'm the Mommy of a beautiful 3-year-old girl, who loves me with a beautiful, unconditional love, trusts me because she knows she can depend on me, that I wasn't supposed to ever be able to have children, and yet through the prayers of the Blessed Virgin Mother Mary and the grace of Her Son, Jesus Christ, I have my miracle baby, that I competently care for her needs each day...

Photo by Kolossos

When I remember that I currently have several writing projects whirling in my head, and that I do occasionally sit down and capture a chapter here, a chapter there, when the muse will no longer let me hide, that I'm making progress with them, though slow it may be...


When I think of all the hell in my health and my emotional health and the complex life issues that I've endured that got me to this point...

I realize that I do work. That I have worked hard in the past, and have every intention of continuing to work that hard for the foreseeable future, because this is my life, and it does take work, like everyone's life takes work. But I am not weak, because "Christ's strength is made perfect in my weakness," and human beings who are truly defective don't exist.  Every one of us is valuable, of intrinsic human worth, and we have the right to be proud of the work we do.  Living is hard work, and not possible for the faint of heart.  We are all busy working, and we are all pillars of strength, each in our own way.

A Quick Look at My Current Report Card

Greetings, loyal supporters and wonderful cheering section!

As the more observant of you may already have noticed, there is a new element in the left sidebar of this blog, my "WIP (Work in Progress) Report."  It's just a little text box, nothing too fancy, but now that I have confessed that I'm in the midst of writing a novel, I decided I would keep you updated on my progress.  Through all of your encouraging words and even the occasional, "Stop obsessing and just write, already!", I managed to commit chapter 3 to the page last night.  I'm not feeling as confident about how it turned out as I was about the first two chapters, but that's what editing and re-writes are for, right?  At least I sat down and actually wrote, which for me is always the really difficult battle.

So, just wanted to let you know that you can follow my progress through the novel, as I will be updating the progress tracker whenever there's actually some to report!  All votes of confidence will be gratefully accepted, as I have a serious confidence deficiency disorder some days.  Here's wishing you brilliant success with all your WIPs!

Introducing The Insecure Writers' Support Group

Dear Readers, many of you who have been following The Beauty of Eclecticism for any length of time know that I am an aspiring writer--isn't virtually every book blogger you've ever heard of? However, I haven't mentioned any writing attempts or projects here for quite some time, partly because my life kind of went into the crapper for several months due to health issues, and I haven't felt like writing.  But that's not really how writing works; writers don't control the situation.  Writing does.  This mythical, ethereal power that takes hold of my brain any time I hear something that makes me think, "Ooo! THAT would make an interesting plot!", doesn't care if I'm sick, healthy, sleepy, perky--nothing changes the compelling drive to write.

And so, I will confess that I am, indeed, currently working on a novel.  It is a project that takes me well outside my comfort zone, a way to work through some mental gymnastics that my brain has been performing for some months now, to sort out my views on a controversial topic.  (I prefer not to go into greater detail at present.)  The good news is that I've made it past the dreaded second chapter; I'm sure I'm not the only writer who has stacks of brilliant first chapters lying about my house, that never got their second chapter or any other chapters at all.  The bad news is that I'm now staring down the barrel of chapter 3, and this is where the self-doubts really begin to settle in.  "Why am I bothering? Do I honestly think someone other than me will ever want to read this? I don't even have a literary agent yet; how am I ever going to work up the courage to start approaching them? How I dread the long, hard slog of finding one that is a good fit, IF I ever do!"  A whole spate of really unhelpful thought processes like that come along, and then here I sit, procrastinating about writing chapter 3 because it feels like it will be an exhausting and perhaps pointless exercise.  I even know what I want it to say!  But the act of transferring it from my brain, through my finger tips, to the computer screen as text just feels so daunting.

Am I speaking anybody else's language?  I can't possibly be the only wannabe writer who gets trapped in this death-spiral of unproductivity.  The only answer I've found is:

1. Wait until the SuperToddler is in bed for the night.
2. Put on music that I know is conducive, rather than distracting.
3. Start typing, and don't stop until I've said what I need to say.
4. Give a deep sigh, and make myself NOT start on the next chapter while I'm "on a roll," or I'll only burn myself out.

All of this is why I have decided to start participating in Alex Cavanaugh's "Insecure Writers' Support Group," and this is my first official post as a member.  The very existence of such a weekly group demonstrates very clearly that I'm NOT alone in these problems, and that in itself can sometimes be enough to get me to my Checklist of Challenges.  Wish me luck!  I certainly wish all of you a continuous flow of brilliant words.

Busy Work

So, it occurred to me the other night, after reading back over the post entitled "How to Sound Well-Read," that I may have left one and all with a false impression that I did not enjoy college.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  In fact, I loved being a university student, and it certainly wasn't because of all the parties (which I did not attend) or other unauthorized recreational activities (which I did not engage in).  We must remember that at the time, I was a good little Pentecostal preacher's daughter.  No, my primary joy in life during college was all the reading I did, because I did a massive amount of reading and research--it's just a shame that I couldn't get class credit for most of it!

Indiana State University
(my FIRST alma mater)

My favorite activity was to lose myself in the library stacks of whichever academic institution I was attending at the time (I've graduated from three), in those innocent, halcyon days before I had a cell phone, so no one could find and bother me.  I studied everything from medieval Islamic art to the Jewish Talmud, read everyone from Owen Wister to Anne Rice, and discovered British comedies like Jeeves and Wooster in the AV department.  I developed a life-long passion for research, as a matter of fact, and whenever I want to know more about a topic, or whenever I'm worried that my SuperToddler might be suffering from this or that ailment, all those hours of searching library catalogs and shelves stand me in good stead.  Probably the single most helpful thing I learned in more than ten years of university studies was how to do adequate research.  Usually, I was just setting out to satisfy my own random curiosity about a topic or a person; hour upon hour I spent in the basement or the back corner of the top floor of a library, my beloved books and I the only inhabitants of the planet, as far as I knew during those long sessions.  As I said, most of it earned me no course credits whatsoever, because I couldn't seem to find a class that was dedicated, for example, to the question of what actually happened to the famous library of Alexandria, and even if a class and my interests coincided, it was hard to fit a semester on Norse mythology into a tightly-packed degree program in linguistics.

Unknown nice librarian lady, Minnesota, 1974. 
(Thank you, Wikimedia.)

I have three master's degrees, and not one of them has helped me to eke out a lucrative career for myself.  The time I spent in the library stacks, however, continues to benefit me on a daily basis, whether I'm drawing once again upon the stores of knowledge I acquired there, or figuring out the best way to begin a major research project because I'm curious to know more about Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.  I have the tools to know where to begin, which authorities to consult and which so-called "experts" to blythely ignore, because of a couple of library systems that ran like well-oiled machines, and were always there for me when I needed them.  THAT was the worthwhile part of ten years of college.

I must say, the classes I enjoyed most were the ones in which I was allowed to choose my own reading materials.  Granted, these were not that common, but especially in graduate school, university departments begin to trust their students more to work independently, and they also realize that they can't tailor a class for the varied interests of every single student on campus.  Thus, the independent reading course was born.  For anyone who's never experienced it, this is exactly what it sounds like--you work out a reading list with the professor, you go away and read it all, you meet with the professor once a week to make sure that you're on track, and at the end of the semester, you present yourself to take an exam that the professor concocted based on the master list.  In some cases, you write an extensive paper as the final project, which is even better, since YOU get to control what's on the "exam" if it's entirely a treatise of your own making.  I did a couple of these independent courses, and actually quite enjoyed it.  There are days when I miss academia.

Which is why I've begun to suspect that for me, blogging has taken the place of independent studies.  Having set myself the goal of trying to post something every day, I know that I have a specific task, I know when the deadline is, and I seem never to have a shortage of things to write about.  I've even found ways to add the assigned reading component back onto my daily life; I've joined not one, but THREE review programs that give ME free books and give the PUBLISHERS in question an honest review of the book.  It's a little like writing book reports again--you remember, I'm sure: "My Book Report, by Jenny Campbell," written in pencil on that 2nd-grade paper with the blue lines on it, and the 'y' always a little crooked, much to my chagrin.  Still, it's a way to keep taking independent reading courses, since I get to pick which of the publishers' new books I want to review, and I get the textbooks FREE!  Nobody ever gave me THAT deal in college, I can promise you.  Here's an example: I find American military history interesting.  Not interesting enough that I would ever take a whole semester-long course of that and nothing else, but still interesting.  So, when a publisher offers me a free, hardback biography of an American general I'd never heard of before, but who was instrumental to our victory in one of our big wars (I don't remember which one; I haven't actually started the book yet), I'm going to happily take them up on it.  Like I said, this gives me the same opportunity to keep learning and the sense of accomplishment that attending college did, without me having to go into $20K a year of student loan debt for it.  Book reviewing, here I come!

Just Keep Swimming

I think most of the Blogosphere has put the famous quote from Dory the Adorable Ding-Dong in Finding Nemo to their own use at some point.  I even saw an entire blog that was called "Just Keep Swimming" the other day.  But can you blame us all?  It's an incorrigibly, infectiously hopeful life philosophy.  I am especially attached to Dory, because I lived with her for a year.  No, seriously, my beloved college roommate, Keegan, will be the first to tell you that she is, like Dory, easily distracted by shiny things, uncannily skilled at misplacing important items, and generally a bit flustered much of the time.  What she probably wouldn't tell you herself, however, is that she has the largest, most golden, purest heart of just about anyone I've ever met, and she was always pushing me to "just keep swimming."  It is advice that has served me well over the years.

So, today, I've done a lot of swimming.  It's been a quiet, steady and productive day, with plenty of networking and blog-related explorations interspersed between playing with Brigid, getting her meals prepared and sending her--unwillingly--off to bed at the usual hour.  My readership, though modest, is growing, in modest increments.  My confidence is being restored and bolstered up with every post I publish.  Another article is waiting in the ViewsHound queue, which means I once again spin the roulette wheel and see if I can win one of their prizes soon.  I did "what my hands found to do" today, as the Scripture says, and though it wasn't much, it was what I had to give.  It all seems to be bearing quiet fruit, for which I am grateful to God, and to all of you.

Cloud Illusions

As you all are aware, I have been delving heavily into what the internet has to offer me in the way of writing opportunities, and particularly into the mysterious depths of the nebulous "Blogosphere."  In so doing, I have visited A LOT of blogs recently--and I mean, A LOT--picking up tricks of the trade, tips and hints for how to make my HTML behave, and so on.  I've seen many stylistic things that I liked, storing them in my memory banks in case I'm ever lucky enough to be able to sink money into blog templates and themes.  But I am not here tonight to talk about the things that have inspired me; rather, I must vent my spleen to someone about something that really ANNOYS me.  I'd like to talk about the cloud.

For those among us who may not yet be up on the lingo, I am not now going to launch into a tribute concert to Joni Mitchell.  Though I do LOVE the song "Both Sides Now," especially now that I have seen clouds from both sides.  And I really love her song "River"; it always takes me back to the winter that Michael and I got engaged.  BUT none of that is relevant now!  Back to the rant at hand.  I am not going to talk about Joni Mitchell and her cloud illusions, nor do I wish to discuss cirrus, or cumulonimbus, or any other sort of meteorological phenomenon.  I am talking about the cloud display now being used on websites all over the world as an alternative to the simple, old-fashioned list.  Or to employ a visual aid, I am talking about THIS:

Someone please explain to me, who on earth decided that this would be a visually pleasing or useful way to arrange information?  Yes, I know; some bright spark would write me a short treatise on learning styles, on brainstorming and flowcharts and free association, to all of which I can only reply that I took that same Ed. Psych. course.  Forgive me if the prejudices of my own learning style are showing, but every time I come across one of these random hodge-podge "clouds," I suddenly start having fond visions of doing considerable violence to the screen in front of me.  There.  I have released my irrationally vitriolic feelings toward something that has no relevance to life, the human condition, or the important events of the day.  I feel better.  Thank you.

OMG! WTF?! WWDD? LMAO!

Okay, maybe I went a little overboard with the title of this post, but I was trying to demonstrate my growing weariness with the post-Internet alphabet soup that has become the English language.  Nevertheless, I'm diving into that brew head-first this month.  BlogHer, a major blog publisher that carries blogs written by women, addressed to women, about things that interest every possible kind of woman, issues a challenge to the blogging divas of the world each month--put up a post every day for a month without fail.  In other words, if you want to be a writer, you have to constantly fine-tune your technique, so instead of getting bogged down in the minutiae of life, WRITE.

And this little gem of an idea, "National Blog Post Month," got chopped mercilessly down to NaBloPoMo.  Like that even means anything.  The original concept that sparked this ever-expanding set of challenges was the National Novel-Writing Month (NaNoWriMo--which really sounds like Mork's "Na-nu, na-nu," to me).  Now there are similar quests for bloggers, poets and heaven only knows what else.  I actually think it's a really cool idea--though I won't be trying to write a complete novel in one month any time soon, thank you--and am grateful to BlogHer for hosting it, so I signed on board this weekend.  Nevertheless, I think the chop-and-splice approach to speaking English really needs to be denounced, with all its pomp and all its works.  Unless someone with some influence in the Blogosphere asks my opinion on the subject, however, we must work within the confines we've been given.  I love your spirit, NaBloPoMo, and so I shall embrace your siren song to blog daily, despite your most unfortunate name.

NaBloPoMo has a monthly theme, as well as daily prompt questions on said theme, in case a blogger is stumped for ideas.  But we members of NaBloPoMo are allowed to blithely ignore this system whenever we feel like it, as long as we consistently post every day throughout the month, and I intend to do that very thing.  Possibilities for learning some discipline in my writing not withstanding, I prefer to come up with my own topics, and I have certainly never been accused of running out of things to say.  Just ask my kindergarten teacher; she'll back me up on that.

(I swear, that last comment is an almost word-for-word quote, and it's teacher-speak for, "How do I tell you politely that I really need your little girl to shut up in class?")  And I really don't think I need to exercise the "gaining discipline in writing by working to a commission" muscle any more right now.  I did AN ENTIRE CONSECUTIVE DECADE OF COLLEGE!  Believe me, I've written enough term papers for which someone else set the topic to last me a life time.  I am extremely grateful to BlogHer for giving all of us women bloggers this opportunity to meet, talk, and know there really are people reading us out there in the ether.  Still, I'm enjoying the freedom of topic that blogging has given me too much to relinquish it yet.

The Thrill of Vigony

The title of this post is an homage to the famous line that used to be part of all Olympic coverage (and could be still, for all I  know), "The thrill of victory, and the agony of defeat."  Actually, the title is an homage to an old friend who once tried to quote that line, got the wires for "victory" and "agony" crossed in her brain, and produced "vigony" instead.  It fits.  Here's why.

Thus far, I've had four articles published online in less than two weeks.  Victory.  Today, I got an e-mail back about the inquiry letter I sent to a publisher a couple of weeks ago.  This would be about where the "vigony" part comes in.  The e-mail seemed a bit terse and abrupt to me, but maybe I'm just biased.  I'll let you decide.

So, there we are; I'm a victim of market research.  Welcome to the exciting world of rejection letters.  It's not the first I've gotten, and it probably won't be the last, but we move on, because if I sat down to mope about it, I know from hard experience that it would be a LONG time before I stood back up again.  That's not a road I want to revisit.  On to the next project--I think I'll shelve that one for a while, then take it to another publisher in a couple of months.  Let the old ego stop stinging a bit.  In the meantime, I'm going to indulge myself and do what any sane person does when their day has mildly sucked--re-read Harry Potter!

Publicize

Oh, the hoops you'll jump through to gain a readership when you're an aspiring author, folks!  In an effort to drum up further interest for my blogs, I am going through the process of getting them listed in blog directories on-line, and I must say, it's a bit like being put through some very odd hazing rituals when pledging a sorority.  So, here is today's required event for Pledge Week: I have to put this code into this blog, and a different one into a post on my alter ego, Philothei of Salem.

DXSXFX7AVYVZ

By-the-way, UPDATE!  I sent in another article to ViewsHound today (even though the first one hasn't finished going through their editorial process yet).  Wish me luck!

Abandon Hope! Unless It Works, Of Course...

Oh, it's been a big day for me.  I sent out not one, but two pieces of writing to publishers for consideration.  However, that's not quite as drastic progress as it sounds (yet), so let me explain.

First of all, have you ever heard of ViewsHound?  Yeah, neither had I until they suddenly appeared on my Facebook sidebar, probably because I started blogging and most bloggers are secretly--or quite openly, in my case--hoping to be published someday.  So, here's the synoptic explanation that ViewsHound gives about itself.

"ViewsHound is built on contributions from great authors just like you.
Every day we give away a prize fund of $120 US Dollars.
Whether your article wins a prize or not, ViewsHound is a great way to get your message out to the world. Use ViewsHound to gain readers for your articles, as ViewsHound allows you to link back to your own site. Also, get visibility for yourself, and to establish a track record as a writer and an expert."

In other words, this isn't exactly the top of the publishing industry heap, but I did some research, and it's legitimate, so what have I got to lose by submitting an article?  Which I did today.  Moreover, they're specifically looking for articles about religion.  Surely I need not outline in detail why this gig fits me like a glove.  Now we just have to sit back and see if they think my writing is any good.  Fingers crossed, everybody!

The second submission today, however, was for a project in which I am much more emotionally invested.  If you glance through the previous posts (see "Veni-Vedi-Vici"), you will find that shortly after my father's death, I wrote a book that was about a lot of things, but primarily about my conversion to Eastern Orthodox Christianity, and my father.  Since then, I have sent the manuscript out a couple of times, but have not yet found a publisher for it.  So, today, I screwed up all the courage I could muster, and sent an inquiry letter to perhaps the best-known Orthodox publisher in the US, Conciliar Press.

For those of you who have never been through this process before, let me make clear that I don't have a book deal or anything yet.  Far from it, in fact.  Though some publishers let you just send in a manuscript and then they mail you a decision letter of some sort, many now require a few intermediate steps, because they'd never get anything done except swimming through unwanted manuscripts if they didn't.  Conciliar Press requires an e-mail letter of inquiry first, in which I outlined what the book's about, why I think it would be a good fit for their publishing mission in particular, and what qualifications I have to write for their intended audience.  Based on this, they decide whether they think the book is worth looking at or not.  If they think it's worth a glance, they'll ask me to send them a few sample chapters and an actual proposal, in which we get down to the nitty-gritty of how I would help publicize the thing if they publish it, stuff like that.  Only after all that, if they are satisfied that I'm not a crackpot trying to get my lunatic manifesto out to an unsuspecting public, and that I really can put together readable sentences, will they let me send them the manuscript so they can finally read the whole book and decide if they want to publish it.  In other words, this is a long, tedious, nerve-wracking, gut-wrenching, often heart-breaking process.  Aren't you glad you're along for the ride?

Seriously, I'm just excited that I worked up the courage to start sending stuff out again.  Hopefully, I'll have good news for you soon from one source or another.  All prayers appreciated!

A Blog (besides this one) is Born!

So, if you're new to the blog you're currently reading, right about now you're probably saying to yourself, "Wait.  What?  You started ANOTHER blog?  I didn't even realize you had THIS one until today, and it looks like it's still firmly in the fledgling stages!"  And of course, you would be right.  Just last week, I was cruising around, idly looking at strangers' blogs, noticing that some people had 5 or 6 each, and wondering to myself why anyone would do that.  Honestly, I still wonder; 2 blogs is plenty for me at the moment.  But the answer to why I opened blog #2, "Philothei of Salem," requires a little back-story.

When I recount the long line of Pentecostalism that makes up my gene pool, I feel a little like the Apostle Paul when he gave his pedigree of Jewishness in his letter to the Philippians.  My mother's family lived in Appalachian Kentucky for generations, and in the Kentucky "hollers," you have two options where religion is concerned: the mountain holiness brand of Christianity, or atheistic heathenism.  Most of my family chose to be holiness Pentecostals--you know, the women who wear their impossibly long hair up in a bun on top of their heads and wouldn't be caught dead putting on a pair of pants instead of a skirt.  One of my forebears, a great-great grandfather, I believe, was a circuit-riding preacher.  My father pastored small Pentecostal churches in several parts of rural Indiana until his fourth heart attack put an end to his preaching career.  I've sung, wept, shouted, spoken in tongues, attended tent revival meetings, and accompanied my parents on evangelistic crusades that took us to churches with outhouses instead of new-fangled indoor plumbing.

When I left my hometown of Salem, Indiana, to start college, I quickly met a much wider section of humanity than I had ever been exposed to before.  I hadn't even left my home state, and already I was making friends with Muslims, Hindus, atheists, Buddhists, and Christians of more varieties than I ever knew existed.  By the time I finished graduate school, I had traveled halfway around the world to teach English to native Russian speakers, and discovered a brand of Christianity that caught my attention and wouldn't let go--the Eastern Orthodox Church.  {For those completely unfamiliar with this church, go rent the movie My Big Fat Greek Wedding.  The main character is a member of the Greek Orthodox Church, which just means that her family are all Eastern Orthodox Christians from Greece.  She's Greek Orthodox; I'm American Orthodox.  Same church in different countries.  You get the idea.}

In 2004, I became an Eastern Orthodox Christian in a ceremony that would have truly baffled most of my family if they had worked up the courage to come.  Instead, they voted for accepting that I was still a Christian of some kind and leaving it at that; we were all happier that way.  The upshot of all this is that I have numerous different microcosms in my life for which I stand as the only connective tissue.  Most of my Orthodox friends have no clue what Hoosier Pentecostals are like.  Probably 95% of my Pentecostal family and friends had never heard of Orthodoxy until I suddenly decided to convert.  The Muslims who have graciously offered me their friendship over the years--whether as my peers or as my students--have little desire to discuss the intricacies of Orthodox theology with me, and who could blame them?  I live in many different worlds, and though my "Eclecticism" blog is a place where many of them intertwine, asking the general readers of this blog to dive into all things Orthodox with me seemed like an unreasonable request.  Still, my faith is important to me, and so--voila!  Blog #2!

There's my whole life story, the very truncated version, for anyone who has ever wondered how I woke up one morning and joined a religion in which all the churches have pictures on the walls, the clergy are called "Father," and the services involve more incense than the average 1960's hippy concert.  If you want to know more about Orthodoxy, come on over and visit "Philothei of Salem"!  If not, I promise the next "Eclecticism" post will return you to your regularly scheduled programming.

Veni--Vedi--Vici

OH. MY. GOD. THE. BOOK. IS. DONE!!!! O.kay, for those who have no clue what I'm talking about, back story.

For the past three months, I've been writing a book about--well, a lot of things, but primarily about my father, and about how my Pentecostal pastor father influenced me to become Orthodox, though he could never have known he was doing so at the time. I don't even remember how many books I've started writing in my life; I wrote my first real story when I was 10, and started my first novel when I was thirteen. This book is the first one I've ever actually finished.

The terrifying part about finishing a book, of course, is that I now begin asking myself, is it possible that anyone will ever publish it? That anyone other than my mother and my husband will even ever read it? But since I only finished it a few hours ago, I think I'll just let myself bask in the reality of having finally completed one for a while.