Write to Live and Live to Write

Writing will always surprise you. Even with a degree, when you decide to push it to the level of a 9to5 job, things change. There can be no Artistic Angst attack, you have to get up every day and do it.

You have to think strategically about what work to put first and where to take your career. I have one book published. (Thank you JaCol Publising and Randall Andrews.) That is where I find myself.

I am close to finishing a “Walking Shadow,” five or six scenes. I have four other novels written and in need of editing. I am choosing to change my writing schedule to put more emphasis on getting the novels ready for publishing and writing a few short stories and novellas to get stuff out faster. We will see how this works out.

Red Sofa Salon and 10
Ways to Use Scrivener for Poetry Manuscripts

Often when I need a resource, I find it simply does not exist or is not in a form useful to me, and I end up cobbling together the resource from various sources.
Red Sofa Salon’s 10 Ways to Use Scrivener for Poetry is a very welcome exception.

Scrivener is well known for being a great writing tool for novelists, screenwriters, and long-form non-fiction writers, but when my friend mentioned she used Scrivener for poetry manuscripts, I was intrigued. As a poet, I’d always used Microsoft Word, with quite a bit of frustration. I usually write first drafts by hand in a notebook, then type them in Word, and save multiple files of subsequent drafts. The biggest problem was putting together a poetry manuscript. I would copy and paste each poem into one big file, which became unwieldy. It was especially tricky to keep track of subsequent versions of poems once the big file was created; each time I edited a poem in a single file I’d have to remember to update the main manuscript doc as well. I’d also have to save multiple versions of that main file with different types of front matter depending on where I was sending the manuscript (some places want acknowledgements, some don’t; some want a title page with contact info, some without; etc.). And worst of all, it was really annoying in Word to try to mess around with the order of poems in a manuscript––cutting and pasting them throughout the main doc, and then manually updating the TOC.

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10 Ways to Use Scrivener for Poetry,” Red Sofa Salon, redsofasalon.com/10-ways-to-use-scrivener-for-poetry-manuscripts/, Friday February 20th 2015 at 11:39 pm, 02/13/2019, http://www.redsofasalon.com/10-ways-to-use-scrivener-for-poetry-manuscripts/trackback/

Started building the manuscript for a Poetry Chapbook using Scrivener. I kind of have a vision of what I want, but I expect this to be a learning experience that will teach me the ropes of putting together a self published book.

Mood is a big thing. For a while, I had a period of time when I felt happy. Not sure what hapened, whether this is just normal, or if I am depressed more than usual. Just have to keep on keeping on. Tired tired, tired.

Swift Essay in Surrealism

I sit trying to begin, delete my words, try again.
Seeking something to unlock my dark, gilded passion. Lost, lost. My lament, my dream of noxious delights, found at the bottom of a bloated body bag.
My nightmares die, their hollow bellies swollen with words I never pen. Close my eyes and begin blind, see the keys of my board with prints of my eyes, where keys melt like the Dali’s clocks, letters running away from misconceptions, abandoning me at the edge of a lake of lice, my fingers chasing the stretched words, spiders pinning letters to a board, sucking their dry radish souls.
The ears, watch for the ears, they hear what eyes do not feel.
An epitaph: Calamitous Sensuality!