A little white lightness

I love the way snow changes the landscape, but I also love the brightness it brings.

I can't drive in it, but I don't have a car this weekend anyway.

What time is it?

Dark.

Wild Friday

I had a party to attend, and the wind was kicking up, so I left work at about 3:30.

At about 3:45, my car died on the highway. Dead. Nothing happening. I became a traffic hazard.

I've been stuck behind people like me.

But people are nice.

One person offered to pull me, but I had already called the State Patrol.

Another person offered to let me in. I think he thought I had a turn signal on and didn't see the emergency flashers.

Then two guys offered to push my car. This was good, as it took all my energy (and a shocking flood of adrenaline) just to steer over to the shoulder.

THANK YOU, TWO GUYS!

I called AAA, and I waited. I looked for out-of-state license plates: Oregon, Idaho, California, Utah, Indiana!.

I watched the rain on the windshield to see if it would turn to snow.

I still managed to get the wrong tow truck (how do you do that? total miscommunication and nothing to do with AAA), but even the wrong tow truck got me to the right place (the car mechanics'). My husband came and picked me up.

It took me four hours.

I missed the party, but I'm home. And people are nice.

Feedback!

Not the crazy electric guitar kind.

Today I received a rejection letter (yes, it's that time of year when they flock to my mail box), and the editor had commented on a poem, noting what didn't work for him.

How often does that happen?

I'll take some time to think about it and take another look at that last stanza.

***

That poem is part of a series, most of which I will now probably never publish. And I'm willing to make that trade.

The series centers on the idea of "outside the capital," the fact that a lot of times we the people know what's going on months before the elected leaders in D.C. begin to get a clue. I wrote a lot of poems last fall. I even finished some of them, and one was published.

But after the November election, those poems have lost relevency. For now. For a good long while, I hope. And it's a trade I'm happy to make. For me, a good real life trumps a poem any day and every day.

***

But this is a poem I can work on. I probably won't send the same poem back to the same editor (and given the little rules I have, I probably won't send to this editor for another year).

Do you ever get feedback on the work that you submit?

Lights, camera, video!

Recently at work, I signed up to write a script for a video about how students could use Microsoft OneNote.

Now, with several script drafts and a lot of help from a lot of people, it's live:

Demo: Take OneNote to class

I had a lot of fun working on this project, partly because OneNote is fun. It's my favorite software tool to use. If you aren't familiar with it, check out the video to get a glimpse of it in action.

Next up, I'll try to pull together a little something about how I've been using OneNote for writing poetry.

For the love of language(s)

I love language, but I also love languages. I always thought that I would learn a lot of them, and well. I haven't gotten very far. I haven't gotten far at all.

But I had this great idea, I thought, for learning Italian. I'd found a couple of (mostly) cooking blogs, Cuoche dell'altro mondo and Un Tocco di Zenzero, and I thought that I could learn some Italian by translating these blogs. If not a whole blog post, at least the recipe.

Some of it can be figured out in context. A lot of it, not so much. Tonight, I finally broke out the Italian/English dictionary my son gave me last Christmas.

What is OMG in Italian?

I was lost immediately, so I skipped the introductory text and went straight to the recipe. In terms of translation, I still became lost quickly. I probably could cook it, minus a couple of ingredients, but I couldn't begin to tell you accurately what it means.

I need to try again, or I need to find another way to learn Italian.

Click Send

I just sent in my inaugural ode—which isn't really an ode, and I still wish it could have been a sestina.

How about you? The deadline is tomorrow.

I'll post it here on the Big Day.

It was fun to think about the transition we're in and where the U.S. could go in a good way and to try to capture those feelings in a poem, even if it felt a little fast and forced.

That said, I am in general feeling prompt burn-out. Having a daily prompt for NaPoWriMo or any other month of the 12 is fun, but I start to feel like it's pulling me away from the work that I want to do—like I'm spinning creativity cycles on poems that are, in the end, kind of a shrug. A great way to get over writer's block—but if you aren't blocked, a diversion. So I'll return to being the unparticipant for a while and try to work on work.

Do you like a steady diet of prompts? Are you able to interweave them into your other writing, use them as a tool to forge ahead? Or are they an aside, a separate endeavor?