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I’m back and better than ever.

There’s nothing quite like a holiday, complete with eleven hours of travel (door to door) to get you feeling rejuvenated and ready for work again. Especially when you start that first day back with a parking ticket and some really disconcerting news at the office.

But I’ve shaved today, a semiannual ritual of sorts, and look twelve years old. I’m wearing a new houndstooth blazer I got on sale. I’m drinking a cup of that strong Writer’s Center coffee. And I’m ready, world, for what’s next.

I spent a good chunk of the break revising the full-length version of the Living Things manuscript. I hadn’t looked at it in ages and was, for a while, thinking about chucking it. (I chuck a lot of work.) I cut some poems, rewrote a few others, and am still tinkering with the title piece, which has been really difficult to nail down.

I think it’s getting there.

I also started rewriting a fiction piece I’ve been working on for a while called Musical Theatre in Hell.

And I read all of the second Gossip Girl novel, You Know You Love Me.

You could say I’m a little obsessed.

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I’m Retiring from Poetry (Again)

Tuesday night I was bored. I was so bored I could no longer justify ignoring my unrevised poems any longer. I sat down and read through my Dorothy Gale poems, my Dorothy Eady poems, and my one Joseph Smith poem (yes, that Joseph Smith).

As soon as I wrote my post about not writing, I wrote another Joseph Smith poem, a longer one. I’m writing poems about people who experienced two compelling forms of reality. He seems to fit. Or we seem to fit as many of us now live in his version of reality.

I do not like many of these poems, which is discouraging.

In happy news, it makes me like my forthcoming book manuscript so much more. I have oscillated between liking it and hating it fo several months.

And the tentative publication date: September 2009.