Saturday in the land of ease

9:10 a.m. I read three poesm. Paula Bohince, Josephine Jacobsen. Sharon Olds. It is not to deconstruct the poems, but to hear language. I read out loud, to myself and whatever spirits lurk in my apartment. To get the brain used to unusual, fractured ways of writing. Like electroshock, scramble it up. To unlock possibilities.

I find it is easier to take this writing less seriously than the writing I did freehand in the mornings. I am aware I may have an audience. Not less seriously in terms of the writing itself, the commiting of words to . . . space, I guess, but in how I regard the practice. Although, I have during this week's experiment, only skipped one morning and made it up later in the day, something I would never do when writing by hand.

It is, as I have reported, less freewheeling. That may be good. Much less introspection. Heaven knows, if there is a something that constitutes a full plate of looking inward in one's life, I must have filled mine near the edges.

The Asheville Writing Enthusiasts meets later this morning. I have submitted pages to be critiqued, from my novela, Come Back, about a young baseball phenom from a difficult family in the boonies of western North Carolina who gets messed up with methamphetamine. "Gliimer Train," the literary magazine, is having a "First Five Hundred" contest for unpublished writers - that would be me - the first five hundred words from a work. I want feedback from the group before I submit to it. However, I am aware I sent it out as an email attachment with as an Open Office document. OpenOffice is freeware that is much like Word but cannot be read without OpenOffice. In the past I have saved the documents as Word doc.s before sending and forgot to this time. SOooo, it is likely no one will have been able to read it before the meeting. I will take copies to be read there. I will report back.

I am baching (?) it this week end, as in being without significant other. I could get a lot of writing done. Or I could watch football. Or hike. Or all of the above. I become anxious when large blocks of unplanned time looms out in front of me. On the other hand, I am neurotic about having large blocks of "free time" available to me. I make up the story that these are concurrent results of being brought up in a family in which spending a lot of time by oneself was suspect. And in which many activities were planned, the usual suburban things, Scouts, Sports, YMCA, Church. I, without choice and with resentment participated. It is I believe, why joining things as an adult has been difficult.

Ooops. We seem to have landed in the land of introspection. Time to go. I can get a half-hour of work on Marijuana Murders.