I watch the ripples change their size
But never leave the stream
Of warm impermanence
And so the days float through my eyes
But still the days seem the same
And these children that you spit on
As they try to change their worlds
Are immune to your consultations
They're quite aware of what they're goin' through

Sunday, August 26, 2007

Rewrite Weekend

This weekend was a slow one. I combined all the comments on Daddy's Little Girl on to one manuscript to get ready for the rewrite. I've put all the comments for Robert's Thunder into one folder (progress! science!). And finally I rewrote Rag-a-Bag and queried a few markets about if they considered publishing an early draft on a personal blog as "prior publication." Some places do, some places don't. I just figured I'd find out.

My brain has been keying to poetry lately. Little things set off the radar, like the line "Dogged days of summer" and "Arcturus, Arcturus, phone your way home."

So, Rag-a-Bag is tighter. I've realize that I really have no clue as to the current forms of poetry. So I don't know if I'm in vogue or behind the times. I did put in more punctuation and sentence structures, changed some of the line breaks. Tightened it up, but in the end, changed very little of the substance. I don't know if that's good or not. We'll find out once we start submitting it. Bewildering Stories was offline (at least to me) for most of Saturday. It seems to be back now. If I hear bad news back from those other markets that's where the poem will go.

And for those people who were wondering about my quotation abilities, here's another source for you. This weekend we've been watching "Deep Blue" and "Blue Planet" on Discovery, all narrated by Pierce Brosnan. For the past three segments I've been overlaying what Mr. Brosnan says with a Pinky and the Brain episode. This is the episode that breaks down the fourth wall and has Brain doing a voice-over and Pinky as the sound engineer. Brain's copy reads something like, "We know a little farm that grows peas..." It's insidious once it starts.

Pinky, are you pondering what I'm pondering?
I think so, Brain, but if we didn't have ears, we'd look like weasels.

2 comments:

Camille Alexa said...

"I've realized that I really have no clue as to the current forms of poetry. So I don't know if I'm in vogue or behind the times."

You're in good company, dude: even the editors of the markets that publish 'em don't seem to be in agreement. I think that's actually a good sign for the 'genre' (if we can call poetry a literary genre). It means there's room for debate (I've been involved in some fascinating poetry debates lately). Debate leads to interest and interest leads to popularity. I hope we're about to see some cool things happen for poetry and the people who like it.

Steve Buchheit said...

Cool. At least I'm not the only one scratching around.

I've had various debates about poetry. They mostly involved structured versus free-form or rhyming versus non-rhyming.

Well, in either case, Rag-a-Bag is out trying to score a placement. Good luck little poem. Bon-voyage.