Sorry, I have been struggling since Sunday. Inspiration seems to have deserted me, and IBS seems to have returned. I’ve been watching my diet, so I’m wondering if the IBS could be linked to stress. Yes, even I get stressed from time to time, though I’m only going to mention it in passing as I feel, as I said yesterday, there is far too much sharing in modern life.
It’s taken me well over an hour to get to these seventy seven words. I’ve written about a thousand, but none are hitting the right note.
I started the day by dropping Julia at work and composing a haibun in the car. I emailed it to myself from work. I find that although I need a pen and paper to compose when I’m sitting down to write, I can go directly to the screen if I’ve already composed it in my head.
It will probably never be shown to anybody, as it concerns everything that has bothered me since the depression descended on Sunday. The writing of therapeutic haibun is well known, as is the fact that they make tedious reading. I’m hoping that with the emptying of my head, inspiration will return.
Inspiration has to return because I’m just starting an important six weeks for submissions and these six weeks could set the tone of then next year. Well, if they are good, they could. If they are bad, I will simply start my year from February.
This reminds me – it is probably time for a bit of planning. Things go better with a bit of planning. This year has been OK, but I’ve tended to drift through it, and I need to get a grip. My literary legacy isn’t going to write itself.
My Christmas shopping isn’t going to do itself either, and as Mrs Botham has suspended her Christmas website due to the number of orders, Plan A has collapsed. As has Plan B, because Bettys has nearly sold out. It looks like the hamper plan is going to boil down to some supermarket scones wrapped up in an old shoe box. This lacks the grandeur of the original plan, and I may have to do some more thinking. I did think about getting some fancy Christmas boxes, but the useful sizes all seem to have sold out. It seems that we haven’t been sending empty containers back to China so they can’t send us all the cheap stuff we have come to rely on.
The picture is some Christmas stamps I used on a letter to the USA today.
I have enjoyed your poetry, and hope your inspiration returns, Quercus.
I can feel it coming back…
I enjoy your poetry, and hope your inspiration returns. 🙂
The perils of being a perfectionist! It would never occur to me not to use a thousand words that I had written for a post. I have always fervently believed in the the old saying that if a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly. But then I am not a poet.
Since word processors came along words have been cheap and easy. If I was using a typewriter my posts would be shorter and full of errors. They would also be easy to spot because my typewriter had a number of peculiarities – as so often featured in detective stories of the Golden Age.
If I had to use a typewriter these days, I would be suffering from acute hair loss!
🙂
All the great composers do it in their heads. Chin up, mate.
Yes, time to start doing things again. I will reflect on the irony of a man with a beard telling a man with a beard to keep his chin up. Neither of us are famous for our chins. 🙂
🙂
Those are beautiful stamps, especially colorful #63.
I would say IBS can be aggravated by stress, along with an unbalanced microbiome. Eat well and sleep well, and give a listen to John Prine’s “Spanish Pipedream (Blow Up Your TV)” 🙂
I enjoy your poetry and hope your inspiration returns soon.