Two views featuring the same bridge
Last night I started typing, got as far as the corned beef sandwiches and was woken by Julia at 3.30 am. She had woken in the night and noticed that the bed wasn’t as warm or as noisy as usual, and come to look for me. I was asleep in my magnificent office chair. I knew it was a good ideato buy a good one.
I don’t remember feeling tired, I just fell asleep mid-blog. I will continue now, using the lines I had already written.
In the 24 hours prior to the events I have just described, I had written 33 haiku and 9 tanka. It doesn’t sound much but it felt like my head was being crushed. I’d also dealt with several emails, written 1,000 words on Prime Ministers who were shot and done the normal sort of cooking and washing up.
Heron waiting to have a poem written about it
Many of the poems will be deleted, or heavily edited, but the purpose of the quantity is practice and defeating the inner critic. Once you have the material you can carve it into shape, but if you keep telling yourself it is not good enough you never have anything to work with..
The corned beef hash from Sunday became thick vegetable soup for Monday night, and thin soup for Tuesday lunch. The thick soup was accompanied by bread from the bread maker, and the two soups were accompanied by corned beef sandwiches using the rest of the bread and carefully stretching the corned beef by keeping it chilled in the fridge and cutting it thinly.
Between falling asleep and being woken by Julia I found I had had an acceptance from overseas. That’s two from last month’s submissions, and it was a good way to start the day. I use the term loosely as, when you use email and have an international reach, every day is a new one somewhere and where it starts and ends is just a constant process of change.
As an example of editorial opinion, the piece I had accepted last night had been rejected just weeks before by another editor. It was, I thought, the weakest of the three I sent out this time, which just goes to show that you never can tell (to quote Chuck Berry).
Flying Scotsman
