Tag Archives: recovery

Smugness, Success and the Art of the Humblebrag

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Warning – this post may contain smugness and inappropriate levels of self-satisfaction. I have also invented a new (to me ) form of humblebrag –

Do you realise how much time it takes emailing editors to thank them for accepting your work? I’ve had to do it three times in the last three days and it’s hard finding time to actually write the poems.

That’s. of course, an exaggeration, as i’d be happy to spend all day thanking editors, and in truth it only took about ten minutes in total. I tend, like editors to have a fairly standard reply, because after “thank you” there isn’t much to say.

The story is that I have spent the last few days hammering away at the keyboard. I did this because I am lazy and disorganised and only work when under threat of a deadline. Even then, the “work” of writing poetry doesn’t compare to cleaning out a chicken she in November, or cutting lawns in the middle of summer. Anyway, I managed six submissions in the last  four days (they were written but not finished.

One had an acceptance within 24 hours. I have already written about that. This morning I had an email to tell me someone had accepted three poems from yesterday’s submissions (which is a high level of editor industry and well beyond the call of duty. This evening I switched the computer on and found two more had been accepted. That had taken several days, which is still stunningly speedy considering editors also have day jobs and get piles of poetry sent to them.

Obviously, I’m happy and grateful, and, as you may have noticed before, success is a double edged sword, as I start to worry about repeating it. However, it goes deeper than that. It’s 12 months since I had cellulitis and the associated sepsis, and about eleven since I had Covid. It has taken all that time for me to get going again and to feel I am back up to standard.

Title? Can’t really think . . .

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I’ve been trying to get into the comments for the last two hours. All I get is a small circle going round and round . . .

Is anyone else having this problem?

Anyway – Julia’s swollen eye is now definitely on the mend, which is good as progress has been slow over the last few days and I have been struggling for supportive things to say. There’s only so much you can say after the first day.

Over the last few days I’ve had a couple of emails from editors. One was an acceptance. However, to cut my ego down to size, they did offer a couple of suggestions which improved the piece considerably. It was a masterclass in editing and an example of how things can always be improved.

The second was a hybrid – neither an acceptance or a rejection, but an invitation to make alterations and resubmit. Generally I’m all in favour of chances to be published but over the years I’ve had bad experiences with this sort of thing and have never had an altered piece accepted on this basis. You know where you are with acceptances and rejections, even with conditional acceptances, but this sort of hybrid never seems to work for me. I can’t see this being the one to break the sequence, particularly as I’ve only been given a few days to do it. Fortunately, I no longer have my old drive to be published so I’m not going to stress about it. Some you win, some you lose. This piece will eventually be recycled, but not just yet.

Meanwhile, I have answered a few comments by going through past posts but still cannot call up the comments as a whole. I hope this might be fixed by the time I post tomorrow.

 

Slowing Down, Taking Stock

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Things are stuttering along. It is, as before, a zig-zag course towards improvement and today, after submitting my first piece for some time, I am once again wondering why I bother writing.

I’m clear on magazine articles. I don’t do many of them, but I do it for the money.

Poetry is different. I’ve been sent one or two free copies of magazines and have had two certificates, but the rewards of writing poetry are mainly spiritual.

At the moment, I’m thinking of stopping submitting so much. I can dress this up as spiritual renewal or an issue of quality over quantity, but in truth, I’m just getting a bit fed up with some of the editors I have to deal with.

Most of them are brilliant (though even the brilliant ones often turn me down – nobody is perfect) with a positive attitude, open minds and helpful comments.

Others are a bit on the academic side and a touch prescriptive. I won’t get too specific, as they all work hard to produce the magazines we rely on, and I don’t want to criticise anyone personally. However, one or two seem to get their preferences mixed up with the “rules” of writing Japanese poetry forms. Even the various societies, with their panels of experts, don’t produce rules, just guides. These also often edit what I consider to be my voice. I write as I speak, and if I want to use an expression from the midlands of the UK, I don’t see why it needs to be ironed out by an American with an academic background in English.

Meanwhile, there is the group of editors who want to be excited by my submissions. I write about my life. It’s not exciting. I’m unlikely to display the qualities required by these editors.

I have limited time at the moment, and have decided to use it more wisely. One submission has gone. The other, with its manufactured false excitement and linguistic fireworks, will stay in the draft section. Eventually, as it matures, it will be used, or dismantled for use in other work.

But it won’t be sent out this week to curry favour with an editor who wants me to be something I’m not.

My Orange Parker Pen

 

 

Random Jottings

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I’m not quite ready to report on Sunday in its entirety, though I will get round to it in a day or two.

The driving went OK, helped considerably by a knee brace. I suffered a little last night, but the knee recovered as I slept and wasn’t too bad today.

Had my dressing changed this morning and progress is looking good – new skin forming and I’m hopeful that another week should see things just about healed.

Then I had a pneumonia vaccination, which was a surprise, as I didn’t think I could have one until I was 65. It’s always nice to get something for nothing.

Went to work and did another half day without a problem. Planning to do full days on Thursday and Saturday.The return to work is going quite well.

Adjusted my seating arrangements at home. I’m no longer putting my leg up, but this puts less strain on my knee, so it’s a good trade off. I have a telephone consultation booked with a physiotherapist on Friday to discuss this further.

The return to writing is not progressing quite as well as I had hoped, but it is progressing, even if it is very slow.

Asked my uncle about the day the school was bombed when I saw him on Sunday. It had occurred to me that although I knew my Mum had been there, my uncle and one of my aunts must also have been there. He was there, so I have another note to add to the family history.

Number One son reports that he is a little stiff from doing the Great North Run yesterday and that his time was in the top 5.000. As I’m a little stiff from just sitting in the car, I wouldn’t mind swapping with him. I’d be happy to be in the first 50,000.

Tried a few photos when I got home, but mostly blurred by a mix of wind and poor photography.

Teasel

 

 

Overdoing it

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Yes, you guessed. After weeks of sitting with my leg elevated, I finally, after a week of building up to it, managed to overdo things. After my haircut and shopping I spent the rest of the day gradually deteriorating as my knee stiffened and my leg throbbed. Maybe “Back to Normal” was a bit optimistic. Just one more day on the zig zag of recovery.

It’s at times like this that you appreciate the magic of WP. I’ve been reading about Captain Moonlight, dining out and the Dave Clark Five over the last few days. Life would be a much poorer place without this ability. I don’t use the internet in the living room these days, as |I’m trying to restore the art of conversation (which is basically me talking while Julia grunts and uses her laptop. To be fair, she does take her work seriously, and does do a lot of planning, even though the general culture of the organisation is to take the money and do as little as possible.  I won’t go on, but as I watch her fill out forms, do training and plan sessions for hours every evening, I do a lot of thinking about the unfairness of life.

I’m going to go to the doctor soon, then will go to work for the first time in just over three weeks. I have grown lazy over that time. It hasn’t been like lockdown where I had plenty of time to do things – most of the time was spent sitting down like a vegetable, unable to concentrate for more than a few minutes at a time.  Four pages of a book has been a struggle.

In the last week things have improved and I’ve been writing again, though I haven’t actually typed or submitted anything. Good news is that I just had a haibun accepted, so things are still working their way through the system. I am able to write, but so far haven’t typed much. I’m going to have to start the whole, dull, copy typing process again if I’m going to get back to making regular submissions. I need to get a couple of submissions knocked into shape as the end date for two magazines is 15th of this month – five days is cutting it fine even by my standards.

Generally, despite the up and down nature of my recovery the week has been a positive one and I’m better now than I was when I started. Even yesterday was a positive, despite the knee pain – it was me that caused the pain by trying too much. My immune system just keeps chugging along and healing as fast as it can.

Zig Zag

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If yesterday was a zig on the zig zag road to recovery (think of one of those cartoon-style graphs as you read,) today is a bit of a  zag. It’s not bad, but I’m definitely not as perky today. OK, I’m not generally known for being “perky” at the best of times, but I use the term comparatively.

Considering that three weeks ago I wasn’t entirely sure who I was, and that two weeks ago I was a festering wreck, I’m not doing badly. Most of my faculties are back, my walking is back to where it was and although I have to sit with my leg up, I’m nearly back to the state of imperfect health where you normally find me.

Nothing brings this home as much as a nurse saying they will have to “do something” about something you regard as being perfectly normal. They love tinkering, do nurses and, unlike doctors they never take no for an answer. I discussed the statin question with a doctor and they told me that even where cholesterol is good they like to put certain people on them as it might help. I looked at the figures on the NHS website – yes, they reduce your percentage chance of having a stroke or heart attack. By a couple of percent. What they don’t tell you is the chance of them interacting with other medication. or it being something else for the pharmacy to get wrong. We have agreed that I won’t take them. I will look at my diet again and see if I can lower the level that is causing concern.

Yesterday in the surgery I was listening to people being told that they couldn’t have liver function tests because we don’t have enough blood tubes. Only about a year ago they stopped prescribing my arthritis medication because I was behind with my testing. Double standards, or what?

Marmalade Hoverfly

A Slightly Longer Post

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Sorry, I was slightly inaccurate when posting last night  – it’s cellulitis rather than phlebitis. As soon as they mentioned it at the doctor (I finally felt strong enough to leave the house)  I remembered it was cellulitis I’d had before. That’s why it doesn’t seem as dramatic as the link I didn’t post.

Julia looked into it after I was diagnosed and she has been giving me a good talking too. It seems that fi you are in the shaking/delirium stage you should get your self to hospital. This is clearly guidance from someone who has never had it. When you are in that stage you can’t string coherent sentence or thought together. Now we know what to do we will make sure we ring an ambulance and, I’m sure, be told that it isn’t serious enough to warrant that.

I now have antibiotics and am in that stage of feeling worse before I get better. Fortunately I am already o lot better than I was. You can tell this from the blog posts. They are hardly masterpieces of finely crafted prose, but compared to the communication of a few days ago I feel like Shakespeare and Oscar Wilde rolled into one.

I’m still making a lot more mistakes than usual with the typing, but am hoping I am correcting most of them as I go along.

My early texts to the boss and Julia a couple of days ago looked like they had been typed by a five year old wearing mittens.

Fortunately |I am resilient, so I will bounce back.

It took me two and a half hours to get my pills this afternoon, which was twenty minutes with the doctor and two hours and ten minutes wrapped up in queues and listening to (yet more) excuses from the pharmacy. Meanwhile, I had plenty of time to sit and view my future – fawn clothes, shoes with Velcro straps and jogging bottoms. I had intended being a natty dresser in old age but it seems fate is even conspiring to take that away from me.

 

Governments, statistics and unreliable narratives

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I’m having to rush a bit because I just wrote 350 words which went nowhere. They were started by me seeing this on the internet whilst researching travel between the USA and UK – a train of thought sparked off by the sight of an elderly gent arriving in Cornwall this morning.

The U.S. State Department has issued a Level 3 Travel Health Notice for the United Kingdom: Reconsider travel to the United Kingdom due to COVID-19 and exercise increased caution due to terrorism.

I didn’t realise that we had that much terrorism. It certainly doesn’t seem as common as it was when I was growing up. At one time they used to search us before we were allowed in a pub. This was strange as I was searched more going into pubs than I was when I used to go to Ireland on business.

It’s also strange when you think that the intentional homicide rate in the UK is 1.2 per 100,000, where it is 5 per 100,000 in the USA. It looks to me like we should be warning UK citizens not to travel to the USA, and that your government advice would be to prepare for a nice restful holiday in the UK.

It just goes to show that Governments and statistics are what they call “unreliable narrators” in the world of writing.

I’m going out for a meal now, in an attempt to get back to normal. It doesn’t feel quite right but I’m sure I’ll enjoy it once I get there. As long as I can elude those pesky terrorists…

I will try to post something more interesting later, but in the meantime, don’t believe all you read..

Improvement at last!

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The cold finally started to improve yesterday. I started to write a post on that subject, found inspiration came slowly and, eventually, fell asleep in my chair. Waking at just after midnight I humphed at missing a day on the blog and went to bed.

The clock went off this morning, waking me from a dream where Julia and I were about to embark, as newly-weds, on an academic career at an American University in the 1940s. I think I was vaguely remembering something I’d read in the biography section of a poetry book recently, probably about Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, but as I’m not from Yorkshire and we don’t have a gas oven it’s not a 100% fit.

Julia is now at work, I’m feeling optimistic about my prospects for the day and I now have approximately eight hours ahead of me in which to achieve either greatness or inner peace, or possibly both.

A cup of tea seems like a good starting point for either of those results, so I think I’ll go and put the kettle on.

The photograph is from the Suffolk trip, but it has tea in it so it will do as a library shot.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Selfie in a teapot

 

A Waste of a Day

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I spent a lot of yesterday in bed with a fever. It came on shortly after I finished my last post and lasted until the early hours of this morning.

As a result I’ve been sitting round the house recovering and doing little else. Even typing seemed like too much effort.

By 6 o’clock I felt well enough to go shopping and at 9 o’clock I went to Trowell Services on the M1 to pick up Number One son on his return from Portugal.

I am now going to publish this, go to bed and prepare for a more productive day tomorrow.