Oh Wha Tana Siam

Yeah, so, it's been a weird day. I feel like looking at it and waving my finger like a disappointed parental figure and asking it, "Why can't you be more like yesterday?" But that wouldn't be fair. It wasn't that yesterday was anything special. There was dinner that was good, and dinner company that was awesome. The fact that there was a couch at the place we ate was pretty much the best thing ever. I lost my point. Screw it - I'm not going back. That pretty much sums up today.

It started off badly. I always make myself a big breakfast on either Saturday or Sunday morning, and this week it was Sunday. That should have been a good start, but it wasn't. It was the most god-awful omelette I've ever made in my life. It tasted like feet. A harbinger of an altogether foot-tasting day to come.

Over at 1097 Magazine, we've had to make the very difficult decision to scale back our ridiculous pie-in-the-sky idea of a monthly web and print journal to a web edition every month and a print edition four times a year. I'm really disappointed, but it's a decision that, at best, could only have been postponed.

In other news, I am behind in both writing and running, and I'm not going to report how much right now. It's not that I don't know how much. Oh, I'm WAY too compulsive not to know. I'll report tomorrow, when I have made up a little ground. Seeing those two minus signs tonight will only serve to piss me off more at myself.

Thanks to Camille for the kind words and limerick. I think I'll be bringing the scotch with me. Thanks, really - this is one of those days that is bad, but bad in a way that none of my friends here really understand. Cheers.

RTFSG

Is it really so hard? I can't imagine that anyone who writes for a living, or even as an occasional hobby, can claim that reading a few hundred words is too taxing for them. The words I speak of are submission guidelines, and I am about to make one of those editorial rants that every single editor has made at least once since we were deciding whose mammoth drawing was worthy of the really good wall space in the cave. Five words: Read the ______ submission guidelines. The third word was excised from that sentence to maintain this post as family friendly, but it's seven letters long and rhymes with 'fucking'. Anyway, it's not those innocent souls who don't read the submission guidelines that really make me the most angry. I like to think of them as excited young artists, so enamored with their latest creation that the details escape them and they must send it now. No, more than these, the real bother is the applicant who prefaces their submission with the words "I read your submission guidelines", and then precedes to break every one of those guidelines, one by one. My God, people. It's like having a woman walk up to you and kick you in a very uncomfortable place, only to smile down at you, writhing in a ball on the floor, and say "I read today that it hurts when you kick someone there, and I swore I would never do it. Ever. Oh, by the way, can I have five dollars?"

1097 Launches

It's been a really long time since I mentioned it, but a few friends and I have been working on editing a print-and-online little monthly zine, called 1097 Magazine, and the first web version is now online at 1097mag.com. Feel free to come on over and check it out. It's all of our first forays into editing and publishing, so it should be interesting to see how much we trip over ourselves. It's been fun - a LOT of reading - and it definitely helps to get inside the heads of those that read my own work. I never really understood how a minor infraction against submission guidelines could send some editors into an insane fit of rage. Now I do. When you're reading 200 poems, give or take, one being out of order and taking an extra five minutes to format feels like the end of the world, and it's incredibly hard not to reply and just scream your brains out at the thoughtless bastard behind it, until you realize you have been that bastard ... and you don't.

In more personal news, I've been a bit down. The second of Western Oregon's two seasons (the rainy one) has arrived, and I'll need a bit of time to adjust to it. There are other things too, but frankly, this has never been a particularly personal blog. I had one of those once, one of the billions of "Waaaah, I hate my life" blogs, and frankly, I bored myself. It's been an odd year, and that may be all that needs to be said.