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And almost another month gone
of 2013! My birthday and Valentine's Day only a memory and spring is another month closer, thankfully. Dainty little yellow and purple crocuses peeping up through the leftover dry leaves of fall woo us with promises of warm weather. And then another cold blast from Canada via the midwest laughs at us. I am very glad the worst of the snow and ice do not reach us. At least, so far.
Ok, I've quit sniveling, almost. My novel didn't make it through the first round of Amazon's Breakthrough Novel Award contest. Oh well, as I said before, nothing ventured, nothing gained, hmmm. And the publisher decided to pass on the novel I've been shopping around. I'll give another publisher a shot at it in a few days when their submission period opens.
The past weekend was exhilarating. I drove up to Virginia Tech at Blacksburg and participated in a poetry reading. The event was held in the oldest building on campus, a restored farmhouse called Solitude. VT's Appalachian Studies program is housed in it now, a perfect fit.
I don't write much poetry and now I understand why. While prose writing needs to be from the heart enough to touch the reader, if it is to be successful, poetry requires it to a higher degree. A person may bury his or her feelings somewhat among the more numerous words of a story or novel. But with fewer words as in a poem, those feelings must be distilled to their essence, and we don't always want to reveal so much of ourselves. I know I resist it. I said as much to a niece in an email when I wrote her about my visit to VT. She telephoned to tell me she knew this was true. And it's why she stopped writing poetry.
Still working on being more diligent with getting my columns to the paper. One hindrance is that I decided to try to work on prettifying the code on my own webpages and the pages I've done for my writing guilds. I'd only made minor changes in updating them since I put them up, because I knew a major overhaul would take a major investment of time. What was up on the web worked, sort of, but I knew it wasn't right. And I wanted it to be right. When you're teaching yourself something like Hyper Text Markup Language, HTML, the glue that holds web pages together, it's always problematic. So, of course, I broke the code. I couldn't replace what's up on the web until the new pages worked, and it's been a bear. I seem to have forgotten much of what I dug out when I first began trying to learn HTML. But I persevere and progress is being made.