A loose coalition of thoughts, some of which are only tangentially related:

• In the last week I’ve managed to thumb my way through an old copy of Strunk and White’s while finishing a first draft. It was nice to review an old favorite, but the emphasis on punctuation and grammar and syntax (as opposed to narrative or plotting or character) has me thinking a lot about the relationship between social media and language.

• I often tell close friends that, if given the opportunity to go back to school for a PhD, I would want to study the relationship between social media and epistemology, which is true, but my interest is as much about how language shapes our thought as it is about your preferred platform.

• I don’t have a point, which I suppose it what’s keeping me to a regular weekly schedule. I don’t know if anyone is ever going to read this. I hope that, someday, I will. I hope that if no one else ever stumbles across these words, that at least I will be able to review them at some future date and remember what my life was like right now.

• I like to think of the drafting process as walking through an unlit wooded area at night. I typically go in with a really good understanding of where I’m going, and an even better understanding of where I am coming from, but at a certain point in the process I am far enough away from both sides to be completely, utterly lost. I have to keep moving forward, hoping that I’m going in the right direction, but I can’t see through the fog much farther than the tiny little circle of lamplight immediately surrounding me. I just have to keep hoping that as long as I keep moving forward, I won’t stay lost in the woods forever.

• I’ve got a pretty good idea of what I need to be working on with this first draft, but I’m already drafting the next piece and for the first time in my life I have to balance both drafting and revising at the same time. It’s a whole new skill set, but one I hope to evolve over time.

• There are so many things I want to work on at once. Poetry, literary, commercial, trad pub, indie pub, chapbooks, zines, essays. Sometimes I feel like there is more inside of me than has a right to exist but when it comes time to externalize these things they become nebulous, vague, evanescent things which I cannot make tangible. I want to work hard but in creative work, “hardness” cannot be identified. It’s difficult not to tie in my creative hopes with my hopes for everything else in my life. I can simultaneously see the interconnected nature of things and want to keep them carefully compartmentalized. It feels so very much like fracturing a chrysalis.

• I want to keep showing up so that I can show I’ll keep showing up. I need some kind of trail of evidence, to prove things if only to myself that I am here and I wanted this. I wanted to create something, wanted it badly enough to try even between the weight of all my adult responsibilities, wanted it even after… everything. I am here. I showed up today. I hope it’s enough.

BH ❤