Sunday, April 10, 2011

Episode 930: Je Dors Trop, Mais Je Travaille Tout De Même

So I didn't make it to morning service, although my alarm did wake me up. It's just that having only fallen asleep at 4 am (again), I was too tired to get up. All's not lost though, as I did get work done today. Read a bunch of submissions, including a very strange 101-page poetry manuscript, accompanied by a comprehensive list of publication credits. I hate it when people do that, as if their credits alone will somehow persuade me to publish them. Also received a biographical note whose length in terms of words exceeded the poem that I was publishing, which again, was a bit weird. Got an acceptance from Bewildering Stories, very thorough editorial process going on there. The editor thinks I may be unnecessarily courting controversy by retaining the colour symbolism in the piece, but I declined to bow to political correctness just because someone might be offended that I appear to employ a black-and-white dualism (it isn't actually that straightforward in my story anyway, which should be clear to anyone who isn't reading with a political axe to grind) that has been in the literary tradition for centuries. Had a rewrite request from LITSNACK as well, which I've taken care of, so hopefully the piece gets accepted now, since the editor made it sound like all that was needed was to add a little more depth to an already interesting story. I also rewrote my most recent PWP poem, 'Dinah'. It's an improvement from yesterday, though still in terza rima just to have something different in the sequence. Have a couple of lines in place for the next one, but I am not making the mistake again of staying up to finish. Incidentally, as much as I dislike Harold Bloom as a critic, the next poem I'm writing actually owes something to his interpretation of Tamar in The Book Of J, translated from the Hebrew by David Rosenberg.

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