--I'VE BEEN HOLDING ON SO TIGHT


…I've got a couple more little micros --"Hirsute," "Window," and "Mad up at Eunoia Review and also here under "Words in Print."

…I passed my 600th acceptance the other day. That's since I started submitting work in May of '09. If you read this blog, thanks for being there with me. Really. Writing is such a lonely gig. Even virtual support is meaningful.
So what does 600 mean? I don't know. I'm not sure. Certainly there's a small dose of validation in getting to that number. But numbers aren't everything. Roxane Gay recently reminded me that quality is paramount and more important than quantity. She named a few great books, classics, by different authors, thus making the point that some writers produce a great amount of work but no one recalls any of it, while the perfect book that resonates with the reader is remember for all time.
I get that. I do.
Not every one of my 600 pieces was remarkable, but most were pretty good. I think so anyway.
In any event, on Wednesday I go back to the novel I am halfway through. It'll be good to re-visit those characters. I've been missing them.

…I like these things to start the week off:


"I am only one; but still I am one. I cannot do everything, but still
I can do something; I will not refuse to do the something I can do." Helen Keller

"It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious." Oscar Wilde

"The act of reaching for a lighter or a spoon is familiar routine, yet we hardly know what really goes on between hand and metal." Walter Benjamin

"There is always something within poetry that desires the invisible." Barbara Guest

"It was just that sometimes reality, the same little reality that served to anchor reality, seemed to fade around the edges, as if the passage of time had a porous effect on things, and blurred and made more insubstantial what was itself already, by its very nature, insubstantial and satisfactory and real." Roberto Bolaño

"They carried their reputations. They carried the soldier's greatest fear, which was the fear of blushing. Men killed, and died, because they were embarrassed not to. It was what brought them to the war in the first place, nothing positive, no dreams of glory or honor, just to avoid the slush of dishonor. They crawled into tunnels and walked point, and advanced under fire. They were frightened to be cowards." Tim O'Brien, "The Things They Carried"