Word Raccoon had plans this morning. Big, brave, ambitious plans. We were gonna wake up, pour a modest amount of Coke Zero (ha), and get that last polish done on a chapbook that’s just about ready to be yeeted into the literary void.

Instead?

Technical difficulties. Two solid hours of them.

We are not tech-savvy. But when something breaks, we tend to roll up our sleeves and curse lovingly at the screen until it obeys. Which it eventually did, but only after draining all our emotional reserves and pushing us past the acceptable limit of caffeine for a Tuesday.

At one point Word Raccoon was pacing like she wanted to bite a router. But we overcame it. It involved uninstalling something that apparently no one has needed on a laptop for five years. It’s gone now.

The only thing that saved us: The Secret Life of Books podcast. They were talking Henry James. Portrait of a Lady, specifically, and since WR and I just reread that over the summer (hello, gluttons for dense prose), it was delightful.

And then they opened with light kink talk. I’m not even kidding. I wasn’t ready. Neither was WR. These very proper-sounding podcast hosts casually dropped a sentence that made us both snort into our glasses. It was perfect. I mean, unexpected? Yes. Delightful? Also yes. A little bizarre? Even better.

Regardless, their book talk reminded me why I still care about books, about words. Why I still do this weird thing where I sit with grief or joy or rage or insomnia and try to shape it into something with a spine.

Last night I couldn’t sleep, so WR and I wrote three or four poems. Not good ones. Not even sure they qualify as poems. But one of them? It has a seed, a solid one. I think. 

We’re not gonna polish the chapbook today after all. Not with the mood we’re in, and not with the heavy thing we have to do later.

But we are going to eat lunch. And we are going to submit some poems, even if they’re a little scruffy. Even if we are. That counts.

And someday soon I’ll write about Chill Subs and why scrolling through journal covers feels like speed dating.

But not today.

Today is about surviving the glitches. And the rain. And…everything. We have tried to be so brave…

And we will continue writing (or submitting) anyway.