From almost the moment she woke this morning, Word Raccoon’s been flirting with poetry calls. I gave her a few minutes to admire the big, strong journal covers just begging for her words. (She wishes.)
I even let her put in her most fun earrings. (Just kidding. I’m feeling better, but not that much better yet.)
I made her a cup of strong Nutcracker Sweet tea and convinced her to eat a banana, even though she was eyeing the cookie tin like she knew a few stragglers were hiding in there.
I was just about to lecture her on her dubious habit of writing “ie” when it’s clearly supposed to be “y” (I’ve given up correcting her; she just giggles and says language is malleable, and why shouldn’t she be the one to bend it?), when it occurred to me:
“Word Raccoon, we have no plan. It’s a new year and we don’t have writing goals.”
She laughed so hard I thought she might shoot straight out of the top of her sweater.
“Where we’re going, we don’t need goal,” she said.
“I think you’re thinking of Back to the Future, and it’s roads.”
She shrugged. “I have a plan. Open those submission opps and dive in.”
“First of all, it’s a holiday. You know, that’s a day designed for taking off.”
“It’s a day for doing what you want. What if this is what I want to do?”
Fair. But while I did load and run the dishwasher yesterday, the dining room table and its immediate surroundings remain irritatingly cluttered.
“And what can’t I do when that starts bothering me, WR?”
She hung her head.
“You can’t think clearly.”
“That’s right.”
I’ve got to take it easy on the kid. She doesn’t realize it yet, but vegetables are coming her way later today via chicken pot pie. I’ve let her off the hook for a few days now.
“We’re not…undecorating today, are we?” she asked, mournfully.
“Of course not! We’ve barely been home, and we were both in a sickness fog. Let’s give it a few days.”
She looked visibly relieved.
She wants to tell you about two of my Christmas gifts, but she’ll have to wait. (Suspense. It’s poetic.)
It occurs to me that the detritus on the table is there because it doesn’t have a home.
Like some of my poetry.
(See what I did there?)
Before we talk about our non-plan for writing, let me just say this: Even while feeling icky, though we haven’t felt very generative, WR and I have still been pitching.
The rate is slower. We have to think harder. But we do it. That’s how you remain in it.
Yesterday we submitted to three places. That might not sound like much, but it took forever.
The last one? I stumbled upon the call at 6 p.m. Just as Barry and I had committed to watching a show together.
“After this, would you mind…?”
He didn’t even have to ask what I meant.
I am such a fun date.
“It should only take a few minutes. Just a cut-and-paste job.”
Except it wasn’t. They had rules. Of course they did.
Earlier in the day, I’d decided that Look wasn’t the collection for one of the calls, but maybe another collection was. So I swapped it in. But that meant reshaping. Adding, pruning. Making sure the middle held. Making sure it mattered.
I found myself editing poems directly in the file I was going to submit.
Which meant making a note to myself to go back and update those poems in the master Google Docs later. (Did I? Not yet. Because: sickness, holiday, life. But I will.)
Today, as I said, WR wanted to take over again, now that she’s functioning at 85% of her powers. But it’s the first day of the year (Happy New Year, duckies), and she and I need to talk.
Oh wait, we just received our first rejection of 2026. On a holiday. Lovely.
This will be the year I finish a tight draft of novel #3.
But WR, as we all know, lives to write and submit poetry. She tolerated the novel at the writing retreat, barely. Has she even let me open that file since we got home?
Nay, nay.
I don’t know what sort of writing compromise we’ll arrive at for 2026, but we must.
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