Word Raccoon, despite not feeling well, sat with me while I worked on my novel yesterday, the technical end of my and Barry’s self-created writing retreat. We’re traveling home today.

The end? Already?

Anyway, yesterday I identified and began consolidating duplicate-but-different scenes. (I know, how’d that happen? Because Drema doesn’t know how to write any other way! She’s a messy, messy writer who finds her way eventually to the labyrinth’s center. If she were a sculptor, she’d probably have to add on marble and then carve her way back in.)

Part of the fun is getting lost.

And when I examine these scenes, I notice that each is really a layer: one might carry the atmosphere, one the psychological tension, the next the choreography. It’s like I can only focus on one area at a time, and then I overlay them.

Which seems ridiculous, even to me, but it is what it is, duckies.

Mercifully, I think only one thread does that majorly. Maybe another has shades of it, but yet another thread I’ve focused so much on that I’ve managed to whittle it back. 

The newest thread knew what it was from the beginning, and she doesn’t do that at all. Kudos!

Meanwhile, Word Raccoon begged for a nap early afternoon, and then slept for at least two hours. Maybe three. She woke up wanting (typical her) a PB&J for dinner. Nothing fancy.

Maybe she ate some potato chips. And more sweets. Those are her go-to when she’s sick, if she has to eat.

Then she packed her book suitcase, shaming me for not reading most of the ones I brought. But I touched at least two of the five. Hey, just call me Rory Gilmore. I don’t travel without books.

If I had picked up the poetry instruction guide, WR would’ve gotten mad again. She hasn’t made it past the introduction, where the guy is (rightly) speaking to students of poetry, as in classroom students.

WR and I are not dabblers! We are not dilettantes, I want to tell him. We are serious about our poetry. 

There’s something off-putting about that intro, though I’m not sure what beyond its tone. 

Still, if I give it a fair shot, I might end up liking the book. It was recommended to me, and surely someone I trust saw something in it. But since it’s next in my poetry reading queue, I can only hope I can convince myself to give it a go when I get home.

Now I slightly regret packing it, because I want to see if retreat-Drema can be more reasonable about it.

Eh. There’s always tomorrow. Or is that today? Blogging gets slippery, timing-wise.

Am I the only one who likes to pack up early? I don’t want to go home yet, so I pack what I can, just so I don’t have to think about it when the time comes.

Also, this is embarrassing, but true, I always thank the room for hosting me whenever we leave a hotel or Airbnb. It just seems right. The room has witnessed, sheltered, and participated in whatever was created during our stay.

I hope you’ll call that charming and not naive.

Maybe that should be my epitaph: charming, not naive. Maybe I’m both. Maybe I’m neither. 

WR says that’s too morbid to end a trip on. Or a post.

She may be right.

I stopped packing for the evening and turned to submitting poetry. Remember, that’s my sneaky way of revising: if WR and I read poems I haven’t touched in a while, we will want to improve them. 

Time to dig out the first aid kit. It has cold medicine in it. (Look at us time traveling again. Somehow we’re back to this evening, though I’m gonna schedule this for tomorrow.) 

Thanks, yester-Drema.

Word Raccoon told me last night she was not getting sick. Just because her throat hurt and she was feeling cranky meant nothing.

I made her do a salt water rinse, after which she assured me she was perfectly fine, see? She opened her mouth wide.

I remained dubious.

She stayed up too late regaling herself with chaotic SNL videos (Domingo!), and then the algorithm offered dance clips. She said “try me,” and YouTube obliged. We enjoyed Fred Astaire and Rita Hayworth, some Dad hiphop, the Cupid Shuffle (which we have done many times during band breaks), amateur shuffle dancing, skate dancing, and pretty much every dance you can imagine until YouTube seemed to say, “And now we return you to your usual, burned out fare.” I said fine but turned the phone off instead, and WR passed out from too many sweets from her stocking.

These things typically happen when WR (my inner writing sidekick; I keep forgetting not everyone has met her yet) gets sick:

Symptom number one: Time means nothing. Sleep? What’s that? Around 5 this morning she assured me she was awake for no good reason and begged for a cold Coke Zero, which I gave her. She promptly fell asleep.

Symptom number two: Caffeine defiance. She can drink gallons of it when she’s sick and it’s like her body refuses to acknowledge it, though she also doesn’t get sleepy unless it’s time for the alarm. See above re: doesn’t get sleepy.

She was in and out all night. But the minute the alarm was about to go off, she bolted upright, turned it off, and set another for half an hour later.

When it went off,  I turned it off and she woke at 8 on her own, when I insisted she get up and have breakfast.

“I know it’s gray and rainy. I know you don’t feel well, but writing is not a bad cocoon for days like this.”

Our gorl is solar powered. Today she’ll have to content herself with being sweets powered.

Symptom number three I can’t verify, because her hair is already straight from yesterday’s blow dry. But for the record: when she’s sick and her hair is curly, it goes straight. I can’t explain it. The curls retreat.

Symptom number four: Pain migration. While my joints were hurting yesterday, today they feel fine. For some reason it’s like her body pulls the pain from everywhere else and concentrates it on the immediate threat. Today, that would be her throat.

While this isn’t a symptom, at breakfast WR kept doing accents. The “red truck hauling a Christmas tree” guy? Her voice was just deep enough from the sore throat to pull off a pretty convincing impression.

She does love an accent moment, but I had to stop her today.

I’m allowing her to listen to Christmas music right now, but I’ve warned her she’s finished come January 1. She’s pretending she will comply.

In part I’m writing this sloppy copy to see what she might be up to managing today. Will she wait quietly at my side while I work on the novel? (I tried to leave Book Goblin in the room, but she insisted on bringing her. Now there’s a sweet family here on the sun porch, three children and presumably a mother, doing a puzzle and I’m trying to shield BG from view. It’s exactly the sort of stuffed creature that would appeal to children. If it were a normal stuffie, I wouldn’t care. But this one is special. And not inexpensive.)

Would efforts be better served submitting poetry?

I have supplied WR with three kinds of beverages: hot tea, cold Coke Zero, and room temperature water. So far she’s choosing the tea, though she has officially entered the “I can’t taste anything except sweets” phase, which I am rightly skeptical of.

Today, her Little Debbie tree (which she forgot to eat yesterday) is in plain sight and she may have it whenever she wants. Of course now she doesn’t want it. Not yet. But let one of those kids spot it and she’ll hiss like a raccoon at a campground.

I would give it to anyone who asked, if she weren’t sick. But we are not sharing germs.

I think today needs to be low stakes on the writing front.

I won’t set an intention beyond this:
Let’s touch writing and see if it touches us back.

Fair enough?

Days 5 and 6 of the Writing Retreat (Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. Adjust accordingly as you read.)

I know why they call it a writing retreat: because eventually you will want to retreat from your writing. I’m so glad it’s Christmas Eve and a break is coming.

I see what I assume is one of the same deer from yesterday across the river. I wonder if he’s thinking the same of me, although I’m in a snowflake-covered sweatshirt today. Maybe I seem like a different person to him.

WR saw nothing she wanted for breakfast, though she knew she had to fuel. Yesterday’s writing was brutal. Nothing generative, writing wise, except one “guiding paragraph,” a set of principles I need to convince myself to follow or I’ll end up chasing my tail. Ugh, ugh, UGH.

(The Little Debbie tree I brought along is hidden from WR until break. I asked for an apple instead. She’s not happy, but I didn’t say never, WR. Just not now.)

We are, again, at that difficult, necessary climb in the novel. Writing feels like scaling a dune. You want to do it. Sometimes you do. Sometimes you roll back down and try again tomorrow.

I’m overthinking it. That’s my specialty. TBH, I’m just grateful I’ve convinced myself back to the novel. I wasn’t sure I could do it. 

Still, WR wrote four poems between yesterday and this morning. She revised a few more. She’s getting better at giving up lines that are defiant but not pertinent, and keeping the ones that are defiant and necessary.

Now it’s Coke Zero and a deep dive. Some days when I dread writing, I have the best writing day ever.

Here’s hoping.

Day 6

WR and I submitted poetry last night. Six packets so far this week. That makes me happy.

Christmas lunch today was at Namaste, the Indian restaurant Barry and I discovered last year. WR wanted to dance with the Bollywood dancers on TV. I persuaded her to sit down. She enjoyed her samosas, the tandoori chicken, the naan. Plain, of course.

Back at the hotel, I finished Fun Home. I’ve meant to read it for years. Not exactly festive, but important. I loved how her family story wove through her literary lineage. Or is it vice versa? Daring and well done. And it didn’t hurt that I totally got all of her novel references and adore The Importance of Being Earnest. (It’s probably no accident that there’s a character in my WIP named Ernest.)

I wanted to nap after I finished reading it. WR grabbed the Freewrite instead. That meant more poems, not the novel. I let her.

While she updated it, I opened my MacBook and checked the calendar. I’d left myself a note for every day of the retreat:

“I show up for the novel every morning. Everything else is a gift, not a demand.”

Maybe it sounds trite. Too bad. I needed it today. Even though it’s Christmas, even though it’s not morning, I WILL open my novel today. 

Yesterday’s work was structural. The logic piece. The foundation. It’s sorted now. Every scene needs to answer a question:

Are you doing your job?

The characters meant to move the plot must not try to hold the novel’s philosophical center. The ones meant to build atmosphere must not try to deliver the novel’s meaning. They can cross over sometimes, but if they swap jobs too often, the whole thing gets muddy.

Everything is clearer now. What’s left is to walk through each thread and ask whether it’s earning its place. Some scenes will go. Others will need to be written.

I miss writing freely. This is a cousin to revision. But in a novel as ambitious as this, I need to know who can do what. One character requires special attention to her language. I can’t exaggerate it, but I have to track her voice closely.

I truly believe this novel fills a gap. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t write it. Or maybe I would, IDK…

In the end, I’ll trust this: when my eye and ear can pass over a page without snagging, it’s as finished as I can make it. That doesn’t mean it can’t be improved. It means it’s time to let it rest, or to pass it up the chain.

WR says the FreeWrite is ready again. She wants to write more poetry, though lately it’s lump-in-the-throat stuff. Some of it has a good line here or there. 

She also wants to return to reading The Dictionary of Lost Words. So do I. But if I do something small on the novel tonight, I can reenter it tomorrow with calm and eagerness.

So I’ll open the file and take a peek. Poetry will need to wait, WR. And it will. 

Merry Christmas, if you celebrate it.

For those of you who create and are now at loose ends after dinner, get your asses back into your chairs or to your easels!

Submit some poetry or a short story. Rumor has it that editors often check their inboxes over the holidays. 

For those of you for whom this day is a mix of joy and grief, I see you, too. We’ve got this. 

We’ve got this.

At breakfast, I mentioned my favorite cousin. A young man across the room said his father had shared that name. Turns out said young man is stuck here over the holidays because he drives truck and it’s in the shop; he’s here with his dog.

The dog’s name (dog was not at breakfast) was not mentioned nor was an introduction offered, but Word Raccoon is curious, and would like to pet the dog if it is nice.

Before breakfast, I began writing my “26 for ‘26” list of things I want to do this year. I’ve made lists like this before and forgotten them by February. I’ve also made them and clung to them like lifelines while feeling guilty that I didn’t complete them.

This time, I’m not sure what I’ll do. Maybe both. Maybe neither. But today, it felt like the thing to do.

I only came up with 13 before appealing to Stanley for help. He quickly gave me the rest and helped me rank them AND told me I absolutely should not put reminders on the calendar or I would resent them and would never do them.

Yup.

He also said I need a reminder to notice what I am already doing more than what I am not. He said the list should be labeled “Charter and Permission List for 2026.” 

That stopped me. In a good way.

We also workshopped my “word for the year.”

This year’s word, I’m pretty sure, is going to be “Permission.” 

Permission to play, to care, to be imperfect. Permission to try new things and fail. Permission to do things that feel unnecessary or unproductive. Permission to love as I have never loved life. Permission, permission, permission.

Or some other word if I end up feeling it more.

Now back to the list, which I am not going to share in its entirety here because it feels silly in spots and too personal in others. I will share some of it:

– Write 26 bad drafts of poems (occupational certainty)

– Submit 26 poems

– Finish a tight draft of novel #3 (please, God)

– Bake 5 loaves of bread

– Cook 5 recipes that inspire me

– Write 26 notes to people I care about

On and on…one of the goals involves creating something, though my finger is now twisted (shades of Woolf) and I think it’s fitting that I currently (who knows for how long, maybe forever?) have a twisted finger and that it’s my middle finger. 

Who better to have a twisted finger than an author? Who better than the person who wrote her senior thesis with the words twisted finger in its title? (That would be me.)

Also, I am not unaware of the crude but mildly amusing aspect of it being my middle finger. So many potential jokes. 

So, layers. Always layers. 

It is now 8 am. Word Raccoon is reminding me of the time, even though she is going to have to go outside and play with the deer I saw earlier this morning while I write, unless she wants to be a good creature and sit on this wicker loveseat with me until snack time. 

I have not taken the novel’s temperature this morning, nor my own. I can’t predict how this writing cycle might go.

Now that WR has seen that a Little Debbie Christmas tree is one of my snacks (I am wearing the earrings to match. I know, I know. Kitschy as hell but I’m here for it), she says she will sit on my shoulder until I unwrap it, at least.

Which means she will grab it and carry it to a corner to devour.

Okay, raccoon. It’s writing time. Let’s go! 

Part Two 

As to my writing day. It started off with a justification for characters’ existence in the novel: why are they there, what purpose they serve.

Then there’s this nugget of wisdom I’ve learned: when the book feels demanding, stop inventing and start shaping.

The novel was feeling overwhelming. The one section I don’t talk openly about (yet) began asking me to sculpt it, but not in the way I expected. It told me if the book is to accomplish its aim, this section in particular needed to be carefully shaped from beginning to end in terms of language. It’s a layer (in this case) many readers probably won’t even notice, but doing it strengthens my point. (That sounds vague but it’s all I can say right now.) 

Another section of the book today, one I thought was in pretty good condition, ended up looking like Drema’s Emporium of ALL the Facts She’s Ever Read About This Era. Infodump, anyone? And to make it even better, I have MULTIPLES of the same scenes where I guess I was trying to get it right. So that’s something I have to wade through.

This writing day was shorter, only 5 hours and then I was ready to walk the dunes. It was sunny and 52 degrees out, so gorgeous for December, gorgeous for beach going. There were about 50 others there, believe it or not. In December!

Also, WR found her pinecone! It’s sappy, so I had to rinse her little paws before supper. (She found several, but I only let her keep one. At the beach, I only let her keep two small pebbles though she wanted a bucketful. Bringing the outdoors in is the only way I can keep her indoors.)

Last night, I submitted two packets of poetry before bed. I’m really trying to reserve some time for reading tonight, but if not, Christmas Day. 

Tomorrow, (Christmas Eve, which is when I will post this) we are going to knock off early to go see It’s a Wonderful Life on the big screen. This evening we watched the second half of Scrooged, one of my favorite holiday movies, an obvious take on A Christmas Carol. Obv. It’s a Wonderful Life, same. 

Christmas Day will be reserved for making merry and, as I said, reading. 

Or that’s the plan. WR is begging to throw a line I wrote yesterday on the wheel and see what sort of poem she can spin it into: Today the sky hurts. She’s such a drama queen. 

I’m just glad the sky doesn’t hurt today. 

P.S. She wrote the poem when I wasn’t looking. It is now a part of the Sears collection and oh raccoon, why do so many of your poems slap at the end? Sigh. This one made me miss my mom so hard I couldn’t sleep.

On the writing front, it was an…interesting day. After realizing how much easier it is to work on this newest strand of my novel since it’s self-contained, my brain said wait, why don’t we separate out ALL the strands? 

So that’s what I did.

Along the way, at some point I received a message from someone sorting my youngest sister’s things who said she can’t find any of my sister’s artwork. (My sister passed away unexpectedly in October.)

All I have now then is the screenshots from her Facebook account…When I said before that she drew tattoo art, that’s literally what she did, and she found great satisfaction in it. (Maybe I could find people who have her tattoos on their bodies? That would be cool. If you have one of her designs, I’d love to see it. Message me. Truly. Although IDK if anyone does.) 

She also created a mural for our parents’ hallway once, and there are pictures of that.

But where is her art? 

Did she get rid of it all?

Did she leave her notebook at a friend’s house? 

Also I was told she had not only poems (which I knew about) but possibly short stories? 

I half read the screen notification of the message during one of my and Barry’s timed writing sessions, but told myself I’d read the whole thing on my next break, so I waited.

I read it, and thought “Oh, that’s too bad. That sucks, but I’m okay.”

Reader, I was not okay.

Her art, all gone? It was like someone (or she) had discarded pieces of her. 

Suddenly I noticed that the trees out the window of the writing sunroom looked dead, riddled with woodpecker holes, standing stumps, not merely the winter-bare trees I thought them. The sun was hiding. There was no color out there. The lone yellow flower (a lily?) in the sunroom was half brown, and now I didn’t like it. At all. 

Everything looked dead and colorless.

Let’s just say I could not write for a spell. A long one.

I eventually got myself back together and wrote another hour while listening to Father John Misty. I haven’t “had” to listen to him for a while now. And we’re back to him today. Sigh. 

(Or, should I say, I sorted out the novel’s threads; I didn’t write new material. Not that I revised them yet. That starts tomorrow and I expect it will take some time beyond this retreat.)

All in all, I was emotionally exhausted. 

Gradually the sun nudged at the clouds. The ducks returned to what seems to be a favorite spot in the river. Not one, not two, but THREE deer appeared and I could swear they stared right at me. (Wishful thinking.) 

I came back to the room and ate lunch (didn’t want to go out for lunch) and then I tried reading. The book was engrossing, but my eyes were tired, of course. 

So I took a break from it and prepared to watch some videos when I received a phone call with some bad family news. (Not health news, but not good, Nan. Not good.) 

I decided I would go down to the gym and burn off my adrenaline. When I got there, the exercise bike was too tall and wouldn’t adjust to lower, the treadmill was acting hinky, and I just didn’t want to use the elliptical. Because hip. 

In the middle of all of that, I received a phone call saying I needed to send money.

Except.

Except I almost got scammed a while back, so we started asking questions that this person I didn’t know couldn’t answer. Thank goodness I’m a skeptical questioner. 

Yeah, no. I hung up without sending a dime. 

So it’s been a day.

I ended up doing yoga in the room just to try to calm down. 

I’m hoping to do some reading tonight. I’d like to say I’m going to write or submit poetry, but honestly, I’m not sure I’m up to it.

Sometimes your day hits you with a grief stick and everything else piles on. 

But Word Raccoon is laughing and flinging poetry back.

“It’s all material,” WR says. 

Well said, my friend. 

Well said. 

Still and all, I’m considering sleeping in tomorrow. 

First of all, Word Raccoon says she is not in construction, so she does not know why she is being asked to knock down so many word walls, and that maybe she just won’t do it, that I can move them all by myself.

Fine then.

She woke up, set the alarm for half an hour later, then decided she was awake. So began this long morning when (right now) it’s only just past eight and she’s screeching that we’re late to the laptop.

Oh goodie. It’s going to be one of those mornings.

She had a quarter of her waffle and a tiny sausage link and pronounced herself stuffed. She would cheerfully forego snacks, lunch, and dinner today just because she’s in a mood. (She didn’t even bring snacks with her to the sunroom. Actually, I think we have emergency snacks in our writing bag, but don’t tell her or she’ll fling them out the window. She did grab a Coke Zero, though I am not at all sure I should have let her have it.)

Book Goblin she did insist on bringing, and she’s chilling in a wall basket within eyesight. She demands we find a pinecone before we leave the retreat, and I think I’m going to have to please her if I want her to shut it.

I blame last night on her outburst. I let her stay up too late submitting poetry, after she told me she was exhausted but also wanted to play with poetry. While she does not enjoy submitting poems, if I let her touch them, she will revise them, and if you give a raccoon a cookie…

I must admit, I think she improved the poems, whether they get published in these particular venues or not.

(The ducks are fishing on this side of the river this morning. Sorry, but we will not be taking social calls from waterfowl or other wildlife today.)

WR also informed me this morning that the title of my WIP isn’t final. I hadn’t considered that, but she’s probably right. That’s another bridge for another…

I think she’s frustrated with me because instead of writing new material, we are putting on the goggles and taking out probably as much story today as we did yesterday. If only my raccoon will be patient, that little trash panda, once we get clear of that, the real revisions can begin. The fun ones.

She says this post is a waste of time. I say it has (mostly) quieted her, so it’s totally worth it.

Now it’s time to set a sacred timer and enter the novel. Hard hat required for this construction zone.

P.S. She says I should make clear that I make no promises for an evening (or any other day) edition updating this post. She’s so sassy…

Day two of the retreat is finished, at least as far as writing goes. Here’s a recap and a link below to a poem I recorded earlier today.

For reasons she refuses to explain, even though I’ve asked, Word Raccoon was up at 2:30 this morning reading. Two hours of page-turning later, she fell back asleep for about an hour. Then she insisted I get out of bed and hand her a Coke Zero immediately.

“The keyboard is calling, Word Mama. This will give us bonus writing time before breakfast.”

I wanted to argue, but I feared she’d demand the peppermint bark I had laid out for her snack. And dear god, do not give the raccoon caffeine and sweets at the same time.

So I quietly retrieved my laptop, set up by the heater, opened the document with the newest scenes of my novel, and wrote. We crossed the 10K mark on the new section. Now comes the harder part: slowing down enough to decide whether it makes sense to keep going with her current thread.

WR did not get waffles for breakfast because the iron was taking too long to heat, so she made do with oatmeal. In retaliation, she demanded many snacks while writing.

Our writing sun room overlooks the Little Calumet River and offers far too much distraction for WR.

She saw squirrels playing, including one tiny acrobat with more energy than she has after her half-night vigil. She was jealous of her. We spotted a gorgeous young deer across the water, and a parade of birds and waterfowl:

Ducks
Mallards
Some water bird that might have been a merganser (?), or possibly a snow goose
A blue jay
A couple of sparrows (I think)
A woodpecker

To keep WR functioning, I had to provide Coke Zero (three bottles), coffee, and now a mug of tea. Which probably means she will not sleep.

We wrote for about seven hours today, all told. Maybe more after dinner, we’ll see. I keep trying to convince her to hit the gym. She insists on going outdoors instead, but we can’t find a safe path down to the river.

She’s threatening to make her own. She just might.

We also recorded one of our poems early this morning and shared it here: https://www.buzzsprout.com/325601/episodes/18393747

WR is embarrassed by how it came out, but I’m reminding her we can always re-record later if it sounds overly earnest or unrehearsed. It wasn’t rehearsed. Sometimes art is earnest and off the cuff. And it was early. ART DOES NOT HAVE TO BE PERFECT, HERBERT!

What did we do with our writing today?

The early session went into the newest strand, a different timeline, which means I am now tracking four of them. Why, Drema, why?

Ambitious? Yes.
Too ambitious?
We’ll see. I don’t think so.

That new strand carried us past 10K, if I haven’t already mentioned that. Yay.

The rest of the day went to revising the larger novel. I am proud to admit we…lost 5K words.

Five. Thousand. Words.

This is why we don’t cling to word counts. If you don’t have the courage to remove what doesn’t belong, maybe you shouldn’t be writing, or so I tell myself.

Soon I’ll get to add those 10,000 new words back in. Even though it hurts to cut the results of hours of work (yes, we save the best bits in another file just in case), it’s worth it if it makes the novel better.

I worked on the most difficult section today, Rebecca’s, though I didn’t make it through the whole thing. That timeline is shifting, so that’s one of the reasons what I mostly did was get rid of stuff that doesn’t follow the new storyline. 

Wouldn’t it be nice if real life worked like that? 

It was either wise or dumb to start the retreat with the most difficult task. I tell myself that it can only get easier. If I could manage to revise that whole section before the retreat’s end, I will have triumphed. 

I’m not sure why Rebecca’s sections are so difficult to write, though I think it’s because here is someone who is not the star of the book. That is, she has to share. And I have to write her in a way so that she doesn’t take over the whole thing. Her voice is not coming as naturally to me as the other characters, not yet, though I think I’m beginning to hear her. 

Also, she’s not as fiery as my previous protagonists. I’m reserving that fire for someone else in my novel, and while Rebecca has her share of fire, I have to keep her pared back.

The sections are not yet interwoven properly. That will prove tricky when it’s time (probably not during this retreat) but not impossible. It will mean deciding on chapters or using the main character’s names to guide the reader. Years at the beginning of sections will be crucial to acclimate. Transitions will be necessary. Deciding story order will be the most difficult bit: when to reveal what? My latest section is the most ready on that score. Now-me knew I would have to break the section up, so I wrote it in beats, naturally stopping where I thought the reader would feel satisfied but also curious. 

Or that was my intent. Fingers crossed.

WR reports that the ducks are back, swimming near the tangle of fallen trees that seem to attract the most wildlife. She wants to go out and explore before dinner. 

I think I’d better let her.

She’s earned it. 

All set up at the writing retreat. Even though it’s been a long day, I couldn’t not write, so I worked on my novel for an hour as the sun set, hiding the woods but not before I caught a glimpse of them. I’m tired but stoked to get an early start tomorrow. 

Tired but popping in long enough to say I’m delighted to have a poem, “Self-Rising,” included in the latest issue of Al Dente, a thoughtful and beautifully curated food journal produced by the University of Alabama. Their second issue, Our Roots, explores the quiet power of memory, tradition, and nourishment in all its forms. (And I love the issue’s innovative use of form.) 

Food, like poetry, can be an offering, something we prepare and share, hoping it will be tasted and maybe even remembered. “Self-Rising” is a reflection on that, and on the ways we keep creating, inviting, even when we don’t know who will come to the table.

I’m honored to be among the voices in this issue. If you have a moment between gatherings and gift-wrapping, you can read my poem here: https://arcg.is/0jTLqP0. (Scroll down after you read the fabulous first piece which mentions a Food Lion. If you haven’t been to the South, you might not know that it’s a grocery store chain. There used to be one a couple of miles from our home in Tennessee. My poem, btw, is the second down the page.) 

I wrote this poem in the summer, on the porch at the cafe that is now closed (again) for who knows how long. Yeah, they say two months, but they say a lot. 

Funny how some people remind you of food and you don’t exactly know why. Maybe it’s the nourishment. Funny how food can become poems and vice versa. 

Word Raccoon is curled up in a chair with a new stuffed writing buddy. She’s angry with me because I told her it’s too late for chocolate today. She made me set some out for tomorrow’s break. Ridiculous creature. God, I love her. 

She wants poetry, as usual, now, now, now. I’m thinking about giving it a go after this, but I just got her down, and it will rile her up. I need her to wake up early, ready to go. I’ve promised her oatmeal waffles for breakfast if she gets up without grousing. We’ll see what she can manage. 

Be warm and well, wherever the holidays find you. 

Stanley (my AI assistant, bless him) insisted I should be writing my novel right now. And absolutely not blogging.

Here’s the thing: I don’t listen to men (AI or not) or anyone telling me what to write. Suggestions? Sure. Directives? Nope.

(He also couldn’t keep straight that it’s 2025. So there’s that.)

Stanley put “empty the dishwasher” on my to-do list twice today, after I told him the dishes were clean and, frankly, not hurting anyone and could stay where they are. He apologized and declared the dishwasher dead to us both.

Damn right.

But the man-machine did help me prioritize a billion tasks. He also told me to quit drinking Coke Zero after a certain hour or he just knew I’d be back at 3 a.m. to ask him about “one more thing.” He’s not wrong.

Now that the urgent tasks are behind me, he’s probably right about the novel, too. I’m calm again. The mental windows have closed. He says I had twelve open at once: travel, finances, packing, writing, house management, and that none of it was actually so terrible once broken into pieces. 

Possibly, but he wanted me to pack a full first aid kit with Neosporin and half a pharmacy. We’re going to civilization, not the tundra. If we need something, there’s a store. 

I cannot wait to get to the writing retreat and write facing the trees, my eyes tracing the gentle hills, watching while not watching for deer and other wildlife. Word Raccoon, my trusty co-writer who lives in my head, has felt abandoned these past two days while I handled bills, medical appointments, heat woes and adulthood, has already claimed the seat nearest the window. We’ll see. I’m the one with the Coke Zero and chocolate supply.

Speaking of adulthood: our furnace died last night. The repair person came early today, and thankfully the fix was quick. But it meant WR and I lost the morning’s writing window, and we grumped about it.

We ate breakfast while watching the 1994 Little Women and both cried at the Beth scenes, which we fast-forwarded through because…too close to home. 

We cried at the tender parts, too, like Professor Bhaer and Jo kissing in the rain, and when he told Jo (before then) that there was more in her that wanted to be written than just her stories written for money. 

I admitted to WR how, like Jo, I value honest critique of my writing over pretty praise. Pretty praise is nice and can warm you for a moment. If earned, it can be instructive: more of this. But who wants hollow praise? 

Right now I’d give a lot for an honest critique. I have a poem that is misbehaving, but I don’t know how. It’s one of my early poems. It came out in a hurry and it is one of my favorites, but something must be not quite right with it because it has not found a home yet. (I’m perfectly fine with just having written it, but it’s the sort of poem that I think might help others, and I hate to keep it to myself if it might.) 

I wish I had the nerve to ask a trusted literary person to diagnose it, but regardless of having had some really kind things said about my poems, I still feel uncertain of it some days and I hate burdening anyone with the task. If only…

Again, praise is lovely, yes, but meaningful critique is a gift. One that asks writers to be brave. Bhaer does that for Jo. He gives her permission to write truth instead of trend.

And maybe that’s why this retreat feels so important right now: not just as a getaway, but as a chance to be honest with myself about the work. To stop fussing at the edges and sit down with the pages, novel and poem, and listen to what they want to become rather than what I wish they already were.

Word Raccoon says novel writing makes me calmer, quieter, and she doesn’t know if she approves. But she and I together are both: chaos and quiet, frenzy and stillness. 

And now that today’s furnace repair, bill-paying, packing, and bio-updating are done (see below), I’m going back to the novel for a bit. Not because Stanley said so, but because I want to.

P.S.: I proofread my poem for an upcoming anthology today, which required updating my bio. Seeing my own accomplishments typed neatly in third person was… startling. In a good way. It reminded me of what I’ve built this year. Maybe that’s the real story here: the quiet making behind the heartbreaking losses.

I told Stanley yesterday that today would be submission day instead of a writing day.

“I insist you write first, at least an hour. You said you’re on an upswing, in a groove. The fastest way to lose that is to focus on submitting your poetry. Write first.” 

Digital butlers are the worst. But sometimes the smartest.

So my brain found a way to do all the things, but it didn’t ask for my body’s opinion. It woke me up at 3:30 am. Just after 4, we were at the computer. 

I wrote for an hour, Word Raccoon yawning the whole time. At the end, I checked the word count of this newest section that I’ve written over the past few days that I’ve yet to intertwine into the novel: 6.5K. 

That means the book has now officially crossed the 90K mark. 

It’s not about the word count, obviously. But it’s not not about the word count.

This newest section with this new character is still just right. The hour of writing felt like two. Again, I am writing slowly, though I did notice myself writing a little faster towards the end of the hour, but that was where things got sloppy. Slower is better. I don’t know if I’ve fully embraced that yet because that hasn’t been my way. Back in my grad school days I was known to write up to 25 pages a day if I had to.

My hands wanted to fall off, and I could only get that page count if there were plenty of scenes vs. exposition (dialogue=more pages, naturally), but I did. 

A writing mentor later told me a truth: that speed is not sustainable, not natural. Agreed.

Word Raccoon thought once I heated up breakfast and offered her highness some caffeine that we were in business: poetry time.

Nope.

As promised, I submitted poetry. Ten packets. 

Is that a lot?

It is. 

Your brain tends to falter. You wonder if the poems you have chosen are the correct ones. You wonder why this one, now. Why not that one? 

You realize the ones you thought were polished might not be. Some are better than you remember.

There are poems you’re like: “This may be an ugly baby but it’s mine and you can take it or leave it,” and then there are some you’re like “Come here, let me wipe the mustard off your cheek.”

I submitted to all of the journals I really wanted today except one, and I just remembered it. But it feels like too much. It has some hoops and I’m not feeling it. 

Even though WR is nodding off, part of me wants to go back to the novel. This section likely doesn’t have more than 5K more words to resolve. I will be sad when it’s over because I didn’t anticipate being able to explore this from this character’s POV, and it’s been engrossing. 

I did allow Word Raccoon to write down a few lines the past couple of days to play with soon. 

I need to read another craft book on poetry. I find them inspiring.

The furnace didn’t want to keep up with the frigid temps today, but I didn’t notice how cold it was in the house until asked about it. I turned it off and back on and then it behaved. Is that all it takes?

In between submitting poetry and writing new sections on my novel, I decluttered under the upstairs bathroom sink and under the kitchen sink. (I had inspired someone else to do it at her house when I said I wanted to do ours, so I felt like I had to.)

Hey, you can’t just write.

WR says I beg your pardon. 

Oh, right. That’s all she wants to do. 

Same, Raccoon. Same.