Break Dance, Break Out, Break Down, Break Through

41º ~ brilliant sun aimed directly at the desk for the moment, one window draped with a sheet on the outside to stop a territorial robin from hurling himself against it (this morning's wake up call)

Today's title is brought to you by the Holiday Break.  I turned in grades yesterday!  Wahoo!  Of course, I'll have things to do over the break, but I won't be "on" every single day as I am during the official semester.  Wahoo!  (Did I already say that?)

This morning was a morning for poetry business.  I received an acceptance this past week and three or four rejections to go along with it.  I was thrilled to the acceptance from Natural Bridge, the lit mag from the University of MO - St. Louis.  Natural Bridge published the very first poem I had accepted while I was in grad school.  While I can definitely tell I've come a long way from that poem, having it published at the national level provided an injection of confidence when it was sorely needed.  Also, NB accepted "Cautionary Tale for Girls Kept Underground in Summer."  After a long string of rejections for the fairy tale series, having blossombones pick up one two weeks ago, and now this acceptance, I feel more energy for that project.  I'm going back over the remaining poems with the fine-toothed comb of revision.  I already found several major changes needing to be made in some of the poems I felt really good about in August.  It just goes to show that I do need to take more time; however, I think the rejections play a huge part in giving me the sharper sight to see the flaws. 

On the heels of this revision and the recent rejections, I sent out some more poems this morning as well.  Along the way, I found this gem in the New Letters' submission guidelines:

d) We encourage writers to create emphasis through word choice, placement, syntax and sentence pacing, instead of overuse of exclamation marks.

Hee Hee.  I am definitely going to use this in my Creative Writing class in the spring, but I may also introduce it to my comp students as well.  Sometimes they have to hear this kind of thing from an outside authority before they really believe me.


In other news, we had our first sticking snow this past week as well.

Sadly for C., the roads were fine and there was no snow day for his school. He gives finals next week, and then we can both enjoy the break together with the new cats, George & Gracie.  Heaven!