NaNoWriMo 2024: Adjusting My Expectations

The point of any kind of forced creativity experience or challenge is to simply do the creative thing you want to be doing but perhaps wouldn’t be doing otherwise. I am all for it. I’ve done more than a decade worth of a poem every day in April, I’ve participated in songwriting challenges that resultedContinue reading “NaNoWriMo 2024: Adjusting My Expectations”

I’m Thinking About Giving Up on Writing Fiction on the Cusp of Another NANOWRIMO

In both Novembers of 2022 and 2023 I wrote 50,000 words for the National Novel Writing Month challenge. The results were two sloppy, hastily written rough drafts of novels. I would expect nothing less from such a challenge, the purpose of which is not to write a masterpiece, but to spill out as quickly asContinue reading “I’m Thinking About Giving Up on Writing Fiction on the Cusp of Another NANOWRIMO”

#542: On the Note Wendell Hawken Wrote to Me, the One I’ve Been Using as a Bookmark in Her Book of Poems

The note she wrote to me almost a year ago, the one I’ve been using as a bookmark as I’m reading her poems, says: “Michael – thought I was out, but I found one.” Even though it doesn’t take me long to remember what she was trying to say, I love the ambiguity of itContinue reading “#542: On the Note Wendell Hawken Wrote to Me, the One I’ve Been Using as a Bookmark in Her Book of Poems”

#540: Masturbation Is Not A Thing

Here’s a poem I drafted quite a while ago, I think, while I was still teaching, that I was too hesitant about publishing, not necessarily because of the subject matter, but because this classroom inspired story was too recent, too close, and I might have been gun shy as the result of an earlier experienceContinue reading “#540: Masturbation Is Not A Thing”

#538: I Can’t Read

I can’t read shit anymore. David bowie I love to readbut I find lately that I can’t read shit, just like Bowie sangin that song by Tin Machine: it seems that “I can’t read shit anymore.”I blame the internet and stupid smart phonesfor turning myattention spaninto squirrel brain.Did you knowthat squirrels can’t remember where theyContinue reading “#538: I Can’t Read”

On the First Day of 2024: Meditation, Bicycling, Music, Reading and Writing

I tried as best as I could to have a great day, a day that included at least a sampling of all the things I love to do and all the things I’m committing to do more of in the new year. I’ll make a quick list here for your generous perusal. So that, inContinue reading “On the First Day of 2024: Meditation, Bicycling, Music, Reading and Writing”