Random scribbles for Canada Day

Yes, it’s Canada Day again. No, I’m not doing anything particularly special. The neat thing about living in a tourist destination is that you don’t have to do the tourist things on tourist days – you can just wait for the crowd to leave and do them later.

Yes, there are days that I have a beach all to myself.

I did think about having pancakes with maple syrup of course this morning but then I didn’t want to take the time.

You see, it’s the first of the month and that means, besides being Canada Day, it’s also “madly submit your writing stuff to all the places before they run out of free submission slots for the month” day.

It’s one of the most annoying days of the month in my writing life. The process is such you start wishing you were cleaning the toilet.

Also, I’m supposed to bring a short story to my local writing group meeting tomorrow, and I’ve just sent them all an email saying I don’t know if I’m going to be able to do that because I’ve got three, no wait, is it four? stories that I’m trying to finish and I doubt I’ll be able to finish any of them by 10 AM tomorrow.

Especially since I’m now taking time to write this blog post.

I’m actually trying to be efficient. As I’m pretty sure I’ve previously mentioned, I mostly write my first drafts by hand, and they all go in whatever notebook I’m using at the time. One after another, and sometimes circling back to shove notes into the side bar. So right now, I know I have three stories in first draft form (two of which aren’t even completed first drafts, they ended up being related and I’m doing research for them and it’s just all sort of complicated and I’m hoping to miraculously have them nice and shiny to submit to a contest closing on the 15th maybe I can just drink the maple syrup straight from the bottle.)

I’ve done my submitting for the month now (for the summer, actually, I’m not going through that again until October since a lot of publications go into summer siestas thank heavens) and have started flipping through my notebook to find the one story I know is pretty much completed – the one I could potentially type up in time for tomorrow morning even if it’ll be in rough shape.

But on the way to it (wherever in the book it’s actually gone) I’ve got all these poems for my poem-a-day project, so I’ve started going through them, making decisions to scratch some and keep some –

Why do I smell cheese?

I don’t know, why do you smell cheese?

I don’t go out in the middle of the night

to buy cheese

she said

fingers crossed.

(I seem to have written this in early June. I’d like to think it’s my cookbook project that keeps me returning to the subject of food, but really it’s a chicken-and-egg question. Chicken omelette is on the menu tonight! Ahem.)

Since I also also try to post something on my blog once a month as a proof-of-life… well, here I am, inflicting my is that even poetry at all on the world again. I only need to write 20 more poems to have 366. And then I’ll be done. Done with the creating part of the project, anyway.

It won’t be my birthday in 20 days, so I might write more poems for the project until I do get to my next birthday but I won’t feel any pressure to do it, I’ll already have achieved my objective of writing a poem for each day of this age-year. (it never needed to be on each day.)

Not super long ago the subject of “morning pages” as a creative practise came up in one of my online groups, and I said that I didn’t do morning pages – but actually I sort of do, because I’ve sort of been trying to write something every day, right? I don’t know. We were also talking about lighting a candle to prepare for writing sessions, and that continues to strike me as one of the most woo-woo magic girly things in writing-land ever, and I find it highly suspicious. There just has to be some candle-manufacturing company behind it.

or maybe it’s the fire retardant people.

I’m not sure where I was going with this now. I’m still testing recipes for the cookbook. I had some set-backs last week (none of the recipes I tried last week worked, ick.)

Happy Canada Day!

Learn about “morning pages” here

Become my competition in the Globe Soup “Inspired by Art” Flash Fiction Contest here

Snag your free submission slot with Orca here – I will be bidding the Orca reading team a fond farewell after the next issue is decided upon, so if you want me to read your story in the queue, send it in now!

And enjoy some silly Canadiana here.