today is 17 July 2007, 0543

It is a good morning.

I may be able to abandon the uncuts soon, as I feel the veil lifting a bit. In the past, when I’ve gone this long without tending to my writing, it’s taken me a good week to get back into the groove and get beyond all of this clutter that’s been building up since I last wrote.

The question for me now is this: where do I want to go?

If I were my own student, I would probably advise me to take it slow, work on a small piece that has a high probability of being published. A real morale booster (this is exactly what blogging is doing for me now, though–getting me out of the mud and back into my writing chair). It might be as simple as writing an opinion essay, or digging a little deeper for a nature essay that I want to submit to the Little Patuxent Review (my essay titled “In the Living Years” was published by LPR and can be found here).

Not bad advice, Prof. Just a small piece a month until the end of the year, perhaps. By October, anyway, I’ll be in the melancholic writing zone, certainly working on a bigger, more substantial piece, as is always the case. Autumn has always been my most productive writing season, and nearly all of my better works have started as strong seeds written in September, October, or November.

No education writing, though. Nothing too didactic, over-the-head listen-to-me kind of pieces. I just need to write something genuine that matters. Fiction or nonfiction–it doesn’t matter a bit.

So the challenge is put on the table. It’s July 17 (hey–30 years ago today I went to my first Doobie Brothers concert at Merriweather Post…), and I need to write and submit a short piece by July 31.

Thanks, Uncuts. You did your job. You threw the rope in the hole and pulled me out. Now it’s time to wash off all this mud and detritus and get back to work.

A blessed day to you all…..