Argh! Got up early and tried to revise three poems that wouldn't jell. I'm racing against time, my mind turns into an old shoe sans tongue, but with plenty of eyes, like a blue-eyed clam (they have 32 eyelets) and we all know how poetic clams are in the morning before coffee.
Neil comes in, a broken axle changes the shape of my morning to that of chauffeur, taxi and loaner car. Meanwhile I find the noon deadline is now EST, not Left Coast time. Bogus. Maybe I should hang myself with my shoelaces. So much for trying to finish the other six poems abandoned before they were written. I bitchslap the three troublesome ones into some semblance of shape and post them on the blog. But it seems everyone else is doing the same, it takes me an hour to post three poems.
At least Writers' Digest could've given us a heads up on the East Coast timing of that one. Three whole hours, precious time I was counting on. Driving back from the mechanic's I realize my Leaving Las Vegas penknife poem should be written as an ode... It flows right out, an easy birth, too bad I can't post it. I'm way past deadline.
Then, the embroglio begins over whether posting our poems on Writers' Digest constitutes as being "published." People panic and begin pulling their poems from the site. I left mine, stet.
The way I figure it, is that the poems mine to do with what I want, whether or not they're published on the Writers' Digest site, as a workshop process, is moot. They're not published, Writers' Digest is not going to give us tear sheets or street credit saying we're all now published in Writers' Digest. There was no editor involved in the selection of poems. Anybody could post anything they wanted, warts and all. It's certainly not going to appear on our resumes or in Poets & Writers as a publishing credit, so, ergo, we're not published. What nonsense, I thought.
Then I began to realize the whole internet posting thing is a huge issue. Does publishing work in my blog constitute self publishing? Have I stolen my own first publishing rights by posting on the internet? I don't consider it so. I consider my blog as an open writer's notebook, pieces in progress, some destined to be published, but most are not.
I can't see what needs fixing until I see it in formal print. Word docs just don't do it. Maybe it's the angst of knowing that there is a potential audience out there that makes me pay attention to my language usage and typos, my God, there are typos, no matter how carefully I reread these pieces.
I consider my blog my journal, having eschewed pen and paper. After the car accident, I fell out of the journaling habit. It was just too hard to write, to hold the pen. PTS left my hands shaking with tremors.
Publishing my work as a blog means there's also a bit of a self-censor involved in that there is a potential audience out there who MIGHT one day read this drivel. But hey, at least it keeps me writing. And laziness coupled with a profound lack of time, erodes all best intentions to write daily. It's also about convenience, wherever I go I can log on (provided that I can get wifi) and continue to work on any given story or memoir—and the indexing process is handy as well. It's a tool.
I consider the blog a transparency of writing available for others to see and give feedback, a large workshop as it were. But with millions of blogs out there, who reads any of this anyway? Chances are slim. Second to none. No one. Well, maybe a handful of people somewhere with time on their hands.
With all this opportunity to publish on the internet, we're ultimately facing the demise of the written word. Or at least the well-crafted word. Everything is reduced down to Twitter bytes of 140 characters or less. We now have the attention span of gnats. Who's going to remember what we've posted?
