End of year writing stats 2023

Is August too soon to think of end-of-year writing stats? Especially, since, come December 31, I will be more or less homeless. I need to vacate my lovely large room at Donna’s house in Sebastopol by January. And I have nowhere to go. My cabin that I’ve been paying rent on for 40 years, is kaput, the roof fell in during an epic rainstorm. The cave-in created havoc, as I had archives stored in the cabin including all my letters and news clippings.

Luckily, I had either boxed or removed most of my stuff before the roof fell in. I lost most of my teaching archives and CPITS poetry books to water damage. But I have back-ups of most of that stuff. Not the end of the world. The cabin will be remodeled. But I doubt if the landlady will let me move back in. We had some words—she’s toxic. Besides, people are renting hovels for $1000 a month. It’s crazy out there.

My Plan B is to live in a tent on my grandmother’s property. Hopefully we won’t have another epic wet winter. And then, my cousin Dave decided to move to Missouri with the cnt-wife and sell the Nicasio house where I had the bulk of my belongings stored. Because it was an epically wet winter, most of my stuff suffered severe water damage. The metal shed leaked. 

And we were given one weekend (no warning) in April to huck everything out of Dave’s Nicasio place within 48 hours, and then we had to move what we wanted to keep over to Sinead’s storage shed in Petaluma. So, sadly, this means all my books are in bad shape, and I was hoping to give them to a library. 

We had an epic yard sale where I re-homed and got rid of most of my old tchotchkes, and the rest went to strangers, or to the dump. We put some tasty stuff out by the side of the road and people went completely nuts over all the goodies we were giving away. Sinead gave away crates of of Sean’s Legos and matchbox toys. There was a massive traffic jam out front of the house. Those who scored goodies will never see that particular bend in the road the same way again.

So though it has been an eventful year, I don’t have much to report by way of publishing record. I’m starting this dinky retrospective early, during the dog days of summer, as I’m sure I won’t have the time to deal with it later. The 2017 Tubbs fire certainly brought it all home that I need to scan and document my stuff, and move on, because nothing is permanent. Not even this blog.

Found my Writers’ Group drafts from 2003 to 2007

Today I found my missing writing from Vito’s Writers’ Group. The packet was hidden in among my CPITS conference notes and poems (for years!). A fluke, really. I just about given up on ever fleshing out the early 2000s posts on my blog when I stumbled across several pieces from 2003 in the back of my CPITS binder, and as I flipped through the binder for the third time seeing if I could clean one or two more pieces, I found all the writing that had gone AWOL from 2003 (only a few pages) through 2007 stuffed in a magenta folder with Steve Kowitt poems on top. No wonder I couldn’t find them, they were hiding out in not so plain sight. There may be more missing pages, but at least it feels like I can finally flesh out all the lean years with the exception of 2003. But 47 posts is doable. I would’ve preferred 52 posts but you never know. For the past few days, I have been combing through old clippings and writing, scanning and uploading them to the blog. Since it’s been such an enormous amount of time since I began this project, sometimes I double post, and then have to delete my work. Who can keep track of nearly 5000 posts anyway?

By right, the year 2007 should also have been included on that scant post list. I began this blog on Aug 20, 2008, and randomly backfilled 2007 with myriad poems, letters, essays, etc. But then I had to deconstruct it when I ran out of room for all my old poems filed by month (I didn’t know that I could backpost to 1970) so there was very little new writing from 2007, about 30 posts in all with less than a dozen poems (ditto that in 2008) because I hadn’t yet started blogging even though I made the site in January of 2007—and that’s with adding all the long lost Writers’ Group entries. There are now 88 posts, but about 40 of them are not from 2007! I decided to leave the letters all in one place, parked in the February 2007 slot, though they date back to the 1980s. At least for now.

• When This Blog Really Began—Aug 2008
• LITERRATA or Veritas and the art of Memoir
• My old poems from the 1980s-90s

*2006 was 12, now 21 (to do. I found my MIA Writers’ Group folder, in w/ CPITS)

*2005 was 10, now 22 (to do. need to add Writers’ Group)

*2004 was 33, now 66 (added Writers’ Group. MIA Florida journals! found 2 emails)

*2003 was 35, now 47 (I found 5 writers group posts buried in my CPITS folder)

END OF YEAR WRITING STATS 2022

Needless to say, I’ve long since blown right past the 4000 blog entries entries mark where I began the year. It’s now closer to 4500 entries. Because of revisiting and recording old journal entries, and using Facebook Memories, I’ve managed to garner dozens of posts lifted from Facebook comments that I had not posted before in this blog. It’s interesting to realize many FB comments are often the nascent beginnings of a poem. 

For example last year, in mid-December, 2021, for example, I only had 125 posts, and then, because of Facebook Memories, I was able to add more posts. Call it found art. For 2021, I eventually tallied 170 posts—that’s nearly 50 more posts. I thought I was not going to break the 125 posts mark either for 2022, but suddenly a rush of poems gave me 181 posts, with 90 poems and 28 prose poems written. 

Now I will need to revise that figure because I went through my latest writing journal whwich I am about to retire, for lack of pages, with a fine tooth, comb, and pulled up 10 more prose poems and non-fiction, leaving me with a total of 190 posts for the year. Wowza. Considering I began this stats analysis post with 125 entries, I'm stoked. 

End of year writing stats 2021

When I began working on this blog post, mid-December, I only 32 poems, I hadn’t counted or added in the prose poems yet, as this was the year of dangerously morphing prose poem posts and straddling genres. So I guess so much depends upon what passes for a prose poem vs. poetic prose, sometimes disguised in journal format. Elevated reportage. I did eventually reach my 52-poem goal but I had to stretch. Note to self, that’s 4.3 poems a month. Get on it.

The good news is that I now have 153 blogposts. A miracle, considering I was having trouble breaking 125 posts mid-December. Not like last year’s 2020 Year in Recap where I managed to break my own personal best record with a whopping 227 posts. Of course, it was the year of serious sequestration, which had something to do with my prodigious output. Some scrambling ensued. I don’t know what happened in May—only four blogposts? And they were all rants against Google for destroying old posts. I have 4,160 posts, many of them not backed up, so I was understandably freaked out. I raided several Facebook posts to bump up my writing stats. And I suspect Facebook Memories will add a few more errant posts next year.

End of year writing stats 2020

2020 Recap. Hindsight is a funny thing. Here I am, in lockdown (it’s April), we’re in the middle of a pandemic, and I’m looking back into the window of the past to see what I can salvage or glean from my old work. Having nothing better to do than to visit old journals during this downtime in order to see if I could flesh out some of the lean years of poetry, I hit some rich pockets. (See below for recap details)

Dec. update. That said, I easily met my 52 poem quota for the year, and then some. I didn’t even have to resort to splitting linked haiku, or counting prose poems. My end-of-year total is a whopping 196 posts (make that 228 posts, as I had forgotten to upload many of my Covid posts—resurrected in 2021, thanks to Facebook memories). My personal best, ever. Upping my game. Of course, the fire journals bulked it up. I also added another potential quota to my list—I will strive for 52 pieces of art a year. Don’t think I’ll make that quota this year, as I only thought of doing it in mid-December. Still, there’s hope. I’m at 28 pieces of art but there are only two days left in the year.

Publishing news: A poem I began in 2015, from a scrawny Facebook post, revised in 2019, was published in Spectrum 24, KILLING THE CAT, Don Kingfisher Campbell also published an aquarelle drawing of Arequipa, Peru, in B&W with less than stellar results. Finally my poem, True Chanterelles was finally published in Fungi magazine. TRUE CHANTERELLES originally written in 2013, was revised in 2018. A long publishing birth. But Art Goodtimes put a bid on it when it was barely a day old. It needed to ripen. Then he said load it up with Latinate names. And so I did. Three of my Solstice poems, one written for the occasion, THE APPROACH OF THE OLD YEAR, WRONG ROADS, and PERHAPS A GARDEN (Dec. 2019), were published and set to music by Kirk Whipple for a holiday Cranberry Covid Coast YouTube extravaganza, to be broadcast at a later date. Part Deux, two poems. Part Tres coming up.

Thanks to old Facebook entries, my 2019 posts which were an anemic 80 posts, have bulked up to 132 posts—I was not expecting that. My iPad was stolen in April 2019, and I lost some writing, but one poem came back home to me by way of Facebook memories. I was quite thrilled to find it. Not quite 52 poem posts total, but, close—as there are many prose poems—so I can put that task to bed. Finally. Small grace. I am pushing up on 4000 total posts since I began this blog process. OK, so it’s 3895. Hard to comprehend that much work, in a little over a half a lifetime.

End of year writing stats 2019

Year-end writing stats. It’s been a rather rough year, some 30 poems, and a baker's dozen of prose poems, that makes 43 poems, so far, out of 101 posts. At first, it was only 89 posts, I despaired, but with the help of Facebook Memories, I was able to glean and a couple dozen more posts—including a few poems that I never posted here. My poetry minimum is 52 solid poems, so I fell behind. Maybe I should count all those haiku separately. However, with the prose poems, I do have about 52 poems total. Make that 60 including prose poems in retrospect. Maybe not such a bad year, after all. Considering.

It’s been a stressful, if busy, year. Still living rough, still living on the run. But determined to stay In the game, firmly anchored in my art. My last refuge, my cousins’ Nicasio house was destroyed on the 4th of July, leaving us homeless (again), and then there was a Sonoma County Kincade Fire evacuation in October. What a nightmare. Both places where I’ve been living, were either destroyed, or under attack. Since the fire, I’ve been living under siege, sheltering in place in an empty house with most of the electricity knocked out, babysitting two desperate cats, making sure the place didn't get looted.

My cousin Dave’s stroke, followed by his marriage to a woman who seemingly reinvents veritas to suit her scenarios, has left me bereft, with no plan B. My car’s on its last legs, and I’m living here, there, and everywhere. So, my car is my lifeline. I carry clothing, art supplies, my electronics, etc.

To make matters worse, my iPad was stolen in April, with myriad photos, and bits of writing that never made it to the cloud. Some April Fool’s joke. I will never see some of that work again.

My cousin Sinead and I took a jaunt to Hawaii to see my friends Dulcie in Kauai, and also Kathie on Oahu. It’s been ten years since I’ve been to Hawaii, long overdue. Lots of photos. And lots of extraordinary outdoor time, circumnavigating the Na Pali coast from the other side, snorkeling, revisiting Waimea Canyon, in Kauai, and circumnavigating Oahu, revisiting my old haunts discovering some new ones on North Shore. Snorkeling again, Hanamua Bay. Not enough beach time, though. then Hawaiian Airlines and American Express double-charged me for the tickets, when I upgraded, and I cannot seem to straighten it out., no matter how loudly I scream. It’s all a vast metaphor for being ripped off in general.

I feel so overwhelmed these days. I can only take baby steps. One foot in front of the other. I’m learning to feel secure within myself during these insurmountable times, living only within the present tense. I’ve had a couple of housesitting gigs, I’m now housesitting in Berkeley through the new year. Respite.

Poems published in the Julia Vinograd memorial anthology.
POEM ON THE PASSING OF JULIA VINOGRAD, STREET POET (2018)
And I have a poem forthcoming in Molly Fisk’s upcoming Fire and Water anthology.
LOVE IN A TIME OF FIRE

I was a featured poet for the Petaluma Poetry Walk, and I also read at Watershed for The Open Mike Slot. I wrote a massive California Arts Council grant for Poetry Flash. all this while living itinerantly.

Ive been a few art shows at the San Geronimo Community Cultural Center, sold a photograph.

Senior art show

Spring art show (poster)

Where We Call Home

Some artwork
Two pastels, Elephant Mountain
Two pastels, Nicasio oak & rock
Spirit Rock (pastel and paintings), White’s Hill
Asbestos angel, assemblage

I made a new art blog to keep track of my art. I need to make one, maybe two for my photos

My Brownie Mary photo is in a traveling exhibit: Weedmaps Weed Museum where it will tour for three years. Someone lifted it from my blog, cut off my name and copyright, and reposted it on a Facebook site where it was massively redistributed, I lost track after 30,000 shares.

Taking stock, old inventories of the past, blog list I’ve been scanning old negatives from the 1980s and 1990s, giving back, as it were. Mostly of poets. I need to find a digital home for my scans, I don’t think Blogger will do. Here are some posts.
Scanning old negatives of the Napa Poetry Conferen...
A gathering of poets, Orange Hill, Nassau Island, ...
For the Bahamas (scans from 1985) (photos)
Giving back old photos
Brownie Mary photo scan

Still on the back-back burner: documenting and photographing my old pottery and ceramics pieces from the 1970s.

Taking stock, old inventories of the past, blog 

End of year writing stats 2018

I have fewer posts for 2018, than for previous years. But despite several major life-altering derailments, I managed to eke out some 60 poem entries (my goal is 52 posts a year)—a post a week) some poems are repetitions, or rather, revisions from April Poetry Month posts. I did very little by way of pulp fiction reading for my Amazon Reviews writing. The thrill is gone. No time or inclination to read, sadly.

My old boyfriend John Oliver Simon died in January, that left a deeper hole than expected. I also had to jump into the fray and manage his two California Arts Council grants, and there was little money to pay for my time as the majority of the funds were tied up in residencies. So I was poor as a churchmouse most of the year, with the CAC money tied up in knots. Then, the man I thought I was going to spend the rest of my life with, ended it—after 20 years. Just like that. I’m still reeling from that one.

So, I’ve been living rough on people’s couches. No fixed abode. Which also means no fixed job. No income. I’ve been living thin. I had to give away most of my possessions. I still need to rehome my books and art supplies. So, keeping up appearances has not been on the list. I wouldn’t wish that kind of year upon anyone. So, 2019 will be my year of massive change.

On the blog timeline front, I’ve managed to add a few old bits from those lean years. But it’s been slim pickings. I picked up a few posts in 1980, 1982; 1997, 1998, 1999; 2000, 2004, 2005, 2006. But I still  haven’t reached the magical formula of 52 posts a year on those lean years. I've come to the conclusion that I may never reach my goal.

However, I did manage to pick up a few odd post entries—mainly posters of readings—for those early years when I created the Russian River Writers’ Guild blog (a big scanning project—still not finished, but the bulk of it is done.) Most of the RRWG memorabilia was buried within this blog, so I’m pleased that the extended RRWG memorabilia is now a different entity. I also began scanning work for Herman Berlandt’s memorial blog as well, but it’s under construction (not posted).

If I ever am able to gather up my old  pottery and ceramics pieces from the 1970s, and take photos of them, that’s on the back burner to add to this blog. But it’s extremely difficult for me to return to Oakland to get the rest of my stuff—let alone, my mail. Besides, I have nowhere to put the rest of my stuff. My books, art supplies and plants, especially.

I don’t have it in me this year to do a deeper Bill Jamesian-detailed statistics spreadsheet on my writing progress. Perhaps another time when I’m better dressed, emotionally speaking.

see 2017 stats

For some reason, an unknown twat named Susan sent me a comment, not once, not twice, but thrice stating it’s my karma. Of course, I marked them as spam. She has no other posts, no other comments, not even a blog. Why would people even do such a hateful thing?

Almost Ten Years a Bloggin'

Wow! My blogpage counter whirled past 500,000 hits in January and I didn't even witness it. I never imagined having that many readers, ever. I know that people are reading my blog, I just don't know who my audience is—whether they're avid readers, or merely flybys. About the only thing I do know is what people are reading.

I added the blog counter in 2010, I would imagine that I didn't have all that many visits during the first two years, perhaps 40-50,000. But it's 517,056, right now, and whirring up. It boggles the senses. My most popular post, The Viking-Irish Redhead Gene Myth 3/23/2009, has garnered 87,113 hits. Does anybody actually read it, or do they just click on it? Gratified to see Mill Valley's Unknown Museum and the Gluers Junk Art move up to fourth position. The art movement was important, and there was very little about it on the internet.

I've been blogging for nearly ten years. I began blogging in 2008, though I founded the blog in January of  2007, I let it lay fallow for a year. I was a slow adopter. To be fair, I really didn't begin blogging until August, 20, 2008, so I guess this is a bit of a preamble.

Since ca. 2015, I've been actively filling in the backstory timeline, posting work from the early years. (Groan.) I've still got a long way to go, as I am gleaning old journals. I'm branching out to include prose—and especially my travel journals.

Right now I'm focusing on the John Oliver Simon years (1985-89). Not that there were that many solid years, as I ran far from him when things went south, but he continued to influence my life and we finally buried the hatched, to become deep friends again.

My goal is have at least 52 posts a year, some years' worth of material is rather slim on content (especially 2005 and 2006), but most years are robust.

Because I've given myself permission to also post freewrites, vs. polished poems, I'm beginning to see crossover connections between posts (and also anchoring the actual date some of the early writing was written.) Matrix. Matrices? Who knew my Tengo Dinero piece had its roots in a CPITS workshop on Marge Piercy's Charm for Attracting Wild Money?

I still hold a vague hope that some of those early corrupted files where I lost vast swaths of work, will resurface, at least in draft form as I glean my old journals.

Thank you Guy Kawasaki for getting me into this mess. It's been a fascinating journey. LITERRATA or Veritas and the art of Memoir.

Happy blogaversery!
Sort of.

NB In case you're wondering why I even bother posting all these blog milestones, it's so I can keep track, and it's a way to measure my progress. Otherwise, I despair. It becomes a morass, and when self-doubt kicks in, it becomes a raft, and a memory aid. And as an added bonus: a timeline!

• Blogger stats (23)

End of year writing stats 2017

So I washed my hair at noon
making ready for the New Year,
I wasn't expecting it to be freezing all day.
Only to say, Stay cold, Pony Boy.

Of my 137 entries for 2017, at least 60 to 90 are poems (some posts have multiple poems), a few are prose poems, a few are themed haiku. I try & tag all my poems. I'm not always successful. Standard poems have BLOCK CAPITALS for titles.

Adding old journal entries, part 2

I seem to work in spates, bringing my old journal entries and poems into the electronic age. I've had a stack of journals haunting me at the foot of the bed for months, now. So I've been revisiting old writing for the past week. (Besides Facebook, where I continue to mine bits from the recent past, is boring as feckall these days.)

Right now, I'm mostly revisiting work from the 1980s. There's more to choose from. The 1990s and early 2000s will be lean years, as it was about that time when I sloughed off writing in my journals. Well, I was writing, but it had more to do with going back to school, academics, rather than writing, or art.

I finally got around to adding my Azores and Lisbon journals from 2001 (high on my To Do list), and it proved to be a rich trove. Only thing is, I didn't particularly need more work from 2001. The years 2000, or 2003-06, were lean, yes. But it seems to work that way, they years where I don't need more work, I have lots of entries.

My goal still is 52 posts per year, and I have finally fleshed out the lean 1980s years, 1984 in particular, was spare, until I discovered there was a whole lot more to my Hawaii journals, as compared to first read, or rather first skim.

Adding old journal entries

I am still working on expanding and filling out my blog, especially the early years, where I previously failed to find relevant work. In addition to mining Facebook's On This Day posts for pithy tidbits from the past (but that only goes back to 2007), I've taken to mining my old journals too.

I think I've nearly come a full year cycle mining Facebook's On This Day posts....there are days and weeks where I missed checking to see if there was anything relevant, but I think I've mined the lionshare of potential material.

You'd think that by now I would've covered all the salvageable, or should I say mineable On This Day posts, but I haven't been diligent about it. I am still surprised by what surfaces. Take my mallard rescue story, also a recent Facebook rescue:

Hypnotizing a Wild Duck
Solstice rant after getting flame mail from a stranger (from flame mail)
Gems in the Basement
Broken Crockery

I am always interesting in salvaging original posts that led to longer stories, or poems. Some are prose poems in their own right. I've been trying to save first drafts, as it were, and then I "marry" them with finished pieces.

Picking Strawberries from the Strawberry Tree
which became
Arbutus, Madroño, or a Strawberry Tree by any other name

I've already gone through all my poetry e-files, and scanned all hard copies, so no hope there. On the years with few entries, I've only made modest gains, a piece or two per year. So, I've gone back yet again to fine-comb my journals looking for lost nuggets. Tedious work. But the end is in sight.

I've been working on 1998, which apparently was a particularly dismal year for writing. I only found 13 entries and one was a repeat poem (2 versions), and 3 were art (only nine bits of writing for an entire year?) I'm now up to 26 entries (but 3 are still fluff), and I don't know if I can squeeze much more out of that year.

But I rescued this: The Higher Functions of Lower Math (Archie Williams). And a few work-related pieces: Catering the US Open Golf Tournament which intersects with Tiger Woods' rise to fame.

The output for 1999 is equally as dismal. My goal is 52 posts per year (poetry, prose, journal, or art). On some of those lean years I'll be lucky to get 25 posts. I'll settle for 40 posts per year. But there are definitely holes.

I've taken to lifting random journal entries, that when separated from my larger tirades, document an interesting space in time. Some of it's exhausting to read, and it's just plain weird to re-enter a timeframe nearly 20 years in the past, and try to pick up where I left off and render it into something readable.

Perhaps the most surprising discoveries were my Pat Wall entries. I didn't even realize I had written them. My friend Micaela's father, Pat Wall opened the first modern art gallery on the west coast in Monterey, which was an artistic and literary intersection that included the likes Edward Weston, Ellwood Graham, Joseph Albers, Jean Varda, Robinson Jeffers, Henry Miller and John Steinbeck. Pat's avant garde gallery changed the face of art on the West Coast.

Of course, there's next to nothing on Pat or the Pat Wall Art Gallery on the internet. Something Micaela and I always meant to do was to formally collect Pat's oral history. I know Micaela did some work, but it's not readily available and I no longer remember the specific details. So it was lovely to rediscover this particular entry.

There's also a large chunk of notes on Miller and Dali that I bogged down on, so I jettisoned it. Maybe I'll get back to it later. I've only just barely scratched the surface with this material so painstakenly collected during the pre-internet days.

• Pat Wall, Modern Art Dealer: 1 Ellwood Graham
• Pat Wall, Modern Art Dealer: 2 Betty Wall

• Pat Wall, Modern Art Dealer: 3 Henry Miller

Fluffing out the blog timeline (home stretch)

Lately I've been adding a few Facebook Memories to my blog. The past few months, I've been scanning adding variations, revisions of old poems and generally fluffing out the blog timeline (home stretch). My goal is 52 posts per year (poetry, prose, journal, or art).

The weak-kneed anemic years:, but 40 posts per year is doable; hell, I'll even settle for 35 posts per year, which means I have 10 9 8 abysmal years to fluff out... In which case, I need to focus on 1986; 91, 92, 96, 98, 99;  2004, 05, 06. The rest is pure gravy. 

The 1990s I was traveling a lot and never got around to transcribing my travel journals. Truth be known, I'm resistant to typing up stuff, so searching for typed work is a higher priority than cracking open old journals. There is some resistance. This is my carrot, this is my stick. Flagellate! Flagellate! Avanti!)

End of year writing stats 2016, Scanning crusades 2014-2016, and beyond

Two years ago, as we began to clear out my grandmother's house, which was my home for the first 24 years of my life,  in order to sell it, I was heartbroken. So much memorabilia. Memory loosened by random bits of paper. And things. I expected to write lots, because, well, unearthing the past... Instead, I was numb. Profoundly depressed. Useless.

So I collected small trinkets from my childhood, and began to create archives. Then, in order to save them, I began a scanning project. It started out small. The first year I scanned old family photos, then I created a large family photo archive on Dropbox. It's now a monster folder pushing seven gigabytes. But the entire extended family now has access to those photos. (Except for the stolen ones.)

I scanned a fair amount of odd flotsam and memorabilia from that era as well (still lots more to do). Some of the detritus of the past found its way to my blog by way of illustration. My story on Christian Burkhardt: Almost Amish, for example. 

Some of it gave credence to old memories that I've transcribed in this blog. Biggest mindblower was finding a photo of my mother and Lloyd Bridges for The Student Prince at Sacramento's Music Circus. I wrote a blog piece about Lloyd in Guys and Dolls.

This year, I focused primarily on scanning my own extensive travel photos, I am nearly done scanning them (I just finished scanning the USSR—monstrous pile o pix), and will add some photos to this blog when I process them.

I began scanning chronologically with photos from the 1970s. Of course, as I scanned photos, I began to remember all the missing ones. Sometimes I'd get lucky. Somebody would unearth a photo from a lost era. See, I was the family chronicler. All events and parties, I was behind the camera recording, recording. Now scanning.

Still to do are all my black and white negatives from the 1980s and 1990s, but I need a good film scanner for that project. Since they are mostly of poets, I've been in conversation with Carolyn Forché who was my mentor at the Napa Valley Poetry conferences in the early 1980s, to bring them into the digital age. Her husband, Harry Matthison, too is culling and scanning his extensive archive of photos from when he was a war photographer-correspondent with Magnum. At least he'll get four coffee table books for his efforst. I still don't have a forever home for most of my work.

Carolyn asked how we can fund these photo archives. I thought the National Endowment for the Humanities might be a place to start. I need to create a GoFundMe account to raise enough money to get the scanner I need. And look into a grant to fund my time. On the 2017 To Do List.

This year, I've also been also scanning my paper/poetry archives, and fluffing up this blog with old poems and memorabilia. (I'm up to 2002 published posts! Nearly 1k posts added this year.)

As I rounded out the blog posts for the early years (1980s-1990s), it became a numbers game. Did I have enough strong work from the old days to bump up my meager collection of posts from the 1980s—before computers! It's strange to relive the past via poetry, but now it's a timeline of sorts. Prepping for the Alzheimer daze...

My goal is to post 52 blog pieces of writing a year. One for each week of the year. Every year. Seems reasonable. Most years I did not meet my minimum goal, so I lowered my standards to 25+ pieces a year. There was some fudging of numbers as I expanded my idea of what I wanted to include in this blog. Posters of readings, and poetry awards were added, for example. Some random doodles from my poetry journals. Letters. There will be letters.

A few of the old yearly collections do meet my arbitrary criteria of 52 posts per year. (PPY). Nearly all of them meet the 25+ PPY criteria (finally), and then some— but I still harbor hope to fluff up those anemic years.

Then, there are the years where I wonder what the fuck happened. I have not scanned all my old poetry journals, so the ranks still might swell. These years listed below are seriously in arrears. I have hope, but I'm also running out of material to scan. Letters and memorabilia from poets will swell the ranks somewhat. Letters. There will be letters. I already said that.

Salvaging old files (again)

Having grown weary of scanning and transcribing old journals (from the pre-electronic era), for poems and journal entries, since mid-October I mosied on over to my MFA papers, and collections folders, where I found lots of material I'd forgotten about. A few of my missing poems from 2000-2003, for starters. The beggars!

I also found a treasure trove of folklore collections for Alan Dundes, and book synopses from my Celtic Romanticism class at UC Berkeley. Wish I had discovered them when I was prepping for my Celtic bard talk at Sacramento Poetry Center last month.

Some of those lean middle years of little writing posted on my blog, suddenly swelled to respectable numbers. But alas, there were few poems, and a few pieces I was hunting down an electronic copy of, were corrupt beyond belief. I took a few screen shots. Ugh. (See below.) The worst culprits seem to be from the Works 2, and Word 4 era; they were updated to Word 5, and beyond, but they ghosted themselves into ASCII oblivion anyway. Word 5 docs also didn't fare well.

The early pre-electronic years on this blog have gained many entries. It makes for an interesting timeline. I did that then? So while some writers are deep into NaNoWriMo, I'm spelunking the past for treasure, and revising some pieces. My NaRevWriMo.

In order to rescue corrupted files, I experimented with different applications, and discovered that sometimes those blank docs would reveal some of their secrets if I used other word processing programs (not Word, itself), and I opened them in TextEdit, RTF, etc.) Usually cracking a document open, revealed all the corrections as well as random ASCII bits. In other words, hodgepodge.

I am constantly correcting and updating my work. That's what writers do. Revise, revise, revise. Imagine every iteration you ever wrote, saved all in one doc., in fragments, like an old laundry pile. That's what lurks behind the scene on your Word.doc. (What you see is but a shell hiding the messiness of writing, rewriting, and endless saving—not to mention your printer's vital stats.) In other words, it's a word salad. Not useful. More like electronic cuneiform. In my attempt to salvage some of those docs, I've rewritten poems, so are they new poems, or old poems?

And since I've backed up all my old files onto new hard drives, I've merely copied the corrupted files there too. Yiii! I do have some old work on CDs, from 2000-2003, so that's my last hope, other than finding hard copy.

My advice to you all: don't assume your old files from the last century, are safely backed up on old hard drives and floppy disks. Open them up and air them out, then transcribe them to a new format before it's too late. Otherwise the cybergods will find them and eat them up—like moths to cashmere sweaters deep in the closet of time.

Paper Trail

As I weed and ameliorate old copies of typed poems, & their revisions, with the electronic files on my hard drives, and with this blog (I've been posting my work by year as a means to keep track of it all—and it creates a nifty timeline as well), I have an ever-increasing pile of paper poems with no electronic files. No equivalents. Only hard copies. Makes me shudder. Makes me wonder what was lost.

So, I'm slowly coming to the conclusion that the dearth of work from 1995-2000 may be due to hard drive failure? This insane archiving process all started a couple of summers ago when I realized I couldn't open some old poetry and prose files, they'd reverted to gray Unix bricks. Other files, that I could force open, had lost chunks of text. Sometimes vast chunks of text. A writer's nightmare. And so, it continues. 

I had typed most of my old work from the early 80s into Appleworks, which later created a translation problem, but I was able to salvage most of it with old Macs I had rebuilt, but this paper trail is an entirely new dilemma as I contemplate what writing was lost. 

Words no writer ever wants to hear.

Weird to revisit that old writing, if I can find it, that is. I came across a pile of poems I had workshopped at Napa Poetry Conferences and realized that I didn't have electronic files for most of them. But clearly they had been electronic files as the hard copies are printed out in faded dot matrix.

I also found a few lurkers in back issues of Sonoma Mandala and other old publications from the 1980s. I still have a few more boxes of papers to sort, so hopefully the missing work will resurface. It's bad enough that I've lost most of my news stories and photo tear sheets from the Sonnoma County Stump and The Paper. But not my poems. Not the gumdrop muffins!

I figure I have a fighting chance to keep my work electronically current by using my blog! Alas, most of of my work is not on paper. Unfortunately it would kill the equivalent of an entire forest to print it all out. It was wildly liberating to know that you don't have to print out hard copy. My writing output grew exponentially.

Remember those electronic printer typewriters that printed out a line at a time? Expensive little film ink cartridges. Some of my work was from that machine, so there would be no electronic equivalents. But even still. Sheesh.

Some of those poems I had saved from the he 5 inch floppy disks to the the 3.5 inch ones. Even files on the 3.5" hard floppy disks are a challenge to rescue. The floppy dist themselves are reverting to ferrous oxide. I trolled them a while back.

I got a USB floppy disk reader (hard to find!)  from Craigslist. I met an Indian fellow in a San Jose parking lot at sunset. Very clandestine. But I suppose I could attempt another trolling. No matter how we back up our writing, it's all temporal. 

I think I decided a lot of my old writing wasn't worth upgrading to .doc files. I left it go fallow, not realizing it's all part of the matrix. 

A friend said: it is alive and well on some cloud out there... perhaps entertaining multitudes in outer galaxies.

Along with those old Jackie Gleason reruns.

Trolling Old Journals

I found a stack of old journals mixed in with newer journals, and since I've misplaced most of my old writing, I took a peek, to see if there was anything I could glean, or steal.

My 1981 journals, where I spent the summer in Port Townsend, the Olympic Peninsula, and Pulsbo, were particularly rich, so I've been typing up (dictating) a few poems and prose pieces.

I was able to date several old poems, having found the original draft. What I discovered is that the writing is much more solid than I expected. Funny how you think your old work is inferior. And your new work accounts for shit. Perception. Not what it's cracked up to be.

I am enamored with my Port Townsend prose piece, and my Mt. Olympus piece, where I had a very, very close encounter with a Rocky Mountain goat.

These prose pieces would've never seen the light of day, as I only typed up poems. Prose scared me. But for the most part, it's solid and muscular. What was I thinking that it was all so bad? Part of why I began this blog was to teach myself to write prose. But the urge for story ran parallel with my poems. Anyway, should you want to peak, this link is a shortcut. (New work also in 1997, 98, and 2000. Not a lot. Yet.)

►  1981 (29)

It all began when I was uploading old poems to this blogspace, and I discovered that many of my files were corrupted. In particular, the electronic version of the HOH RIVER VALLEY file is toast. And I still haven't found the hard copy. It exists, but I don't have access to it.

My other long-term goal was to fill in the posts where I have too few poems for a given year. I am/was a prolific writer, so this is a search for lost work. Retyping old work is a bit like reinventing the wheel. But on the other hand, I'm treating it like revision.

Most of the 11 years I need more work for, are the years I don't have journals for, they're tucked away deep in a box in storage. 1998 to 2000, the years I was in grad school are particularly paltry. I know I have writing, but where is it? 1982 I was in a car accident, so I probably didn't write much. Ditto 1997/98. Some of those years I was in Amsterdam, or Russia, so it may be a case of typing up work that I never had a chance to make an electronic file.

Updating Old Poems

I thought I had lost my big black 3-inch manuscript clip binder with all my poems, notes, publications, awards, from last century, etc., in it. It was my master copy, my hard file, so to speak. The other day, while I was sorting papers, I found it in a crate in the back of the closet.

Last summer, I decided to put all my poems up online via my blog, not because I think they're particularly wonderful or have literary merit, but because all my old electronic files are slowly going senile. Some are disappearing as well. It's not like there's a reader stampede to my blog either, some of those poems have been posted for ages and they've not been read once. This is my safe deposit box.

I have had a very hard time accessing the files from the 1980s, SimpleText, AppleWorks (the original version), and MicrosoftWorks, are no longer supported on any platform. OS X can't access most of those files.

Some electronic files were lost forever. Some turned into grey Unix bricks. Most, I could force open with TextEdit, but they were an ASCII clean-up nightmare, with all kinds of artifacts embedded in the dense prose block that looks like it's simultaneously swearing and sneezing while constipated and groaning.

Then there were the files that were only half there. I kid you not. Some had chunks missing in the middle, most had the lower end lopped off. And then I didn't have valid creation dates. Not to mention what poem was published where, or won awards...So I was pretty jazzed to find that binder.

I spent the day going through each hard copy of poem, and adding creation dates, publications dates, and other versions. Seventeen (17) hours later, I'm still at it, I'm up to W in my MS book. Nearly there. My eyes no longer work after that many hours of proofreading, so I used my iPad to magnify my faded pencil notes. Fancy magnifying glass. Brilliant! But I'm flagging. So, i can report most of my typed poems are up in the cloud, well on Blogger.

Blogger, yeah. I'd like to shoot it. What a buggy program. even with faster internet, it constantly hangs, and tells me in red banners that an error has occurred while trying to save  or publish my post.  Please try again. Ad infinitem. Try & get out of that loophole and not lose all your work. Yeah. Like this post, right now. I can't update it.

Notable disaster areas were poems from the 1980s, especially 1989. I had hard copy of several poems and no electronic file. None. POOF! Where did it go? Not good at all. Also, the early 1980s poems are also MIA. I think I have hard copies somewhere—hand calligraphed, as I didn't have a typewriter in those days.

As to the 1989 MIA poems files, in desperation, I began taking photos of my fileless hard copy poems and posting the jpg up as a placeholder, poems to be transcribed and typed up at a later date. I wish I had OCR software, but it usually is more trouble than it's worth by the time you've corrected the typo. Almost as bad as the ASCII bricks.

Still to do: prose. But tomorrow is already here, so I needs must sleep. But, oh, the memories unleashed by a poetry retrospective timeline. There'll be wicked dreams tonight, I'm sure.

End of Year Writing Stats 2014

The best training is to read and write, no matter what.  Don’t live with a lover or roommate who doesn’t respect your work. Don’t lie, buy time, borrow to buy time. Write what will stop your breath if you don’t write. —Grace Paley

End of year writing stats: this blog helps me keep track of my writing. It's often the only tangible evidence that I am still a writer, though most of the time I don't feel like a writer or a poet or a thinker. I suffer from the illusion of falling into the void of nihilism. I don't do many readings and almost no publishing. I don't even write every day (except on Facebook).

My generic goal is to average 52 poems (a poem a week) and I strive for a similar quantity of prose pieces. Some years I exceed my goals, other years I fail miserably. When I began this electronic writing process in August of 2007, I filed everything thematically. Well, that didn't work out so well. This year, I've tried to restore some semblance of chronological order. I've got a long ways to go, so my numbers are always in flux.

When I began this process, I also had misplaced ambitions of writing a blog piece a day. What was I thinking? I had read Guy Kawasaki's evangelical blog post, How to Change the World in 120 Days, in the Art of Blogging, April of 2006, and I founded this blog soon after, then let it lay fallow until mid-August of 2007. It's always a struggle to be productive. I was once more prolific a writer, but these days I take what I can get, wherever I can get it. Facecbook? so be it.

I probably have the poetry quota well met for this year as I have many haiku strings that I file as one item, though there may be as many as six or eight linked haiku in a file. But I tend to count them as a single entry. And, I didn't even attempt to do NaPoWriMo, nor did I participate in April Poetry Month PAD, these two are where I usually stack up the writing bits. (Do I count the prose poems as poems too? I waffle, I waffle. Hold the syrup.) Anyway, not separating haiku threads, I have about 45 poems.

I'm up to 90 pieces (I'm not sure I should count this one as it's an open letter). Don't know if I'll make my self-imposed quota but I've still got several orphan bits and pieces to whip into shape. Much of my writing these days comes from interacting with friends and with strangers in Facebook groups—especially my prose and essays. 

NB: With a little help from Facebook posts throughout the years, my total tally increased to 169 posts.

I guess if I were to include my 60 Amazon book reviews, I'll have met my prose quota as well, but though a lot of thought and analysis goes into the process, I don't consider it to be new writing—nor does it take one's breath away, as Grace Paley put it.

In general, my prose writing begins as a small nugget, then as I research and expand an idea, a day has slipped by, and I'm stuck wrestling long cephalopodic pieces into coherent shapes. Not always succeeding, I might add. Prose, where I seem to spend most of my time working on, is always difficult, but it also won't let me alone. I do read and write very day, no matter what. But rendering finished pieces is not always so easy. This dark craft. 

The blog format forces me to go back and wrest fragments into being. Maybe it's the fear and the tyranny of the printed page. Or maybe it's the thought that someone might actually read the pieces that motivates me.

I am especially grateful to those of you who visit this blog from time to time and leave comments. So I thank you all for your interactions. For keeping the home fires burning. Something I hold especially dear, as the process of writing is often akin to falling into the void.

Dear Google, Using Blogger is a Painful Experience

Dear Google,

It's become so painful to use Blogger that I often resist posting new work. I'm using Safari/Snow Leopard, and a wonky ATT DSL (read variable speed). But these problems persist even under Mavericks OS... So either it's a variable ATT issue, or you don't support Macs.

Before you lay all blame on my legacy Mac OS and low-end DSL, let me remind you that there was once a time when Google products really shone, they zipped right along, and loaded right up with even older software (Tiger, Safari 4.1). No waiting. Gmail was a dream. It just worked—despite bad ATT DSL. That is why I embraced Google products. You might even say I was evangelical—like Guy Kawasaki, who got me into this blogging mess to begin with. BTW, I'm an old customer: I scored a coveted Gmail invite waaaay back when you had to know someone who knew someone at Google.

Now, unless one has fast DSL, using Google products has become an unpleasant experience. I have complained and yowled long and mightily to you in the past via your Report a Problem button, especially when you first rolled out this version of Blogger. But clearly no one at Google cares, or is listening. Blogger is long in tooth and in dire need of an overhaul. 

So once again I find myself writing into the void in the rare hopes that maybe someone at Google might actually read this plea and instigate an overhaul of the painfully sluggish Blogger, and fix an equally sluggish Gmail, AND also ensure that they still continue to work with older software (and a weird internet connection).

I now am forced to use the classic Gmail in basic HTML as the current version of Gmail won't even load with Safari 5.1. It's not much better under the latest Safari and Mavericks OS. Nor is it improved by using the latest Firefox, or Chrome.

I can't begin to tell you how many emails and Blogger posts I've lost to the cyber-void due to Google software hanging somewhere between first saving and uploading.

I mourn for those lost posts as I put considerable time and scholarship into them. One post I was able to rescue as it was cached on another open page. But usually I'm not so lucky. That particular rescued post just so happens to be your number one post on on the Google search engine—The Viking-Irish Redhead Gene Myth. (Use "Viking redhead myth" for your search words).

Since Google products used to work just fine before you revised your suite a few years back, despite the fact that we have the world's worst ATT DSL service, the blame can only lay square on you. You've designed fatally flawed software. In the process of trying to make it cool, you've sunk your flagship with too many bells and whistles and not kept enough elegant structure—for which you were once justly famous for. I expected so much more of you, Google. 

When I say Blogger is painfully slow, it's not hyperbole. When I load the Blogger dashboard, I get a white page, and it hangs for five or more minutes—or longer—before I can get to the post icon to write. By that time, I could care less about posting a blog. I go make myself a cup of tea, and see if it's loaded yet. I wind up drinking a lot of tea while waiting for Blogger to load, Maybe I should take up wine instead?

For example, I have some screenshots I wish to share with you and I can't upload them, because, yes, they're hanging. Again. (So far, third time is not a charm...just sayin'. Forget about multiple images, I'm lucky to load one image to load at a time.) Hanging here....

My Blogger experience is punctuated by these white windows hanging for as long as 2 to 5 minutes each. Sometimes they hang forever. Loading and loading and loading. Just like the current Gmail.

I spend too much time watching this spinning cursor. This is where things can go horribly wrong if it's the first save and publish. OMG!

This is is a particularly devilish window, because even if you hit the Dismiss link, sometimes the screen goes white and there's no text at all. All my hard work gone. Poof! Sometimes it takes 20 tries to get past this red warning bar and upload the revised blog. Click on the orange Update button. Wait five to ten seconds, sometimes longer. One-and-two-and-three.... Wait for the red bar to appear. Click Dismiss. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Oh, and I revise a lot. So I count a lot too. One-thousand one.... You get the picture.

Oh, and about loading photos, this is a particularly slow loading page, that blue loading bar typically gets stuck, and most of the options are hidden behind white expanses. I had to find the right buttons by trial and error.

Photos typically hang when I do get this far. It generally takes me 3 to 5 tries to upload photos. Notice that the drop down list under MORE is invisible.

And may the gods help you if you get this window. There is no cure, no exit strategy. It will repeat endlessly. Only thing left to do is to copy your blog post to a clipboard and make a whole new document.

Your bloatware is worse than Microsoft Word. Rethink the process Google. You know the adage: KISS (Keep it simple, stupid, but I'd rather call you sweetie).

Don't even get me started on Google+, I literally cannot use the site which is linked to my other Gmail account—and in this case, Safari is not at all to blame, as I use the latest beta version Firefox for that account. Because it is so buggy, I've pretty much had to abandon my Google+ account. Luckily, I've found a way to access my old legacy Gmail and Picasa albums, otherwise they're as good as lost to me under Google+. 

I am also cross-posting this note to you on my Blogger page, because it is patently clear that you do not actually listen to customer feedback submitted via your "Report a Problem" button. So I put this plea out to you, warts and all. And I challenge you to do a much better job next time, when you do overhaul Gmail and Blogger. (Please let it be soon, before I am forced to use another email server. FWIW, IOS, by comparison is much better with Google interface. Keep in mind, that ATT DSL is little better than dial-up, with its variable speeds, causing this iteration of Blogger to repeatedly crash. Something to consider for the next iteration.)

Your latest slate of programmers have done Blogger and Gmail a grave disservice, and by extension, your (formally) fiercely loyal customers as well, by designing such flawed software, that you leave legacy folks with laptops in the dust. Bells and whistles are merely that, and if they interfere with the bones of the program, in the form of bloatware that can't upload, then you need to rethink your strategy. Sometimes cool is not very cool at all. It's so yesterday.

Or why don't you just come on up and wifi-ify Oakland too so we can have great internet. Some of these Blogger problems are bound to disappear with fast, regular DSL. I'll be more than happy to make you all a nice cuppa tea too. Cookies?

A disgruntled writer....

Old work, new vision

Lately I've been uploading old work—mostly poems from the 1980s and 1990s. It's a bit of a surprise to revisit one's old writing all at once like that. I started at the beginning. Only work that made the electronic cut was uploaded. It's been a tedious process fraught with technical difficulty (read: incompatible formats) and more than a few poems weren't all there. As in physically not all there (no that's not a value judgement.)

And of course, I don't have hard copy for any of my old work, my big clippie-board mss binder has gone on walkabout. So I can't fill in the missing words and lines, nor date some of my old work. I'm sure there are myriad formatting typos. Long dashes (em lines) reverted to accented ós, and line breaks disappeared. I've been burning the midnight oil—nay, more like 2AM, removing those pesky ascii artifacts. But some are insidious.

See my very first entry of 1979 to read all about it. But rereading and reformatting all those poems is labor intensive. (I'm up to 1993). There are gaps because I didn't date my earlier work—incestuous nepotism? It dated me and now it's haunting me. Everything's relative.

Yeah, there was a lot of love gone wrong stuff. Rites of passage. Painful stuff. Painfully funny stuff: comparing women to pears with PTSD, imagining myself as an asparagus stalk, eating white oil paint because it reminded me of ice cream. OK, so I was four, it was my first metaphor.

Weird to review one's life for the past 35 years via poetry—shuffling the poems into the right creation date has created an interesting timeline.

Don't know how much more I'll upload during this round. My eyeballs hurt. I've moved all the orphan poems to relative dates within a 2-4 year period. Usually to Jan 1,19xx, so I can find them later. I still have a rat's nest of early poems filled in 1994—that was the latest file date saved. Need to track them down too.

Too much circular reading. Sorry for the typos, Working on them.
When This Blog Really Began—Aug 2008
Old Posts, New Posts
The Paper and the Sonoma County Stump

Poem titles are in CAPITAL LETTERS, and you can search the blog, using the word 'poem" in the search box at the top or clicking on the word "poem" on the hotlist below the dates. Other poetic categories too: haiku, ekphrastic poetry, collage, etc. Some poems also sorted by region: from the Andes to the USSR, and Zenia.