I spent the morning at Goodwill looking for a Halloween costume. I went with an open mind, but with the hope of finding a good mechanic's shirt or bowling shirt. After a good hour, I wandered over the wedding dresses and there, mixed in with taffeta gowns and lace fiascos was a Bo Duke costume-- yellow cowboy shirt, blonde wig, cowboy hat, and Dukes of Hazzard belt buckle all for $12. YEEHAH!
I put down the scary renaissance dress I was holding and grabbed a 99 cent t-shirt that said "Sailors have more fun - go Navy" just because I liked the mermaid on it. I also bought a NY Yankees baseball jersey for $4 as I was debating as going as a baseball player (though I'm a huge Red Sox fan, my husband has a vintage Yankees cap I could wear). I decided my husband could wear the jersey, but it turns out it's too small for him, so it may be my costume next year.
Other than that, there's not been a lot of poetry going on. I've started submitting my mss, though I'm being much more particular to where I send it. I am shocked at the amount of reading fees these days and wondering if there is a better way to do things in the poetry world. I'm not anti-reading fee for contests, but $25 a pop? Plus paying for copies and postage.
To copy my mss at Kinko's today it came out to about $5.85 per manuscript. Plus postage. So, for me to submit one manuscript is about $33, $35 if I send Priority Mail. Or $100 to submit 3 manuscripts. It's a strange world, yet I find here I am choosing a contest and submitting my work to it. There a certain amount of vanity and egotism I see in myself as I prepare another manuscript. Why do I want (need?) another book? What am I trying to do? I'm not sure, yet I feel I need to send this book out.
I'm going to be thinking more about what inside me makes me want to publish a book of poems. Maybe there's a poem in that. Could poetry be an addiction?
