After all the fussing and moaning yesterday, I woke up with an epigram in my head. How about that.

I’m in Columbia, SC tonight, staying at Tara’s while she’s in Calgary. We met up for a few hours last night and had dinner before she left at 4 AM. I spent the majority of the day on the USC campus, attempting to piece together a workable manuscript from the 170+ pages of printed material I have available to me from the last two years, but that was not a pleasant exercise. The only thing I felt I really accomplished was transferring one of the stories I did in June into the poetry folder– it seems the most likely candidate to lead off the collection, if there is a collection in all of this. Considering how often I look at animals with people properties (like talking cats), people with animal qualities (like the city of Galveston turning into owls), and things that are half-animal, half-something else, you’d think I would have a pretty decent chunk working together. But, I have a lot of work to do if I want to piece together a collection that I want other people to see.

It’s only day 3 of the month but already I’m terribly frustrated with the poem-a-day exercise. This is natural– I think I was five days in last time before I was certain I had nothing to contribute– but it doesn’t change the fact that it’s frustrating. I spent almost six hours of the day today trying to get something going and all I came up with was another installment in the Expert Advice sequence, which was really exciting to me for three days in April.

It could be another very light posting month at Little Fury: along with three co-conspirators, I’m undertaking another poem-a-day-for-a-month project. Is this just a glorified form of self-flagellation? Perhaps, perhaps.