Out of the blue last night I opened a new document in WordPerfect and started quickly typing up a poem, just my thoughts in lyric form, or perhaps not just, since I hardly ever spew forth drafts of poems anymore. The first line surprised me, but it is the most genuine thing I've written in quite a long time: "what a sick fuck i am". So I think it has potential, this vomiting admission of how I regularly calculate my chances of not coming down with some terrible illness. The title is "statistics". I hope I can actually finish some of these drafts and get them circulating. And maybe, I really hope against hope, this is a new era in my writing, a time when I will focus on what the poem wants to say and not so much the sound or style. So hard for an editor not to edit everything that comes out.

I have been taking every free moment and building on the romance novel. Up until early Sept. I had been frustrated with the idea, rather lost in how to keep going. But over Labor Day weekend I was up helping my sister for a few days. After the kids were in bed we put on the movie Closer. Worse thing we have started to watch in a VERY long time. So boring, choppy, terrible. (Any fans? Perhaps we did not give it enough time, but after Jude Law runs back into the exhibit, Sis and I were sick of his stalking and pushed Stop.) It left me empty and thinking about relationship movies.

We did watch most of You Got Mail, most of which had left my memory. At the end of that movie ("Don't cry, Shopgirl"), I could feel a sadness developing, a wish that the world had better romance kicking about: slow, emotional, intelligent, subtle, rather innocent romance (says she who is currently editing erotica). It set me thinking about other scenes, movies, words that created the romantic in me -- the (good) Love Boat episodes, the Han and Leia repartee, even the recent King Kong cabin exchange that seemed rather nice. I'm sure there are many others, which I'll blog about if I can gather a list. It all made me feel that I can contribute something to the genre, even if in the end the manuscript only circulates among my (hey, what do you think of this) friends. So I'm back to putting an effort in. I hope I can get a real draft soon.

In other news, we have selected The Phantom Tollbooth as our work book club selection. Don't ask how that came about, but a good number have not read it, and as I think it is required reading, I am happy that the group thought it a good idea. I certainly have misplaced my copy, so I'll have to buy one. Drat, buying books. What a shame.