Caught up

[ailbhe]

Kitchens, Sleep, Medical, and Poetry

I think I'm caught up on most of my online reading, except newsgroups, because they take too long, dammit - so I can post a little about how we're catching up in real life.

Kitchens

Rob and his father put in a new kitchen while Linnea and I were out of the way. It's lovely - the counters are larger and the cupboards aren't disintegrating and the bit where I put my foot through a shelf when I had a back labour pain is gone (It was propped up on bricks). The room looks larger, too. The only downside is that I need to acquire a new dish-drainer, but that's ok.

Sleep

Linnea is catching up on all the sleep she missed while we were away - she had almost 12 hours last night and her nap has been two hours and forty minutes long so far. She only fed once after bedtime last night, too, at five am, though she did come into our bed pretty early. We're going with the flow until after CCDE, and then we'll have a look at logging her sleep patterns and seeing whether we want to make things simpler for us poor exhausted parents. I'm pretty sure it's exhaustion that has her sleeping so much today.

Medical

I have my appointment for my pre-op for this exam I'm having under general anaesthetic. I have a GP appointment to get a referral to a gynaecologist, for which I will dig through old journal entries and draw up a list of symptoms. And I have a dental appointment for a checkup - I must remember to mention that my wisdom teeth were hurting a lot while I was on holiday. I wish I could remember which ones hurt most.

Poetry

I am seriously considering publishing the Linnea Pomes in a collection of $smallnumber for the gift market. I just need to choose which poems and which publisher to try. It would help an awful lot if all y'all could let me know what your favourite 1,3 or 5 poems are. There are nearly 80 poems in total - that's a lot to choose from. The best guide is probably which ones you can remember a bit about without checking, I suppose... whatever you like.

My mother and my-sister-with-kids both like them. And so do my foster-family. I really think I'm on to something here - I think I made something good. I feel scared and excited and proud, and I really do want to go the final step and try to get published. I've never done this before.

Help?

Comments

[datagoddess.livejournal.com]

Kitchens: Yay new kitchen!!

Sleep: That's one tired toddler! At least she's sleeping and not trying to stay awak and being crabby :-)

Medical: Is the appointment soon? Is this to fix what you were told you'd just "have to live with"? I hope that things go well in planning so that the surgery itself is successful.

Poetry: I'm not a big poetry fan, but I love several of the ones you've written. When I have more of a brain I'll go through and pick out a few favorites.

[laura0141.livejournal.com]

Great to see you back :)

poetry opinions

[baratron.livejournal.com]

I hadn't read the poetry before, but I just looked. Now, bear in mind that I am probably outside your target market by quite a long way, so my opinion might not count for much. But I'm not so keen on the poems told from the baby's perspective with limited vocabulary. I much prefer the humorous poems in the mother's voice, like:
Ickle diddums, in the library, with the candlestick.
Tonight's Headlines or The Uninformed (it is hysterically funny!)
Please stop eating your greens, baba...
O What A Bad Mother Am I (I don't think it needs the second "Am I" in the title, not that my opinion counts for much)

These poems I think have much more mass-market appeal, in that they are amusing to the child-enhanced people who think "oooh babies aren't they so cuuute?", but also amusing to the childfree people who'll think "oh, babies, they're so weird"! I suspect that, although your child is your main muse at the moment (and further children will be in the future), that you'd rather be known as a poet (full stop) than as a "heartwarming baby-story" poet?

I also like the poems which are emotional but not sentimental, like
Insomniac pome, redux (although that would probably need a title-change (to "On Caesarians"?) or author's note - or just a capital S on section?)
and the elephant poem (although I suspect some of the Hallmark crowd just wouldn't get it)

The one that starts I almost remember a night in hospital is good right up to the end, the And then they took her away. That ending freaks me out, completely. It makes it sound (to me) like she's died or you had to give her up for adoption, or something. I can't explain it, but it really upsets me. I don't know if that's the intention, but it doesn't seem to fit with the rest of it or the rest of the pomes at all.

Re: poetry opinions

[ailbhe]

It sounds like "I almost remember" does recreate some of the panic and horror I felt when they took my baby away while I was still unable to move - my arms were tied down and my legs were tied up, and they took her to where I couldn't see her, after, well, the labour and birth I had. I still think that that was barbaric, given how much *expressed* doubt I was in that I had a baby at all at that stage.

Re: poetry opinions

[baratron.livejournal.com]

Oh, it recreates panic and horror all right! I wondered if that was the idea, but it jolted me so much and without any sense of closure, even though I knew rationally what must have happened because I'm familiar with the people in the story. Perhaps a title like "After the epidural..." would work? (it explains why you're so woozy and confused, even if you didn't have an actual epidural in the real story). I feel it needs something after it or around it to make it clear that there was a happy ending, eventually, even if it felt like forever at the time.

Also, although it's a story that must be told (like your difficult birth experience has made people in similar situations feel that they can talk as well, which is a Good Thing), I worry that without some kind of warning it could be triggering. The worst situation I can think of is placing it on a facing page opposite one of the fluffy Linnea talks ones. I feel that it, and the goddess poem, would fit in the same book as the others, but in another chapter. You could have maybe 4 chapters separated something like "Linnea Talks" (the bouncy baby-voice ones), "My Replies" (that one doesn't sound so good, er, but you're the writer), "Observations on Parenthood" (not necessarily aimed at Linnea herself, like The Broccoli Incident and Bad Mother) and "The Bad Stuff" (the actual bad, potentially triggery stuff). Someone not feeling emotionally up to dealing with bad stuff would then know to avoid that chapter, but could read it at another time when it would be helpful.

Just my opinions, feel free to ignore :)

[radegund.livejournal.com]

I went back and reread most of the Pomes over the weekend, and got all excited about the idea of their being published. You have the guts of a really great collection there. When I get a chance I'll send you lots of comments in an e-mail...

[baronscartop.livejournal.com]

I'm partial to both

Until it's time to go to slee-
&
What I did today (January 25th 2005)

because they're not only told from a perspective which will make them fun to youngsters, but also there's a wink and a nod to those watching the behaviour of the littluns from a distance.

t!