Scattered Thoughts

My thoughts are scattered everywhere, and it made coming up with a new blog post this week that much harder. I thought I would take off from writing about writing and address a couple of things that were in the news. I thought I could write about the rage in the news about rich kids buying their way into college. But are we really all enraged about it? Did we not know that this has been going on since the day these institutions opened their doors? I did write a piece about it, but it won't see the light of day because as a public school kid from Kindergarten to bachelor's degree, I don't really have any special insight on the topic aside from rolling my eyes at every mention of these privileged nobodies living off their parents' success.

I was also contemplating writing another piece last weekend about separating the art from the artist, and how its mostly others in creative fields that can attempt to see the actions of the villain in the artist without obscuring the exceptional in the art. Erasing the art/music/movies/TV shows is not the answer. My opinion on this is not the most popular one, but I also know that Pete Davidson did a way more entertaining job of explaining it than I could have. So I didn't write it. But I did buy Moonwalker so that I could watch it at least one more time in my life in case it ever gets pulled. I won't apologize for the fact that watching this was a happy childhood memory for me, and it certainly isn't an endorsement for anything outside of its entertainment value.

When it comes to my main projects for the month, I'm trying to work hard on short stories and In Another Life, but I keep getting pulled back into poetry. I took some time to indulge in found poetry yesterday, not because the urge was irresistible, but because the magazines are starting to pile up, and if I don't get to them I may have to toss them before I can find those new pieces. I did, however, manage to finish a short story outline this morning with the wonders of a morning shower and a writer's mind--that's all I need sometimes because it is the one place I seem to run into the least distractions. These stories are important because I need to come up with something good to get back on the submission train. Hopefully by Monday I will have a polished piece to start sending out.

When in Doubt, Make a List

The project that's going to be my main focus for March is still unknown. I didn't know how to choose from so many things that are lingering on my desktop, so I decided that making a list would help. I put restrictions on myself--I could only list projects that I could think of off of the top of my head. If I can't remember it, it couldn't be that important, right?

Here's the list:

Seems like I have a pretty good memory, because there are more than 20 projects, ranging from finished but needed to be submitted to half of an outline. I still don't know what to choose, because nothing is standing out, nothing seems clearly commercial, so I won't be choosing based on the tens of dollars of royalties I may generate.

What I'm going to do is give this list a good hard look over the weekend and see which one will come out on top.