meta-blogging: a thousand posts! and other things

If each of my posts were a paper crane, I would get a wish!

So, after three and a half years (well, a little more), we are at merry number 1000 for this blog. It’s been quite a ride, yeah? It works out to something like one post every thirty-one hours or something, which I don’t think I’ve done, as it seems rather more excessive than my sporadic nature of late. But numbers don’t lie, at least, not in the way we want them to. I’m a big fan of milestones like this, and trying to set goals and such when they’re reached; I’m also a fan of looking back and finding some small measure of pride and accomplishment.

Last night (since Barbara demanded details), I began a poetry workshop with Douglas Goetsch. My immediate impressions are: everyone in that workshop knows what they’re doing and has serious chops (which is good: I don’t feel out of my league, but I definitely feel challenged), there is a nice people-balance of lives and experiences as well as humor and seriousness, and it really sucks to go first in a workshop. (For three reasons. First, you always get overtime, but the discussion is skewed towards what you need to fix; second, because the moderator wants to impress the importance of finding snags, everyone feels obligated to find something wrong and has time to do it; and third, once a snag is reported, if anyone else does the same thing later, it just has to be referenced, not laid out in detail for them.) But I didn’t cry! Not once! It helps to have a moderator who’s not afraid to drag opinions out of people, and who can pull examples from his encyclopedic knowledge to help you. And since I hate posting a piece without a poem at all, here’s a gem from last night, what he calls an “American haiku”:

The dogwood blossoms
won’t be here this time next week:
fuck ‘em. Fuck ‘em all.

(Doug, if you stumble across this, I will happily append a (c) 2013 by you.)

There will be weekly assignments to do for the workshop, which I will probably keep off-blog, which means I may be posting a bit less for eight weeks, maybe longer. Generally speaking, I’m trying to expand my real-life creative endeavors, including the monthly writer-artist salon and this new writing confab I’m doing with friends. But I shan’t abandon you, blog! At the very least, I will keep up Refineries (which again, I know I’m late on), my usual weekly contribution to dVerse and We Write Poems, respond to Donna‘s prompts when she has them, and the occasional bit about goings-on or particularly inspired things. One of these days, I’ll also get around to a massive comment-responding thing.

I also want to extend my thanks for everyone who’s stuck with me thus far, and I hope you’ll continue to stick with me a bit further. (Like, another 1000 posts or so.) The people are what make the blogosphere a charming place, not the journal opportunities or the ease of getting work out there, not the textual tricks you can do with HTML or the crossing over between writing and reading that happens so easily in a blog environment. I appreciate you guys way lots, and if it ever seems like I don’t, just yell at me and remind me to show it more. That’s what I have to say, more or less. Please carry on with your usually-scheduled Tuesday, which I hope involves lots of writing and mugs of hot tea. Cheers!