Moving!

I am currently in the process of moving this blog over to WordPress. I do most of my editing on my iPad and that is, unfortunately, proving cumbersome in Blogger. Please come visit me at my new home: http://www.starsinmysugarbowl.wordpress.com. Thanks!

Inspiration

What inspires you to write?

As a haiku poet, I tend to find myself inspired by nature. And as a mom of two school-aged kids and one preschooler, I spend a lot of time driving. So most of my haiku inspiration lies in things I see through the windshield of my car: trees, clouds, farm fields, a nearby pond.

My process for writing scifaiku is different. I go to a dreamy place in my mind when I write science fiction. Often, I am inspired by new scientific discoveries. Some days, I browse Wikipedia for inspiration. I always follow up with more technical references when I find something that appeals to me. I try to do my homework to make sure that my poems are scientifically literate!

But sometimes, inspiration finds me unexpectedly. One day, I was shopping at the craft store and found this on the wall of a toilet stall. 

Where do you find your writing inspiration?

Culling

My main poetry goal for the year is to put together a manuscript of scifaiku. In looking over my poems, it has been interesting to see a theme of extra-terrestrial romance flowing through the images. So, I am trying to line up my poems so that they tell a sort of love story while writing new ones to fill in the gaps. It is a challenging process because it is so new for me. I feel like I have a handle on submitting individual poems to contests or magazines, but a collection is a different animal - it has a different feel and it requires a different skill set.

When I was a little girl, my mom and I used to garden. One of our favorite things to plant was carrots. I think they intrigued me because they looked so different below the surface. A big leafy top didn't necessarily equate to a big root. And every year, when it was time to thin the carrots so that the remaining ones could grow larger, we had a hard time doing it. My mom used to say that the carrots worked so hard to be born, she didn't want to stop them now. Often, we just left all of the carrots in the garden to fend for themselves. So none of them ever grew very large.

Preparing a poetry manuscript is a lot like weeding carrots. If you want individual poems to flourish and be successful, you need to retain the best and remove the rest. But culling is hard. These poems are all my poetic children, so to speak, and I worked hard for them to be born. How can I choose?

Our new dog

adopted dog --

learning to read her mood

by the curl of her tail