Organizing your writing life

PRACTICAL GIFTS: That's really what this season was all about in the gift department. I suppose as you get older, fun presents take a backseat to the "needed" and "practical." In my Christmas "grab bag" put together by my parents were these items: an electric can opener, bedroom slippers (?!), notecards, fingernail clipper set and $50 in cash. Yep, those days of Star Wars action figures and Atari games are long, long, long gone. Sigh. And what did I get my parents? A giant battery that will trickle charge your car battery through the cigarette lighter in case of an emergency. Doesn't get much sexier than that does it?

You hear people moan, "Oh, I don't know what to get -----, they have everything." In the case of my parents and grandmother, this is definitely the case. And they have no idea what to get me (obviously), so thank god for the cash, which I used today to buy a new cd player for my home stereo. I know, I know...I could have bought an iPod, but I have 500-plus cds and need something to play them on. I ventured out today to Best Buy (overrun with screaming children carrying Xbox and Nintendo games and adults pulling a muscle carting out flat screen televisions) and picked up a Sony Walkman CD player, which is quite nice...and practical.

The mailbox yielded Charles Jensen's lovely new chapbook Living Things and the last present I bought for myself, the Criterion edition of The Spirit of the Beehive. It's one of my favorite films, so haunting and enigmatic and full of quiet symbolism against fascism. In 1940s Spain, a young girl goes searching for Frankenstein after seeing the film in the local make-shift cinema. Meanwhile, the rest of her family seems to spiral into their own dreamworlds inside a crumbling mansion. I highly recommend this if you've never seen it. Put it on your Netflix queue.

I was highly motivated this past weekend and not only got my final submissions made, but also finished editing a memoir written by a friend here in Atlanta. I think it has potential and the edit/rewrite was a good exercise for me as I move forward with my new poetry collection and turn my attention to my second novel.

Oh, and then there's this from Jilly Dybka's blog. Quite funny actually:

My Peculiar Aristocratic Title is: His Eminence the Very Lord Collin the Festive of Much Leering Get your Peculiar Aristocratic Title