I need some input!

Hi friends, family and (possibly) fans. I'm not a poet, really. I have no formal training beyond my love of Whitman, Cummings, Frost, Blake and Shakespeare. But I keep trying.


And now I want to enter a contest. I've written a poem, revised and edited it for quite some time, and now it's time to submit it. But first, I want to post it here and see if you all would give me some tips. 


Don't worry about copyright. It's protected just fine. 


Here it is:

Ice Cream

Trickles of light

in a hall of books toys clothes and cat food

eddy and squirm around me

casting my shadow

on hardwood

and

resting on four forms. They

settle gently, breathing softly, one snuffling in sleep

and others- lips parted stomachs sighing- sing.

My lovelies sing a harmony

of whispering breathing and sleep creeping close.

I imagine that dreams

begin to glimmer

behind their closed lids.

Eyes

both blue and green- an inheritance from she and me- see

nothing. But imaginations begin to fire and I turn

from the room.

My heart

is heavythick with memory of

climbing trees, houses bursting with strangers,

long lectures from non-parents

and

always moving.

Playing monopoly risk chess checkers cops and robbers

with roommates not family.

Who is my father?

Where is my mother?

Who are all these people?

Was this family- all jumbled confused and angry?

Was this life?

Filled with boredom, rigid rules

candles incense rituals oil

and

empty of motherhugs and fathertalks.

Was this disorderly, off-key, strain-to-fit

melody my song?

Her voice echoes

off glimmering hardwood

pictures framed and couches stained.

She spins

tales of crafts legos books tears and hugs.

This is the harmony I love

the song I sought.

Her hand, chapped from vented heat

touches my arm.

Her fingers

entwine with mine

and

her smile

filled with wifelove, mothersweetness

draws me back to light

to life- present, real, sweet like ice cream- and family.

So tell me what you think please. I will be submitting this on Friday morning. 

And as for Servant of the King, when this week of getting submissions ready for contests is over, I'm going after it big time. I intend to get this book done within a couple of months, then revised and sent out and all of that by June. 

I will be a successful writer. Why? Because it turns out I can write and I am pretty lucky. Plus-- as the emperor in Return of the Jedi would say, "It is my dessssstiny." 

So even if my dad has to cut off my hand. Or even if I have to shrink, turn green and grow big, rotten apricot ears. Or even if I have to kick an ewok-- I'll be successful. 

Finally, the update we've all been waiting for...

I've been somewhat cryptic in my latest status updates on Facebook, and they have basically been alluding to what's been going on in my writing world of late.

Let me start this off by making as clear as possible the pure and undiluted, and really quite distilled, fact that it is 6:40AM here and I have been working at the kitchen table for the last 10 (ten) hours. Not straight, because I get up every hour or so to stretch. And I had to go get some Rockstar.

Am I getting ahead of myself? Can't tell.

Okay. So my client in Korea keeps feeding me lots of work. I could probably work on it full time two to three days per week. But there's so much other stuff to do during the daytime that I end up doing the lion's share of the work at night. So I have just finished something in the realm of 20 hours of work for this client. This is, of course, at my hourly rate of $25.

So that's nice. Tasty in fact. It's a lot of questions and extension activities, but I'm getting pretty good at it and I think it plays right into my strengths as an educator and writer.

I have to say right now that I am extremely grateful for this work. How wonderful it is to do something you love. Sure, this gets a little tiring and tiresome, but it pays and it is essentially what I love to do.

That's not all. I landed another client: it's basically a partner company of WeXL, the company I market for right now--which is another day job. And that day job is going okay, although with the recent goings on, I've had to keep the time I spend on that one to a minimum since it doesn't deal with deadlines so much.

So I wrote a website and sales letter for that new client, am in the process of tweaking that copy as they finalize things, and have already been paid on my invoice. Sweet!

I have a good friend who works with this new client as well, and he passed on the name of a fellow who was looking for a ghost writer to work with him on a large-ish instruction manual. I met with them three weeks ago and it went well. I spent some time with the material needing written up and sent along a sizable (very!) estimate, which is, albeit, negotiable.

Wow, I haven't slept in 24 hours (almost) and I think I just used 'albeit' correctly in a sentence. I'll just soak that up for a second.........................................zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Okay, I'm back. That should be able to be parlayed into good work, and ongoing work with that company as well, since the main client is a marketing company that specializes in web marketing. Funny, I specialize in web copy!

That's not all! HA!

I sold an article on Helium.com's marketplace. Incidentally, if you want to make some extra cash (it starts small but snowballs with diligence and patience) check out:
http://www.helium.com/marketplace?placement=CL45690

That article sold for $32. Not terrible. It was about how to make homemade bread.

I cashed out over $100 from Helium.com this last month. That was the result of my large collection of articles on there, about 8 or 10 new articles, and one sold marketplace article. Considering I spent about ten hours over the month on Helium, that's not terrible for a writing website.

Dang, my Pandora's playing U2's Mysterious Ways. I love this one. Actually, it's pretty much my favorite U2 tune.

But that's not all!

I got an e-mail from a publication out of Canada, one that has a print and online version and a readership of over 250,000 (does that mean they have 250,001?). This was the editor of this magazine that e-mailed me. She invited me to contribute regularly to their American offshoot. It's about gardening-- one of my favorite subjects to write about!

But that's not all!

But that IS all I can say right now. When the deal happens or doesn't happen (that's all the detail I can give right now, sorry!) I'll pass it on. But it could be big. I mean... uh... insanely big.

Kristi. Melinda. Kaye. Mike. (Amy too).
I owe you a huge thanks. Your advice (mostly Melinda and Kristi, but the others' support of this advice) to maybe focus on non-fiction was inspired. I know it. I am not abandoning fiction, but there's something I need to do in the realm of non-fiction. I can feel the shivers of excitement right now.

I'm not kidding. I'm trembling with this right now. Maybe it's partly the Rockstar, maybe it's the lack of sleep. I've simply got a certainty that I'm going the right way at this point. No doubt about it. And as I write that, the HOLY GHOST, who is the teacher and Comforter, confirms this certainty.

Why does so much of society, including me far too much of the time, discount our most important sense? I mean, our physical senses can be deceived so easily. But our other sense: the one many of us call soul, or spirit, or heart, or intuition is actually not so easily deceived. Yet we so easily mistrust it.

That's all for now.

Or not. Actually, the WeXL thing is going well too. It's neat to be marketing something, and beginning to be successful with that something, that actually helps people. I'll actually help a client save over $650,000 in interest alone over the next eight years!

Now that's all. The update I'd been needing to post for a while.

My head's above water now, so I've got to go leap in again. I'll do the bed thing first, though.

It's past my bedtime, so off I go

I really need to be in bed now, as part of my new campaign to sleep like an adult. So what I did today was this:

I wrote a final article for my client's job and sent it off.

I did a pile of research and note-taking for the ChartedCourse May newsletter. By the way, Blake tells me that he'll have some material for me to start working on for the sales rep manual soon. Cool: more work!

And I wrote just under 1700 words for The Cabin. I know, I was supposed to do 2000, but other stuff kind of piled up. I ended up running some errands and getting 64 boxes of cereal for our food storage! That's right, 64. They were a dollar a box at Smith's, and we had been waiting for this sale, as it is an annual thing. So now our food storage is looking better.

Anyway, I was actually close to not doing any writing for The Cabin today, but I fought back the temptation to watch TV and be a fat vegetable who fears finishing a novel that could really be something.

When I sign off here, I'll run and write an article for www.helium.com and then rate a little. But then I need to get to bed! I am nearly certain that as I regularize my sleeping, the incessant ringing in my ears will reduce.

So off I go.

I am going to write a bestseller and I think I may just be doing that right now.

carpe somnium

Nothing inspiring to write today. Just a day that brought me closer to my success.