Another acceptance, happy dance!

I just got an acceptance today from White Pelican Review in Florida and am doing the happy dance (they took two poems). I took an entire month last June to get my sending-out process back in order, and got all the unpublished poems, essays, and excerpts from my book back in circulation. It paid off with two acceptances so far, and a lot of the work has not yet come back (which used to mean something maybe ten years ago--if the work was out for more than three or four months, I started crossing my fingers--but no more. I've even had an increasing number of places, not many but a certain amount, simply never send work back. That sucks and is rude in Stregaland.

Speaking of poems, I was going through my old computer and found the love poems Mr. Strega wrote me when we were first together (he's the left brain of the Strega conjunction, but he's actually a decent creative writer as well--which of course made me smile at the irony of how easily writing comes to him, because he doesn't have himself wrapped up in it like I do, I think--and therefore I sweat every word). These poems deserve to be printed out and put in a box with dried roses and old elbow-length gloves and dance cards, whatever those were. They belong to an era when people waltzed in the afternoon to look proper, but drank absinthe after midnight's sleight-of-hand, chasing whatever visions the green fairy chose to impart.

Not that Mr. Strega and I drink absinthe, mind you--just the writer's dragging-into-place of Moulin Rouge props.

My mood is endorphin-soaked tonight because I moved as if possessed in my African dance class, until my clothes and hair were drenched. I swear, at one point, my feet felt like they didn't touch the ground. It's good for me to just go into wild mode once a week and get all the tension out to the beat of the best drummers in Santa Cruz.

And thus I bid all my faithful readers goodnight.