Sheila Rambles

I have managed to avoid Excuse Notes for a few days running (and there's one day in particular that I want to write an entry about) but I have to get this out first. I am delighted to discover that the domain poetry.com has a new owner. Poetry.com was previously owned by the International Library of Poetry, a literary scam outfit that had been kicking around for decades. Originally, they solicited poems for their "poetry contest" in newspaper ads (I remember seeing them when I was a kid) and with the advent of the Internet, it became easier than ever for them to solicit submissions. The trick of it was this--every single poem was a 'finalist' in the contest and they would offer to sell you an overpriced hardbound book of 'finalists' that included your poem. So, excited poets (or their proud parents) would pay a chunk of change for an 'anthology' of, well, twenty-line attempts at poetry and look, there's yours on page 187, crammed on a page wi

Please excuse Sheila from working on her novel today as she visited the library and ended up checking out four books, which she takes as a clear sign that her brain is in inhale mode rather than exhale mode at the moment.

Please excuse Sheila from working on her novel today as she spent most of the afternoon unconscious and most of the evening attending a dear friend's birthday party.

Please excuse Sheila from working on her novel today as she dealing with a distracting level of stomach pain and needs to be as well-rested as possible in order to play with her niece this evening, as promised.

I've decided to try something with this here blawg to motivate me to keep working on the manuscript. For every day that I don't do at least something on it, I will require myself to post an Excuse Note explaining why. For example, today I might post something like: Please excuse Sheila from working on her manuscript today as she spent the morning in a networking meeting, the afternoon in a nap and will be spending this evening visiting her family and then visiting a friend. . . . except that today I don't need to do that, because I just made some cuts to the manuscript in anticipation of inserting a revised scene that deletes an extraneous character. So there.