Planning for Morning Writing

It is one of those mornings where I feel like I don't have much to say.  Some mornings, I arrive at the blogging desk with multiple possibilities fighting for my attention.  Today, I think, well, I already wrote about my days of piecing small scraps into larger squares, which is mostly what I've been doing.  I went to the grocery store--blah topic.  I haven't done interesting sketching lately or taken interesting photos.

So this morning, let me think about what I want my mornings to look like, once classes start.  My mornings will be relatively free, at least at the beginning of the semester.  I am aware of my tendency to waste hours (hours!) scrolling through a variety of pages, some with snippets of information, like Twitter and Facebook, and some with more substantial articles, like The Washington Post and The New York Times.  

I think back to times when I wrote more and writing was the first thing I did in the morning.  Of course, that was back in the 90's, when the internet was a very different experience, and writing was more attractive.  Let me think about the current day.

I've done a good job of continuing to blog, regardless of the distractions that come my way.  I would like to write more poems.  This week, I've done a good job of writing poems--I've written 2.  I'd like to do more to get drafts of poems revised and typed into the computer.  I've done a decent job at continuing to send poems out to journals, particularly those that don't have submission fees.  At $3 a pop to submit, my submission strategies of decades ago would cost me a huge amount.

So here's my proposal to myself:  three mornings a week, before I go to the sites that I know are huge consumptions of my time (see above), I will turn my attention to writing poetry first.  Not typing poetry into the laptop, but putting pen to paper or pulling lines out of my list of abandoned lines and composing poems on the laptop.  

When I realize I'm spending too much time scrolling, I want to take a break and do something else.  If I'm listening to podcasts (often what I'm doing when I'm doing mostly mindless scrolling), I want to sew or quilt, sketch, or type poems into the computer, depending on how much brain power I have.

I'll continue to send out poems to journals as I have been doing.  As I look back over my submission log since arriving to my seminary apartment, I'm happy with that effort.  Several times a month, I send out a few packets.  I'm not sure I can do much more without spending a lot more money.  And right now, I'd rather do other things with that money.