6 April 2004. I just did something daring: I e.mailed Tor Publications to ask hem what was going on with the sci fi novel I sent them close to eight months ago. My impression from their website data was that they'd let me have their decision on it four to six months after they got it. I feel that bothering them is daring because they may simply not have gotten to it, and be annoyed enough by being bugged to just skim it in a bad mood. As a mature adult, I do not think that is more than 4% likely; as an infantile paranoid creative writer, I think that's the best that can happen!

Why am I discussing my novel at a blog that's s'posed to be about poetry? There are a few connections. One is that I found I couldn't use anything I feel I've learned as a poet in it. The diction stinks. That is, it's standard prose. I thought I could at least be poetic the way I think some of the best detective novelists--Ross MacDonald, for instance--are. I couldn't even verbally heighten scenes with rain in them, or the high sea.

Another way I thought I'd get poetry in would be by quoting my own! This should have been easy because the hero is me. Not based on me, but me--except that his adventures are fiction. The inspiration was Henry Miller. Laziness was more a factor, though. Anyway, I thought that along the way I could talk about my poetry, and quote some of it. I had plenty of room to do that in, for the novel is just under 200,000 words in length. (It's a virtual reality quest novel.) And I digressed all over the place, spilling all kinds of opinions about sports, the creative process, intelligence, Jackson Pollock, even economics, but I'm fairly sure I said just about nothing about poetry. Odd, considering how much I discuss poetry, my own and others, and the fact that I consider my novel in part a kind of forum for disseminating my views. It's mainly a fun narrative, though--I hope.