First of all, now I know how to post a photo or text here at WordPress — but not both. Please bear with me as I learn my way around …

What I meant to tell you about the two rosemary-themed kitchen decor items in my previous post is that they hung for years in my mom’s kitchen. Her name was Rosemary, so I put these up and to the right of the desk where I always write (in the dining room, where we also do a considerable amount of living). It’s like she’s watching over me, and possibly reading/critiquing over my shoulder. She would not like that I said she was critical — but she was at least as much of an editor as I am. When we finally got our wireless set up, I pictured myself making the most of my newfound freedom by writing from, gosh, another room within our two-bedroom condo. Nope. Almost without exception, here I sit, typing in the dining room. Creature of habit.

This month, my main creative task is to put together a small chapbook from 10 to 20 of the poems I wrote last month for the Writer’s Digest Poem-A-Day Challenge. Chapbooks are something I’ve considered to be a logical next step for me, but they’ve proved to be a tough nut to crack. I have yet to succeed in getting one published — but I’ve found that putting them together is a good exercise, at least. I’ve now pulled together 21 poems that I like pretty well. The last cut is always the hardest.

As for writing, I’m trying to stick to my new rule of writing one poem per day. This can be tough, in both directions. I don’t always feel like writing a poem (in fact, I’m pretty tired right now, and look what I’m doing instead). There are also times when I want to write one after another after another, in hopes that if I rub enough sticks together, something will catch fire. But I learned last month that if I do one — and only one — then I focus my writing energy on it rather than on a handful of lesser attempts. It’s also more manageable once I’m in another revising phase. Trust me, you don’t want to pick through a pile of 80 to 90 poems you barely remember, a few of which *might* be worth something. For December, anyway, this seems like the way to go.

I’m still awaiting word from one more publication and one more contest entry. I have decently high hopes for the former and near-zero hopes for the latter — but it’s still fun to imagine winning it. After that, all my wandering strays from 2011 will have come home, and it’ll be time to look ahead to a new year … whatever that will bring.