06 February 2010

Snow Report

This post does not like whiners. Thus, this post will contain no complaints about the weather, especially since many, many folks were hit with the snowtastrophe much harder than we were. Last night, when I went to bed around 11:30, it was a bit flaky out there, but nothing major. I thought the storm reports were yet another instance of misguided prediction. However, waking up this morning and not being able to get the doors open without serious force, it appeared that a winter storm did indeed descend upon Akron, OH last night.

Phase one of today involved snow removal. Lots of it. We probably got a foot-ish of snow, but in places it was up to my waist thanks to the drifts. There was also some frolicking, and a snow angel that looks pretty cool from the upstairs window. I'm exhausted. But that's mostly from phase two, which involved gathering and herding all of the poems of BOR #3. I've never done this part of the process all on my own before, and though it's a bit monotonous at times, it was a total blast.

I did wonder, however, how other editors feel about typesetting poems with a lot of white space (bless you authors who actually use tabs to do it), or other formatting quirks. Also, I thought a lot about prose poems. Some people make theirs skinny. Does that mean they want us to preserve that width? I typically don't care with my own poems, but I am very careful with other people's poems. Thank goodness for galleys. Here's what I did much of the day today.

Look at our wind chime icicle. Of course I had to play the wind chimes. The long, thin visitor didn't make much of a difference with the sound.

It was an insanely productive day, but also cozy.

In other news, if you missed them, here's my interview from this week on How a Poem Happens, and something fun I did as a guest prompt-mistress over at Read Write Poem.

Had another double-dose of good poetry news this week (one dose that was kind of a triple-whammy), which is confirming my suspicion that 2010 may be a very good year.

8 comments:

Gary L. McDowell said...

A double-dose of good poetry news? And you're gonna leave us hanging? Boo! But congrats on whatever it is, Mary B. Hugs from snow-less Michigan!

Lyle Daggett said...

With my poems I usually use irregular margins on both the left and right side. I write the originals by hand (in a stenographer's notebook, spiral bound at the top), and it's easy enough to type them -- for many years on a portable manual typewriter, and in more recent years in MS Word.

Although I've never edited a magazine or done editing for a publisher, I can tell you that my publishers (and many of the magazine editors who have published me) have found the irregular margins formidable when they were typesetting the poems. I've done typesetting for a living, and I understand in painful detail the difficulty of the irregular margins.

For my more recent books, I've initially sent the manuscripts to the publisher on paper, then he's had me send him an MS Word file of the manuscript once he was ready to start the work on it. I guess he then copies it or converts it into Quark or whatever typesetting system he uses (I haven't ever gotten into the techno details with him much).

A number of years back one of my publishers did a broadside sheet of one of my poems, which he typeset letterpress by hand. (Everthing else of mine that he's done since then, he's done by computer.) Typesetting letterpress with irregular left and right margins -- now that would be fearsome.

Luke Johnson said...

I'm with Gary. Can't wait to hear the triple-whammy!

marybid said...

Oh, it's nothing *too* crazy, y'all. But a poem of mine got picked for Dzanc's Best of the Web 2010 (Population 41,685 from Memorious) and then I got three poems picked up by The Journal. Made the week rather cheery.

Gary L. McDowell said...

Yay! Congrats, Mary B. That's good news all around. And The Journal? Great, great!

Suzanne said...

Niiice! Congrats Mary!

Luke Johnson said...

Woot Woot! Congrats on both counts!

wv: morma

Matthew Thorburn said...

Congrats, MB! I love The Journal.

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