November – Goodreads, Acceptances, and NaNoWriMo for poets?

Hope you all had a happy Halloween! I’ve been sick (cough, sneeze, cough) and the time change – yes, now it gets dark at about 4:20 – always throws me off a few days.

But the good news is, after a whole month of many rejections, I had two acceptances of a total of five poems right at the beginning of November, which cheered me up and also encouraged me to try my own poet version of NaNoWriMo – where I write something for twenty minutes every day of November. So far I’ve got a couple of poems out of it and some various essaylike stuff.

It has been mostly cold and dark, but I’ve been looking for signs of beauty even in our dark November days – here’s a rainbow from a rainy Sunday and some Anna’s hummingbirds, who have been haunting our feeders with some fervor!

I rented some movies from Redbox to watch tonight and hope to get some poetic inspiration from – Pixar’s Inside Out and the David Foster Wallace movie The End of the Tour. A nice night – the high today was in the forties, the sunset was at around 4 PM, so we’ve got to start planning cheerful activities to the nights don’t seem soooo long. But having a little bit more nighttime does seem to lend itself to more reading and writing – I’ve been reading Laura Hall’s Speak (linked short stories about AI, among other things) and Dani Shapiro’s Still Writing for inspiration. All this will take our minds off the somewhat depressing househunting, as well.

And I hate to ask, but if you guys are on Goodreads and you could go here (https://www.goodreads.com/choiceawards/best-poetry-books-2015) and type in The Robot Scientist’s Daughter at the bottom of the page as a write-in vote, I would really appreciate it!

Anyway, happy November! And let me know your own anti-gloom writing and reading tricks and tips!