Burning Out, Burning In and The Twelve Dancing Princesses
- At August 20, 2013
- By Jeannine Gailey
- In Blog
0
So, after my last post, I bet you’re wondering what I’ve been up to.
It’s my own prescription for burnout – I’m cheating with another (shhhh) genre. It’s fiction.
I’m starting small, with short stories. I’ll write a thousand words, then another thousand. For me, that’s a lot of words, because poems usually end before the page is full. The stories are sort of in the vein of the kind of poetry I’ve written – fairy tale influences, and science, and medical weirdness. It’s got mutants and transforming magical women. It was really a slow start – I’d been making bobs and weaves at short fiction for a while, but ending up with mostly prose poems. I’ve tried a little bit of memoir, and abandoned it. But now I feel okay about letting myself write 1500 word stories, 2500 words…I haven’t got one up to 5000 words, yet. But I’m getting there.
I mostly write these stories late at night, after I’ve gone to bed. That’s when the idea for a story “hook” or a certain line will come to me, and I have to grab my laptop and write. It’s what I’ve been doing that’s screwed up my sleeping patterns, making me grumpy during daytime appointments at dentists, physical therapy, physicians. I barely hear what they’re telling me, because I’m waiting for the magic to whisper to me again, when I put my head on my pillow. I think it might be a kind of enchantment that I’m caught in, like The Twelve Dancing Princesses – everyone sees them go to sleep, but when they wake up in the morning, they’re exhausted and pale, with worn-out dancing shoes by their beds.
Jeannine Hall Gailey served as the second Poet Laureate of Redmond, Washington and the author of Becoming the Villainess, She Returns to the Floating World, Unexplained Fevers, The Robot Scientist’s Daughter, and winner of the Moon City Press Book Prize and SFPA’s Elgin Award, Field Guide to the End of the World. Her latest, Flare, Corona from BOA Editions, was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award. She’s also the author of PR for Poets, a Guidebook to Publicity and Marketing. Her work has been featured on NPR’s The Writer’s Almanac, Verse Daily and The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. Her poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Poetry, and JAMA.
