Hope you all had wonderful Christmas days!
We stayed home this year, so it was pretty uneventful, except my head cold turned into bronchitis, and…
Someone left a lump of coal in my stocking!
Casually checking my book on Amazon, I noticed someone had left me a nasty bad review of my Becoming the Villainess book…on Christmas Eve! It was just so hurtful. I know we poets ought to have thick skins, but you know, you pour your heart and soul into something…anyway, it was a bitter Christmas pill and just plain discouraging. And I was already feeling a little discouraged about the whole poetry thing. I did re-arrange and re-edit the Japanese fox-wife/folk tale MS, so it’ll be ready to send out again, but I haven’t really been writing or sending out work lately. Hmmph. What’s the use of writing poems if people are just gonna hate on them anyway?

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.


