Listening to Coltrane, but not very loud. The more "out there" pieces are on and everyone else is asleep. I ought to be, but I've screwed that up by taking a long nap.

We have been doing some cleaning in anticipation of the move. Tonya found some folders of my junk the other day and one had some important stuff, at least to me. There was a volume of my personal journal from around 1986 or 9, I don't remember which. There was a small note pad that I must of gotten to write some sort of devotional pieces in. And there were a couple folders with some stories and poems I wrote a long time ago.

The really great thing about this discovery is not just that I found some writing that I had pretty much forgotten, but that I found a few pieces I didn't hate. There were two decent short stories, one I think is still pretty good. I have scanned it all in and the stuff I think is publishable will go out with the rest of the stuff I've been sending out this summer. I've already sent off the story I liked most, "Promise."

A few weeks ago, I got the idea of collecting some old poems in a small chapbook and perhaps shopping it around, entering it in a contest or two, or making an e-book to sell somewhere. When I had this idea, I spent the better part of an afternoon finding and retyping some poems I thought wouldn't be too embarrassing to publish (some have been). But I only had 13 poems, and a couple of those were written in graduated school. I have found 11 more. After some editing and revision, this might make a nice little volume. It is not a project I had expected to work on this summer, but I think it might be worthwhile.