Happy 2006! and Contest Excitements!

January will bring the reading of the manuscripts ,and I am looking forward to that a lot. I have skimmed some, as many as possible, and enough to see the intensity. People are writing their hearts and passions. It is good for me to see and feel this. It is ,in an odd way, like being fed by my colleagues.

I really congratulate all who entered. I know how hard it can be to really seal the envelope and put it in the mail or push the SEND key on the computer. It takes courage and each time is a self-affirmation.I am glad Emily decided to have this contest. I think it is generative.

* ***********************
My holidays have been interesting in that I have been writing poetry--and I am no poet. But I always turn to poetry when there is a need to keen, wail, sing, go beyond what my fiction can do.

And for some wonderful reason, I have been able to go deeper and more into the dark. For some reason, perhaps because I have worked hard this year, another bar of my self-imposed prison has fallen. And I am enraged that I was so willing to sit, kneel, stoop, in grossly uncomfortable positions ,there for so long. And in some ways I still do this false contortion of self, but many bars have fallen. I can stretch and perhaps that means the words can hammer more powerfully.

I am a lucky woman to be 66 and finding all these riches.

Happy New Year again to all my colleagues. I hope we all move, write, grow, sing, dance, and find new movements, new visions, new ways of being our best selves. And, thank you, Emily, for this neat Blog place. A very good place.
Shalom, Claire