Pure Grace

June 15, 2004
Tuesday

My writer friends all blog. Anyone who is anyone blogs. So here I am trying to be someone.

My pen name is B. K. Birch. My genre is Southern Historical Literary Fiction and short stories and I dabble in poetry. I've been writing seriously since summer of 2000 but have yet to be published. I had an agent once - for my first novel - but it floundered on its rounds to the publishers and I have since shelved it. Not that it is bad, but my name isn't well known and I have no publishing credits.

I have moved on to novel number two and dropped my agent. I have relaxed to write what I want and haven't found a new agent. I'm not looking really. I have a weekly goal of writing. It consists of one or two poems, a short story or two, and at least one chapter of my novel.

Of course I fit this in with my day job in the manufacturing business and being a mother of four very athletic children.

Currently I have the following out for submission:

4 poems to Bathtub Gin (Sent 6/9/04)
2 poems to Wildchild Publishing (Sent 6/8/04 and 6/2/04)
2 poems to the New Yorker (Sent 5/11/04 - I suppose a gal can dream, can't she?)
6 poems to Asheville Poetry Review (Sent 6/2/04)
1 short story to Bygone Days (Sent 6/8/04)
1 short story to The Gettysburg Review (Sent 4/28/04)
1 short story to Bellevue Literary Review (Sent 4/28/04)
Pitched to write a poetry column for Aspire2Write (Sent 6/9/04)

I am 47K into my second novel and hope to complete it by September. Time will tell. Both of my girls play Softball on a travel team and my oldest son is into Golf. My youngest - well, he's just along for the ride. Isn't life grand?