Not all poets revise. Some poets don't even use words in their poetry! That's well outside my wheelhouse—I'll defer to those poets on those perspectives!

Plenty of poets who do revise hate revising. I am not in that camp. Revising and editing are the stages of writing that make me happiest, and because that orientation colors my perspective, it's worth confessing at the forefront.

There are intelligent, scholastic approaches to this topic that would reference brilliant writers and cite sources and collect materials to support the argument. But, as previously mentioned, I do not think or operate in that way, and the readers who prefer that kind of approach have likely already sought it out and do not need me to repeat that research for them. I'll point to a few quotes and videos, but I'll leave out more of the relevant discourse than I'll reference.

Disclaimers disclaimed, on to semantics!

DANGER! DANGER! WE HAVE ENTERED IMPOSSIBLE TERRITORY! Great way to start, yeah?

Most poets offer up their answer to this question at some point. I'll offer mine—but it's sticky. Defining anything is always harder than we're socially primed to expect.

Poetry purposefully heightens literal meaning through indirect, non-literal communication.

Most art does this. Movies and novels have subtext; music communicates information through sound. Video essayists communicate indirectly through body language and lighting and set designs. Visual art relies almost exclusively on indirect communication, transmitting an experience from artist to viewer while only rarely using words at all.

But poetry lives here. This is what poetry is entirely oriented toward. Other mediums utilize indirect communication, but (except for visual art) their primary motivation is likely something else: to tell a story, to be catchy, to comfort. I argue that indirect communication is the primary motivation of poetry. Poets manipulate language to super-charge it—and a poet succeeds at poetry when utilizing poetic devices as purposeful tactics of expression. Poetry results from the deliberate use of language, from harnessing the music and plasticity of language to do something more meaningful (literally, more full of meaning) than making a direct statement.

For example, typing out the words "Hope feels good" is a statement, but it is not art. It is not poetry.

Poetry takes an indirect, circuitous route toward communication for the purposes of making the reader feel what is being communicated, for the recipient of the art to experience something, intuit something, consider something from different angles.

I can tell you "Hope feels good," and perhaps you will believe me, agree with me, understand me.

But you won't be moved. You won't have a meaningful experience. The words aren't impactful to you because they are so familiar, so obvious. You won't feel anything—you certainly won't feel hope.

If, on the other hand, you read a poem by Emily Dickinson that begins:

Then, suddenly, you are having an experience. You are floating. Something has lightened in your chest, something has released its grip inside you. Dickinson's poetry does not just communicate the idea that hope feels good, it uses formatting and rhyme and imagery and line breaks and sound and breath to move you, to do something.

The effect on you is not an accident. It is not a side-effect of divine inspiration.

The poet made conscious, intentional choices to cause that effect.

The effect is a result of word-science!

If that seems impossible to you, unbelievable to you, then you are underestimating writers. It's time to stop! Believe me when I say that good writers are employing deliberate tricks and tools toward a desired end, as opposed to being possessed by some external impulse to funnel art into your mouth without the writer's active or conscious involvement.

Art is interesting because it reflects the perspectives and capabilities and decisions of the humans who made the art. If a human is not making purposeful choices in the creation of something, then it is not art. Beautiful, maybe; meaningful, maybe; but it is not art.

I love cross-stitching. When I follow a cross-stitch pattern, I am making something beautiful, something meaningful to me, something that requires skill and technique, but I am not making art. When I run an existing image through a pattern generator, I am not making my own decisions about the construction of that pattern, and I am not making art. If, however, I laboriously construct a pattern out of an image I designed, if I pick the colors to use for  its stitches, if I decide what should be a full stitch and what should be a quarter stitch, all because I want the end product to look a certain way to human eyeballs? THEN I am an artist!

Having established at least my working definitions of poetry and art, we can move on to discussing the particular processes and motivations of revision in poetry.

Though I struggled to find a source for this quote, American poet (and scholar!) Ellen Bryant Voigt is broadly said to have said, "It's all a draft until you die." Meaning, poems are never finished, never set in stone, never unavailable for improvement.

This cuts against the ideas most people have about art: If you publish a book, that's the book, the end. If you release a movie, please do not come back and change the movie, we liked the first movie you released, and that's what we wanted to watch. A painting is painted and then hung in a gallery and if the painter comes in every day to make little adjustments, the painting has become performance art, and maybe you need to calm down and leave your painting alone.

Poetry operates a little differently. A poem is typically published in a literary journal or magazine then published again/later in a poet's collection. For particularly successful poets, the poem may even be published still more times in anthologies and collected volumes. The industry anticipates that poems may be revised between those instances of publication. The first version of the poem exists, it remains. Readers can continue to enjoy the first version of the poem, if they prefer that version. But publishing multiple versions of a poem enables a poet (and their editors) to continue improving upon the work, moving nearer to the poem's intended effect. Personally, I love to see the evolution of a poem, to compare and contrast different versions.

I suspect anyone involved in theater will understand. Theater changes and shifts. Each performance is slightly different, slightly unexpected, slightly re-framed or reconsidered. Because theater happens live on stage again and again, night after night, across any number of productions with different actors, directors, costume designers, choreographers, there is no one "version" of the play or the musical that is "the" version of the play or the musical. Even when a play or musical is filmed, when one particular performance by one particular production becomes inextricable from the collective understanding of the work (e.g. the May 1989 filmed production of the original Broadway cast of Into the Woods), the existence of that "captured" work does not prevent future adaptations, interpretations, or performances from also "being" the same work of art. If you attend your local high school's production of Into the Woods, you can say you've seen Into the Woods, even if you missed out on Joanna Gleason's definitive performance in 1989.

Poetry can be performed, and in that way, it sometimes shares much in common with theater. Many poets write specifically toward the idea of performance, and many will read their poems differently every time they stand on a stage.

But when non-poets express confusion about my revision process, they aren't reacting to the idea of performance adjustments. We intuitively understand that no two live performances will ever match exactly, and we'd never expect a performer to stop performing simply because they already performed something once (though, certainly, that happens, particularly in performance art).

When non-poets are taken aback by my ideas of post-publication revision, they are reacting to my lack of satisfaction with a published product.

"That's already published. Isn't it 'done'? Aren't you finished with it now?"

For poets who relate to the Voigt quote, the idea of "done" is antithetical to our conception of the artistic process. If I find a way that a poem can be improved, why wouldn't I work to implement that improvement? Why wouldn't I want my poem to be better? I am not here to finish writing poems, to be "done," to stand on a mountain of my writing and feel satisfied or complete and never write again. I am here to play, to explore, to experiment, to protect my motivating dissatisfaction from the lie of "accomplishment."

With nothing left to want, I think I'd be in hell.

I do not want to push a button and produce an art. What would be the point?

Imagine being given a receipt that reads, "You have played one game of kickball," and then being told that the receipt is either equivalent to or better than actually kicking a ball with your whole, real foot.

This is how I feel whenever someone suggests that AI can be used for generating "artwork."

Because so many people have decided that the point of making art is the product and not the process, they have failed to realize that the person most changed by the art is the person who took the time to make it, not the person who receives it.

Something happens to us when we make decision after decision in pursuit of a goal. We experience agency. We experience surprise. We manage to do something, to think something, to say something. We create not only the art but our ability to care about the art. We build a house of concern and devotion and interest and we live inside of it, where what we mean matters.

Nothing feels better than uncovering our own abilities as we use them.

To outsource your own communications to an artificial intelligence is to deem yourself unnecessary, redundant. You reduce yourself to a third-party assistant, play-acting at communication while you actually enable AI to talk to itself through you and the people around you, ferrying information back and forth from AI to AI without substantive, conscious, human involvement. On the backs of stolen artwork, you poison the collective well of human knowledge, taking a backseat in your artificially-propelled life—all to "save" "time"?

For what, exactly, are you saving your time?

But! I am not using AI to write this, and I do not want to get too far off track! So, back to poetry!

To the original question: what, mechanically, is being changed as poems are revised?

Sometimes, the fundamental meaning of a poem can change. The poet's perspective on a topic can change. I might decide that an entire poem no longer interests me except for one line, and that line can be the seed for an entirely different poem!

But that seems fairly intuitive, right? If you're writing about something different, then you're writing about something different. That level of change wouldn't come as a surprise to anyone.

The type of revision that surprises non-poets—the type that most clicks my brain into high gear—is when the content of a poem, the general communication, remains static, but the language employed toward that communication changes.

I'll give a few examples—though far from a comprehensive list!

Word choice. I recently changed a line of poetry from "and back then even professors collapsed us" to "and back then even professors abridged us," because the word "collapsed" didn't really fit with the context of the line, and "abridged" reinforces the poem's academic setting while better communicating the idea of being truncated. Different words are associated with different things, even if they generally mean something similar. "Ascend" and "surmount" have different connotations. "Instruction," "direction," "command," "advice," "guidance," "requirement"—these words are not perfectly interchangeable. They carry baggage with them.

Shape & Structure. The order in which we receive information alters our understanding of that information. Sometimes, revision re-orders information to create a different experience of that information. We also experience a poem differently if it is written all in one stanza, or in couplets, or in field composition (where the words are scattered across the page, away from the left-hand margin). The shape of a poem can change radically in revision, even if the words themselves stay the same!

Sound & Cadence. Do I want to sound conversational ("I'm always wearing blue") or lyrical ("I tend to live my life in blue")? Do I want soft sounds ("ending the science of supple sayings") or hard sounds ("tracking the chicken's craven cackling")? Do I want slow, round language ("Around the orchard against the open wall") or fast, closed language ("Quick-cooked crumbs can kick it!")? The sounds of the words in the poem are like musical notes in a song—they influence how the poem "feels" to read or hear.

POV & Tense. I wrote a poem in third-person past tense ("She ran. She hopped the fence."). Then, I revised it into first-person present tense ("I run. I hop the fence."). Then, I revised it into a list of gerunds ("Running. Hopping the fence."). And each draft had merits, but the point-of-view and verb tense impacted the reader's experience. Right now, I'm sticking with the gerunds, because I want the poem to sound methodical, list-like, obsessive.

Line breaks. When writing lineated poems, poets have to decide where to break sentences into lines! Each choice will result in something different:

So? Based on what I want to happen in my poem, which one will work better toward my desired end? Which one produces the energy I need? The pauses? The surprises? Which one will best welcome a reader into my poem? Which line break emphasizes "wild," or "after," or "boudin"? And which word do I want to emphasize?

Punctuation. What if I don't use commas? What if I don't use any punctuation marks at all? What if I use em dashes instead of other punctuation marks? What if I split up phrases and lines with slashes? What if I put everything in quotation marks? Every choice affects the outcome.

Articles & Pronouns. Is this "a shirt" or "the shirt" or "that shirt" or "their shirt" or "some shirt"? How do these function words imbue "shirt" with different levels of importance?

Considering all these facets of language (and many more) simultaneously? Well.

To return to to the subject of musicals, 🎶"You could drive a person craaazyyyy...."🎶

You could also have a damned good time, making all these decisions, seeing all these little tweaks accumulate into something that you have considered from every possible angle! For me, all these considerations help me isolate and reckon with my wayward, erratic thoughts.

And isn't that important? To examine what and how we think?

All of that said—yes, of course, at some point, you have to arrive somewhere. After putting all this thought into designing a poem's impact, you should allow that poem to impact someone, then move on to a new poem, a new project.

In their video "7 Deadly Art Sins," CJ the X said, "To complete and release or perform a piece is an essential part of the creative process. And if you're not doing it, you have not experienced the full cycle, you have not done the 'artist thing' yet. You're not 'perfecting your craft,' you're shielding yourself from vulnerability. [...] Uncompleted passion projects function like blockage in your creative system. While you're still enamored and honeymooning with this big special idea that's so important to you and you're always talking about but you never got around to finishing, you've cut off the pathway for new ideas to form within you. Until you release that blockage, you're not going to have as many new ideas."

How, then, to reconcile this—its incontrovertible truth—with Voigt? "It's all a draft until you die"?

We reconcile it by realizing that Voigt is not advocating against publication, and CJ the X is not advocating against post-publication revision.

Both call for openness to new ideas. Both call for flexibility in the creative process.

If you allow yourself to remain stuck working on one thing and never bring it to some conclusion, you are not progressing as an artist.

If you allow your work to remain stuck in one form and never explore its other possibilities, you are not progressing as an artist.

Their point—or, at least, my point—is that we cannot be precious about an idea. We have to remain nimble, to pursue the best form for the art we are making, to be involved in those decisions, then put it out into the world, even before we may consider it "ready." We keep working, keep writing, keep revising, keep sharing. We have to care. We have to consider.

Publication is a destination, not an end to the art.

Art only ends when we abandon ourselves and our humanity and the value of what we think.

So—you know—don't DO that!

Okay?

Okay.

The issue webpage opens with a digital booklet (to be discussed more later) in flipbook form. Mechanically, the flipbook offers a seamless reading experience, with art, poetry, and song laid out as if in print. The PDF also makes a pleasant keepsake for contributors.

Beneath the booklet, Audi Locus provides a linked table of contents. Readers/contributors looking to find or share a specific piece can click on the anchor link to jump right down to any item. For readers looking to enjoy the issue as a cohesive whole, however, it is easy and delightful to scroll continuously down the page, organized to mirror the layout of the PDF.

This melding of priorities within the structural design of the issue ensures that contributors and readers will have their unique needs met. I had a blast skipping around via the anchor links and flipping through the booklet!

Cover art by Whitney Tates ("Waterlogged in Pink") provides a focal point for the issue and a color scheme for the site, uniting both in an ethereal cornflower blue and a muted, heavy pink.

Within the issue, Tates's artwork is paired with the poem "THESE COLOURS" by Devon Webb. Webb's poem begins, "These colours // yours & mine too / pink & blue // on & through"—a satisfying line drawn between the two contributors' visual and written pieces.

The PDF booklet showcases Maudie Bryant's talents as an interior and graphic designer, boasting a calm and clean layout that imbues the contributed works with deserved and professional authority.

The issue opens with the poem "morning" by Julie Allyn Johnson—a new dawn for a new journal. It concludes with "THESE COLOURS," previously mentioned, a poem that ends with the word "new," reinforcing my experience of the issue's themes as a contemplation of beginnings, forays, assays, ventures, entrances into the unknown. The poems imagine surreal and dangerous worlds, present scenarios and possible outcomes, often circling back to the prospect of hope, of crossed fingers, of daring leaps. The poems tackle hard and sweet topics at turns.

The contributed poems range from contrapuntal to lyrical to narrative to rhymed, establishing anaphora, alluding to myth, and entering into conversation with the poetic canon. These poems seek connection, seek answers, seek safety.

In her editor's note opening the inaugural issue, Maudie Bryant writes, "[A]rt has a way of grounding us, even in uncertainty. Curating this issue became an anchor—a way to make sense of the chaos, find beauty in the mess, and celebrate our shared human experience."

Co-editor Brandon Bowman adds, "I believe that we as creatives share pieces of ourselves to expand our own edges, to grow, to change, to challenge, and to persevere."

In its first issue, Audi Locus reckons with the travails of existence—and in response, it defends the triumph of the attempt, any attempt, to step forward.

Submissions for Volume 1, Issue 2 of Audi Locus open April 1, 2025.

The editors intend to announce their first theme by March 15, 2025.

Good luck to all!

In August 2022, I returned to graduate school after a decade away from collegiate study. When I graduated with my Master's degree in 2013, I swore I would never seek another degree. But after several years in the workforce, a pandemic lockdown, and a self-destructing journey as a self-published fantasy author, I knew I needed to find my way back into writing.

I applied to the UNO Creative Writing Workshop MFA program, and I asked to concentrate in poetry rather than in fiction, the genre I considered—at the time—my lifelong passion.

With only twelve hours of coursework (nearly) completed, I count this among the best decisions I've made.

Over the last year, I have read all the material assigned to me—an uncharacteristic feat, for those who knew me well in prior journeys through higher education (or secondary education) (or... primary... education...)—and I have spent hours writing and revising poems, plays, and response papers. I've completed all my work early rather than starting it late. I skipped out on fun times with friends and loved ones, and I spent approximately 180 hours in class rather than with my husband. (And, yes, unrelated, I did get married!) I have made new friends and rediscovered old obsessions.

More importantly, I have admitted to myself that I was always a poet. And though my full-time job means I can only attend classes part-time, though my first year amounted to a first semester for the traditional graduate student, I can sincerely admit that the six hours a week in class are often the best six hours of the week.

I love this. I hope I continue to love this.

​And I am proud that I finally feel actively dedicated to what I am learning.

After years of reflection, I have decided to discontinue sales of Bless the Skies across all platforms and permanently shelve its unfinished sequel. There are irresolvable problems with both books, and whatever pride I may feel about the sentences I wrote is eclipsed by my shame regarding both what I included and what I left out.

While I have never made a profit from this novel, and profit was not a concern or a goal at the time of publication, I no longer wish to see the book distributed or sold. Too much of my ignorance is on painful display.

Anyone who purchased a digital copy of Bless the Skies will retain access to their copy. I know there were and are people who enjoyed the book, and I am not trying to erase it from my history. The book’s pages on Goodreads and on my website will remain intact.

However, the following disclaimer will be added where possible:

The author has discontinued all promotion and distribution of “Bless the Skies.” This page remains active strictly for archival purposes.

Though I do not wish to itemize or argue my reasons for the book’s removal, I felt I owed at least this much explanation to all those who supported me with emotional, intellectual, and physical labor throughout the writing and publication process.

Thank you for all that you did—if I ever try this again, hopefully I can be prouder of the product.

Stay sane out there, everyone! And remember! It's OKAY not to be your most productive during a GLOBAL PANDEMIC. =)

[Says the erstwhile author whose productivity bottomed-out long before said pandemic...!]

Though this book certainly was not written for children, I think I would have loved this book as a child. It's a cathartic and satisfying story with great dialogue, excellent comedy, and tangible warmth.

Spoilers to follow!

​Let's talk about Dolly.

Let's talk about how this book changed for me the moment Dolly sat up in that wagon, bagged and blind in his purple suit—a massive murderer plucked from his own grave.

Eerie. Absurd. Delightful.

Dolly is the Hulk; he's Hodor meets the Hound; he's Frankenstein; he's every nightmare and dream combined in one. And I wish he played more of a role in the novel. I wish I'd seen him sleeping beneath Mrs. Sand's loaner bed more often.

Let's talk about Mrs. Sands. The warm, loud, brazen, determined, generous Mrs. Sands, who mended her little brother's socks and left him supper, whom I'd like to mimic more as I age.

You've read the book. And when I think about what I want to say to someone who's read this book, inevitably, I want to commiserate over the glee I felt reading these characters.

Yes, they're caricatures. None of the characters reaches particularly deep. And there's no question that the characters are exactly as Ren sees them. But the point of this book is its charm, not its startling revelations. This book is a journey—not a question, not an answer, but an experience.

The ending with Benjamin Nab did disappoint me. I'm not sure it made much sense for him to leave; neither his character nor the logistics of the situation quite justified it. However, the life ahead of Ren with Tom and Brom and Ichy and Mrs. Sands and the mousetrap girls would be tainted by Benjamin's presence, and I suspect that to be why Tinti sent Nab away.

Overall, The Good Thief excels in the emotions it inspires. Though I rarely re-read books, I can easily envision myself returning to Tinti's tale in times of need.

We, the Drowned begins in 1848 during a war between Denmark and Germany. It ends with the surrender of Germany to the Allied forces at the end of World War II. The plot covers a lot of ground with skillful storytelling and delicious prose, sailing across the globe while always anchoring in one place.

The main characters come and go, but they all hail from the Danish seafaring village of Marstal. The story fixates mostly on five individuals discussed mostly in the third-person, four of them sailors—but the narrative voice extends beyond the minds of these five.

Most English writing uses either a first-person singular or third-person singular/plural narrative voice. Every so often, you'll see second-person. (See?)

We, the Drowned, from its title and forward, uses first-person plural. And the "we" isn't a specific, specified group of people. "We" can be any configuration of Marstallers: the men, the women, the children, the living, the dead, or any transient mixture thereof. Because the "we" is not a set group of actual people. The "we," the narrative voice of this novel, is the community itself.

This narrative technique is delightful and impressive. Some may find it disorienting, but I loved every moment, once I realized its implications.​

I loved the tone of this book: dark and unforgiving, but with a persistent thread of hope. Terribly funny and terribly sad. As one might expect in a seafaring, war-faring novel spanning 100 years, We, the Drowned can be slow at times and strange at times. But Jensen routinely rewards the reader's commitment with catharsis and comedy and intrigue.

​In my review of Terry Pratchett's Small Gods, I said, "In a few lines—in every few lines—Pratchett offers a revelation, a question, a probe into the contradictions of humanity." I've said similar of Lev Grossman's Magicians series. Most lines are works of art independent of the books themselves.

Jensen writes with the same level of skill. Every line is a gift with a new truth to contemplate. I wanted to tweet the whole dang book. And it's 688 pages long!

I recommend this book. I recommend this prose. I recommend this story. It'll stick with you—the characters live inside me now, as much as they lived in Marstal.

Spoilers to follow!

Also, please note: in this review, I'm actively chewing on this novel, and I'll be asking more questions than offering definitive commentary.

​I'm a person who likes flow charts. And when I think about the point-of-view characters in this novel—the named Marstallers who take up most of the book's time—I envision the novel as below:

Each of these characters fascinates me in his/her own right. Why were these five chosen? What does this grouping say? And how does Laurids's story, which acts as something of a prologue, introduce and comment upon the stories of the four mains to follow?

Laurids Madsen

At the beginning, Laurids is our charismatic hero. We laugh with him, we struggle with him, we realize the cruel absurdity of his situation together. We love his family and we love his home.

Then, when he leaves, we mourn him as Albert mourns him—only to find the man hiding on an island with another family, named to resemble "ours." And that hurts. And by the end of Albert's journey to find his father, I hated Laurids. He'd become weak in my eyes, lazy in my eyes, heartless in my eyes.

Jensen never shields us from pain in We, the Drowned. The scene with Karo... haunts me. And he does not shy away here from rubbing salt in our/Albert's wounds.

Compared to Albert and Knud Eric, the remaining two protagonists (Klara and Herman act more as antagonists), Laurids does very little. We spend comparatively little time with him; we only get the ending of his life, really. We get all of Albert's life. And we get the beginning of Knud Eric's. (Past, present, future! With the encroaching forces of greed and vanity from Herman and Klara?)

Laurids, then, is our foundation. He is our tradition, our pain, our legends, and our painful secrets.

​Albert Madsen

Only Albert Madsen speaks in the first-person singular. And he only speaks in first-person singular when journeying to find his father Laurids. Because, as I'm deciding, Albert is the present. He is the crux of everything. He is the breakwater.

I liked Albert. I never stopped liking Albert. At the end, when he began his toxic relationship with Klara, I often shook my head at Albert—but I never stopped liking him, rooting for him. I believed he could make the right decision.

In the end, like Cinderella on the steps of the palace, he decides not to decide. (Into the Woods, anyone? Anyone?) (Actually, the more I think about it, some of Cinderella's conflict there legitimately mirrors Albert's conflict...) Sadly, Albert's moment trapped in the ice resolves with far more tragedy than Cinderella's moment stuck in pitch.

And his death hurt me. I mourned him. Fortunately, his protege stepped up to take his place, more of Albert's son than Albert was Laurids's.

Knud Eric Friis

​​Knud Eric is the culmination of everything. The entire story funnels into him and becomes his story. We watch him grow from a curious, sensitive boy to a traumatized veteran of the second World War. When he and the sailors spent their night in London swapping women as the bombs dropped around them, it felt like watching a son performing those activities.

Knud Eric, Anton, and all the crew of the Nimbus are presented to us as the storytellers. They recount Laurids's exploits, Albert's journey, and pass on the legends to younger mariners. Knud Eric carries the Madsens with him. In that way, he almost is the reader of the story with us, experiencing his own reality as if in the shadow of these weighty stories.

Knud Eric most exhibits the novel's chief theme: community. Fellowship. The positive and negative effects a society can have upon its members. Albert makes him who he is. And Albert makes him that way because of Laurids. The other children of Marstal make Knud Eric who he is. Herman makes Albert who he is. Klara makes Albert who he is. And everyone is acting based upon how the "we," the entire community, has made them who they are.

Klara Friis

Klara is billed as an antagonist. She's an antagonist we understand, a villain we admire and respect, but a villain nonetheless. She threatens "us," our town. She disparages and ruins our way of life. And though she regrets it in the end, though she and Knud Eric welcome each other in the end, though her letters break our heart, Klara nonetheless puts everyone in an awful, unwinnable position.

The story of her and her doll Karla drives so much of her character, and Jensen utilizes this beautifully. It's a horrible, poetic moment that grows into an entire life's ambition.

Honestly, I wanted more of Klara. I wanted more action from her, but then, she represents the women who wait at home, and the inactivity of that. By having a plan, Klara steps away from that inactive, waiting role, but her plan is largely passive: do nothing; let it die.

As the main female character in We, the Drowned, Klara is strong and smart and flawed. She loves deeply, but once Albert dies, she no longer allows herself to be defined externally. But because she seeks to upset the balance between Marstal and the sea, she inevitably serves as an opposing force to the community.

Klara seeks dominance rather than fellowship, much like the other antagonist...

​Herman Frandsen

Herman feels like an anomaly.

Laurids passed narration to his son, who passed narration to his good-as-adopted son and that boy's mother. The Madsens and the Friises are related by blood and by choice.

No one chooses Herman Frandsen as a narrative successor or partner. He's a murderer, a rapist, a pathological liar, and he's stuck in a cycle of toxic masculinity that ruins his life and continues to influence other impressionable minds on the Nimbus, and no doubt little Bluetooth after the novel's end.

We get others' points-of-view throughout the book. Anton and Markussen and plenty others take their turn in the spotlight, however briefly. Herman recurs. And I've been trying to figure out why. I've been trying to figure out why he's there at the end of it all, why he plays the role of catalyst throughout so much of the book.

In the end, he touches on many of the main themes of this novel: balance; agency; impermanence.

In Jensen's novel, good people do bad things. (Can we forget how Albert helped to kill defenseless Karo?) Bad people do good things. (Despite the cruel man he became, Josef Isager asked for the burial of the African's hand.) Sometimes the captain is right, and sometimes he is wrong, but we listen to him—until we don't. All remains in balance.

The narrative also places greater weight on the willingness to choose, no matter the morality or the cost of that choice. I felt like the novel suggested that agency outweighs conformity, tradition, social status. Look at its treatment of Klara: though she upsets the balance and seeks to destroy the source of the town's survival, that choice is presented as something admirable. We, like Markussen, do not understand it or agree with it—but we respect her for making a choice and exercising her agency.

And finally, this is a novel about change. A changing of the guard, a changing of the times, a changing of the world. Nothing can remain as it was, and we should accept new realities. Marstal changes over 100 years. Generations die over 100 years. Technologies advance over 100 years.

Herman embodies all of those things, even being the most despicable character in the book. And we are invited to hate him for what he's done wrong and nod in approval at his indomitability, without sacrificing one for the other. It's the complexity of this character assessment that made Herman so uncomfortable to read.

Overall, I have too much to say about this book. I'd have to write another book to fully analyze it! And for that reason, you should read and experience this one for yourself.

Do you find yourself scribbling lists everywhere, only to lose the lists? Do you curse the amount of time you waste on Facebook? Do you wish you could motivate yourself to read more, write more, think more?

Are you trying to track the fluctuations in your mood and identify which activities contribute positively and negatively?

Have I got a list for you!

(Do internet article introductions remind you of sleasy car salesmen? Have I got an intro for you!) Ahem.

Please note: I operate all the below software through Windows and/or Android. Apple users, you'll need to research what's available for you.

I've discussed Workflowy and its wonders before. But that post touched only slightly on how I use Workflowy, and I've optimized it quite a bit since that original post. Needless to say, I still pay for Workflowy Pro, and I regret nothing.

Workflowy is my master list. I use it to store my long-term goals, to catalog my ideas and my interests, and to outline projects. (I actually outlined this entire blog post in Workflowy!)

This single, infinitely-sub-dividable list acts as a central headquarters for me, for my mind, and for my memory. When someone recommends a movie to me, I add it to Workflowy. When I think of an idea for Chapter 12 of my book, I add it into Workflowy. When Paul and I are going on a trip, we use a shared Workflowy bullet (lovingly titled "Paul and Julie Life!") to store our packing list.

I use a separate Workflowy account at, um, work, to track my—uhh—workflow. REVOLUTIONARY!

In any case, Workflowy is overwhelmingly versatile and astoundingly simple. I love it. I'll love it forever. The end.

The thing about Workflowy as a to-do list... It's great for project-centered items. If I'm working on something, and I'll be working on it for a while, I'm using Workflowy and its hashtags and subcategories to track the project's status and my progress toward its completion.

But sometimes, I just need to remember to go buy shampoo. And I don't need to record that anywhere, I just need to be reminded to do it. Sometimes, I need to schedule activities—for instance, I knew I wanted to spend a specific Sunday writing this blog post.

When I had the idea for this blog post, I entered it into my "Blog Post Ideas" list in Workflowy. When I wanted to outline the post, I used Workflowy.

But when I wanted to remind myself to actually write the damn thing, I used Google Tasks.

Google Tasks, unsurprisingly, integrates exceptionally well with Gmail and Google Calendar. (By the way, Google Calendar is another productivity tool that works wonders at keeping me in the right place at the right time, but it's universal and pretty self-explanatory, and thus, not actively included here.) You can add a Task straight to your calendar, and you can create multiple lists to house different tasks.

Bizarrely, Google does not offer a standalone app for Tasks. So after trying multiple third-party Tasks apps, I've settled and been pleased for a long time with Tasks by Team Tasks.

I use Tasks for scheduled or short-term action items that aren't important in the long run. If I need to write a blog post, go to a store, call a family member, or complete some other non-routine, domestic action, then Tasks reminds me to get it done with a notification on my phone. The list also appears in my Gmail inbox and adjacent to my Google Calendar.

Then again, there are certain things I want to do every single day. I want to be able to check these achievements off somewhere, because few things prove as satisfying as crossing or checking off a list item.

For routine tasks, I use List: Daily Checklist. It keeps me accountable for taking care of myself and prioritizing what should be at the forefront of my mind.

I want to read, write, exercise, and tweet almost every day. Some things only need to be done on weekdays. Some things only need to be done on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. Some things need to be done every day except Friday, or every day except Sunday.

And this routine manager helps me adjust and record all of that in one place. It tracks my success, lets me set priority levels for task items, and comes with a widget that sits at the top of my Android home screen.

Mostly, I love Daily Checklist because after you set it up initially, it's largely an automated process. I ignore it when I want to ignore it, and it doesn't bother me. There's no need to spend hours resetting things each night, week, or month. The app operates in the background, and it's there when I need it.

Those to-do lists are all digital. And sometimes, you need an analog solution. When my schedule is jam-packed—when I'm juggling multiple projects from my day job, night job, and odd jobs—when I need to keep track of conflicting due dates and encourage good mental and emotional habits through the scramble—that's when I pull out my Panda Planner.

Something to know about me: my romance with these tools can sometimes be on-again, off-again. The love dwindles, and I sink into my couch, and I watch TV​, and I spend hours clicking through YouTube videos, and all my productivity tools disappear for a little while.

For that reason, I love undated planners. I don't feel guilty about wasted paper, I don't have to look at a physical representation of all the "lost" time, and I don't bother with the planner except when I actually need it.

The great thing about Panda Planner's Non-Dated Daily Planner is that it serves as more than an analog schedule. It's a task list, a journal, a habit-tracker, a self-compassion tool, and a gratitude/insights diary.

It's not filled with airy quotes you've seen on Instagram a thousand times. It's not flourished or bright-colored or effusive. The pages are simple black-and-white, and if you want to ignore a box or a question in the monthly/daily/weekly pages, you're certainly allowed.

Best of all, there's no wasted space for a meal planner. That can be incredibly helpful for a lot of people, but it's not something that suits my lifestyle, so I'm glad to have an analog system that ignores meal planning (while, honestly, still giving you ample room, if that is something you want to track!).

Man, oh, man, did I love my bullet journal.

For about two months.

The thing is, I started watching all the YouTube videos giving advice on how to make a bullet journal SUPER PRETTY AND ARTSY, and then I remembered that I'm not artsy. And I got tired of hand-drawing routine trackers every month. I got tired of dividing out space for Work, Personal, and Publishing tasks. I got tired of hand-writing journal entries. (That's never been sustainable for me—I'm a typist, through and through.)

I'm still proud of my flip-out symbol key for tagging daily tasks, though. And I drew some fancy doodles, I'll tell you.

In the end, Panda Planner just works better for me. It gives me the baseline that I'd have to create myself with the bullet journal, and in that respect, saves me a lot of time​.

Most recently, I've begun using Google Keep as a journal and research collector.

Back in high school and sometimes in college, my English instructors frequently encouraged us students to take notes on what we were reading, as we were reading it. I remember one instructor required that we put Post-it notes on every page of our assigned books with some sort of significant thought or question written down.

I hated this as a student.

And of course, my teachers also knew what they were doing.

​I've come to call this "active thought." If I spend time reading or watching something, then I should spend time thinking about it. If I'm thinking about something, I might as well put those thoughts into words.

And if I'm writing something, you best believe I want to save and tag and color-code those words! In an easily-searchable index!

Google Keep lets me store ideas I've had, pictures that inspire me, and articles that interest me. When I come across a piece of news that concerns me, I can use the Google Keep Chrome extension to save that news and write about it while I'm reading.

And since I've never been good at handwritten journals, and I've had most success with journaling-via-blog, I use Google Keep to record what's been happening and how that's been impacting me. I make a note, I title it with the date, I label it "Journal," and then I click "done" when I'm finished. Easy-peasy!

And everything can be searched. When it comes to search, Google is king. You can search by text, by attachment, by tag. You can even search/sort notes by the colors you assign them. 

​Google Keep represents my new commitment to generating more ideas and thinking more critically about the media I consume. It helps me wrestle with things I'd usually leave un-verbalized. And I credit my recent bout of productivity—culminating in the composition of this blog post!—to the faithful implementation of this system.

I paid for Evernote Premium for a while. It's an excellent product with a wider range of abilities than Google Keep. It's more robust, and it's something I'd recommend.

Unfortunately, it stopped being feasible for me. My notebooks became clogged with unsorted materials, I weighed it down with audio notes, and my tagging system was inconsistent at best. This all resulted from the biggest drawback to Evernote: it doesn't use folders. It uses notebooks. So instead of being able to drill down deeper and deeper, as in Workflowy, I'm only allowed one level of containers.

That doesn't work for me. I like layers.

Google Keep doesn't use notebooks—or folders, either. It only uses tags. And in a way, that works better for me than trying to juggle notebooks and tags, deciding which "thing" deserves to be a folder or should remain as a tag, etc. etc.

​Google Keep is more minimalist, and I've preferred it for that reason. I also like the Chrome extension for Keep much more than I ever liked the Evernote extension.

Except, I can't carry that thing around with me everywhere I go. And I don't always have an Internet connection or a charged phone.

For spontaneous, analog note-taking, I use a range of mini-notebooks and pads of paper. These pages most often get ripped off the pad and stored in a folder somewhere for when they're needed.

And that's all I've got to say about that.

As for mood- and habit-tracking, Daylio's the best and simplest app I've tried.

Tell it how you're feeling: rad, good, meh, bad, or awful. Then tell it what you've been doing lately. You can completely customize the activity options, with a hefty bank of icons to choose. I've got eating activities, cleaning activities, exercise, writing, reading, time with friends, time with family, time on Facebook, empty time, etc. etc.

Its customization options are infinite, and they'll fit your life, however your life looks.

Daylio then tracks what you've been doing and how you've been feeling, and it spits out graphs and charts and beautifully rendered data.

In addition to using Daylio to track my mood, I also use it to give myself "credit" for good behavior and to hold myself accountable for less-than-desirable behavior. I like Daylio's system, because even when I've eaten junk food or wasted time, choosing those activities doesn't penalize me in any way. It just forces me to admit what I've been doing.

I don't respond well to apps that offer negative reinforcement. More on that at the end.

I'll probably write another post about this sometime in the near future, but I'm recommitting myself to reading. I'd fallen off the wagon for a while, and that's shameful.

Goodreads helps motivate me to do what needs doing in the reading department.

I can keep track of the books I want to read, have read, and best of all, am reading. (#amreading)

Every page I read, I get a little productivity-brain-boost, because I get to log my progress in Goodreads. And the website broadcasts how much of the book I've read. When I finish a book, it adds that book toward my yearly Goodreads challenge. (58% percent through, and 1 book behind schedule... but I'll get there!!)

So while Goodreads may not bill itself as a producitivy tool, I definitely use it in this capacity.

Sometimes, the best way to keep yourself accountable to what you're doing is to involve The World.

Once you tell The World that you're planning to do a thing—well, you'd better do the thing, hadn't you?

Twitter is The World in a lot of ways. And though it definitely saps productivity at times, I use Twitter to keep myself accountable and give myself credit when necessary. I post about reading and writing when I'm doing it, and I track my word counts, and I post quotes from the book in front of me to keep myself engaged with it.

​Because the whole point of these tools is to stay engaged: with your work, with your life, and with your thoughts.

Once upon a time, I adored HabitRPG. I was proud to be one of its first users.

And I still adore it, now that it's re-branded as Habitica. I'd recommend it to anyone! I shelled out for the paid version for many, many months, and I regret nothing!

However, it stopped working for me. Because Habitica relies on negative reinforcement as well as positive reinforcement. And when I knew I wouldn't get my tasks done, I'd turn it off. Then I'd keep it turned off, because I wasn't sure if I'd ever get all-my-everything done. I didn't want to lose the items I'd amassed.

But what's the point of keeping the items, if you aren't using Habitica for its intended purpose?

Habitica is a one-stop habit tracker and to-do list that offers most of the features offered by the to-do lists and habit trackers discussed above. If you're looking for a fun app with rewards and punishments, it's a great place to start.

But if you're like me, and you want all the flash and fun without the threat of penalization, then I hope these 10 productivity tools prove useful and engaging to you!

​What productivity tools do you use? Share them with me in the comments!

If you return to my website daily and obsessively refresh the pages—not that I’d ever participate in such neurotic behavior—you’ll have noticed a new hierarchy in the main navigation.

I am happy to announce that anyone can ask for my help with writing and editing!

I’ve listed my various services and a test run of prices, compiled from online research and a lifetime of experience tweaking people’s words. These prices may be set in stone one day, but for now, I’m willing to negotiate depending on a client’s circumstances.

After years of plying my trade in semi-secret, I’d love to attract a new client or two. Every dollar helps to expand my publication budget, after all!

​I’m also submitting blogs and articles to digital magazines, and I’m aggressively pursuing publication for my poetry and short stories in literary journals/small presses. Why? Why now?
​

1. I miss the thrill of a byline.
2. I want to expand my portfolio.
3. I relish the thought of additional income. (Who doesn't?)

I’ve already received a commitment from one website to publish an article!

As I work to explore new venues of publication, I hope you’ll consider requesting my help with your projects.

​Here are the services I now offer:

​For a range of hourly fees, I’ll write you a cover letter, a blog post, a feature article, a speech, a press release, or even a delicately phrased email. The scope of the project influences the cost, and ghostwriting will cost more than writing credited to me.

Please note: I will not write scholarly essays for students. I will, however, help students improve their papers with my editing services. (In that instance, I'd call it "tutoring"!)

​This is my favorite service to offer! I’ll crack my knuckles and transform into your personal “writing trainer”—someone who'll dig deep into your prose and mold it into its best self. In this package, I’ll provide line editing, copy editing, and structural editing, and I’ll offer detailed commentary of my impressions, suggestions, and explanations.
 
Recently, I worked with a friend in this capacity, and she said, “I feel like you’re the equivalent of a personal trainer to my writing, refusing to allow sloppy form or lazy moments, pushing for 100% the entire time.”

​That's a direct, copied-and-pasted quote!
 
If you’re looking for that kind of punishment—improvement, I mean improvement—then I’m here to push you!

​If, on the other hand, you just want an objective eye to glance over your writing and check for glaring errors, this is the package for you. I’ll happily be your high-level sounding board, review your words, and make basic corrections.

I separated these two editing options because my brain approaches them as entirely different processes. It also helps me better anticipate what kind of feedback clients want.

For many years, people have come to me for help with résumés. I have a skill for communicating job duties with complimentary phrasing, and I’m a formatting evangelist. Give me a rough or messy draft of a résumé, and I'll polish its content, phrasing, structure, and style!

Cover letters typically follow résumés—I'll give a good deal to those interested in both cover letter "Writing" and "Résumé Assistance."

How can I help you with your word-based projects? Let me know in the comments!
 
And if you’ve already benefited from my assistance, feel free to leave a testimonial before you go!