This week I sent my manuscript to a friend for review and she gave me some very helpful feedback about how "normal" people would react in a crazy situation, so I'll be working that into my story this weekend. I let another friend read it and he gave me some helpful feedback about some of the more mechanical aspects of my story and I'll be working those in as well. Thanks friends! It's nice to have the diversity of friendship that I do--my friends have interests ranging from sports and cars to poetry and psychoses.(They go hand in hand.)

Working all this knowledge and experience into my story has been enlightening. I'm having a good time fine-tuning all the details, and the synopsis is coming together nicely as well. I've discovered that my brain is finite. I am not an "expert" in everything (don't tell my children that). Sometimes we have to get outside ourselves to see things in a bigger way and this feedback is allowing me to do that.

I went through a Pablo phase where I only wrote poems in response to Neruda poems, because I felt they evoked such an emotional response from me. I couldn't tell you whether the resulting poems were "good" or "bad," but they may be stretch my boundaries a little and explore something different. So that you can share in my mental and emotional enrichment, I've included one of my favorite Neruda poems below. Enjoy!

I do not love you except because I love you - Pablo Neruda
I do not love you except because I love you;
I go from loving to not loving you,
From waiting to not waiting for you
My heart moves from cold to fire.

I love you only because it's you the one I love;
I hate you deeply, and hating you
Bend to you, and the measure of my changing love for you
Is that I do not see you but love you blindly.

Maybe January light will consume
My heart with its cruel
Ray, stealing my key to true calm.

In this part of the story I am the one who
Dies, the only one, and I will die of love because I love you,
Because I love you, Love, in fire and blood.