Up very, very early this morning. Too early really. Saw my attorney yesterday regarding my social security disability hearing, and he seems very on top of things. My hearing is set for June 20th, and I'm really nervous about it, but there's nothing I can do about it at the moment. I wrote 19 poems this past month or so, and I feel really good about a number of them, but I realize I'm not writing in the style that is popular now-a-days, but that's okay. I feel good about my work now, about what I'm writing about and how I'm writing it. I am going to keep working on the poems to make them the best they can be. These 19 poems are totally new, and not part of "Seven." They seem to come more smoothly, as I am less stressed than when I wrote "Seven."

Waiting to hear back from two editors who are currently helping me with "Seven." They are very good. I added four new poems to the manuscript, and I'm sure those are the ones I will need to work on the most when they get back to me. Not really sure what will materialize from this process, but I feel I'm getting very helpful feedback. It's helping me get back to what I wanted to do with my work originally, and though the collection has been difficult for me, largely due to content of some of the poems, I feel it is coming to an end.

Carmen says once I get past this collection, I can move on and it will probably be easier. I think she's right as poems are flowing more smoothly once again, now that that manuscript is almost finished. I have a lot of difficulty liking the collection as I've worked on it for so long, and I have an awareness that it might make others uncomfortable reading it as much as it's been uncomfortable writing it. I don't know. I had to address issues of trauma and mental illness for my own sanity, and it's helped me move to a different place. In some ways, I've moved beyond where I was when it was written, and that was a very hard place. I have a hard time looking at those poems. I'm glad to be writing new ones. I was in the midst of deaths, illness and recovering from amnesia or repressed memories. It was not a pleasant time. Also, I struggled with anger from the past, about a lot of things. In the end, I am uneasy with it, but it is time to move on to something different altogether.

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Going to a sleep doctor in the morning. I've been awake since 2:30 a.m. So I blog though nobody is reading really. It helps me maintain what I'm doing as it is quite lonely writing and living off AND aka 175.00 a month. I really don't like facebook very much. It's okay, but no real communication seems to go on there.

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Not sure I will swing money to go to Canto Mundo suddenly, as my hearing date is further back than I had previously thought, but you never know what can happen by then.

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Don't think I can get back to sleep this morning as it's almost 5 now.