Chrissie’s Blog
100 Rejections: My Submissions’ Year in Review
I usually aim for 50 Rejections each calendar year with my submissions. I entered a lot of poetry contests with state poetry societies for 2024 – Tennessee, Virginia, and North Carolina – so I hit 50 Rejections pretty quickly (by April). So I changed my goal to 75...
What’s New, Pussycat?
It’s a new year – 2025. I remember bringing in 1998 in Times Square and can’t believe that was more than half of my lifetime ago now. This year, I spent part of New Year’s Eve at the Arcade (that’s what Russ and I call the casino here in Bristol), with one of my...
New Bed
I have a brand-new bed! Yes, I’m excited. I’d been sleeping on my other mattress for over fifteen years, and it had grown flimsy and caused hip aches on a regular basis. I’ve been hinting to Russ that I needed a new one for months but was getting nowhere. We had a...
Writing Update
I’ve not been as diligent about writing s I need to be. I feel like I’m going through the motions, but not getting a whole lot done since I wrapped up my first draft of the short story collection. There’s still a lot to do with it. I just can’t seem to find the...
Cleaning Out
We recently spent almost a week trying to get started cleaning out Russ’ parents’ house in the Northwest suburbs of Chicago. When my mom passed away, we didn’t have to do this. The doublewide on the God-forsaken Hill had been abandoned and was my sister Sarah’s...
Can You Feel It
On November 1, a long-time dream came true. I got to see the remaining Jacksons (sans Jermaine and Randy) perform a show at the Hard Rock Casino in Cincinnati, Ohio. I had thought that Jermaine would be there, so I was initially a little disappointed, but once the...