TidBits

Left-overs always taste so much better! Couple of days ago, I made this kosha mangsho with goat meat. I followed this recipe almost verbatim. Koshano is a form of slow-cooking, I guess. But it does some magical things to the meat.

In another week, we will bang right into National Poetry Writing Month. I don't think it will be a good idea for me to try to do the challenge with the dissertation still looming large in the background. Instead, I am taking up the challenge of working on my poems everyday. I don't know if that will amount to writing a new poem, or revising an old one. Sometimes, it takes me three or four days (or more) to get a poem out of my system. I don't want to yank out a poem a day because of April happens to be some kind of poetry month. But it does feel good to see that poetry receives a kind of special attention during this April, and there are events around it.

The dissertation-chapter is moving, although not as fast as I would like it to go. But it's moving!I have a strange, inconsistent relationship to deadlines. In case of the dissertation, the deadline to submit at least once to the writing group during a semester has been very very helpful. It has made me sit down, organize my thoughts, and just to produce something. Even if that "something" happens to be very rough, sketchy, and tentative. I mean, if I have a first draft at least I can go back to it, revise,and make it better. But it's hard to produce that first draft, often times! In case of my creative writing, I prefer to write without deadlines, and then put them up for workshops. Sometimes, I have generated new stuff for a workshop, and have revised the existing stuff extensively. But in general, I do like to produce creative stuff on my own time, and then use the workshop for thinking through the feedback.