amazon_syren

First thing: My wife's feeling really run down again. She went to work anyway because (a) she's still testing negative, and (b) everybody's living in their respirators right now because of the ancient insulation they're working in and around.

She came home early because she literally fell off a ladder (but NOT down the damn stairwell she was working over, so thank you gods for small mercies) and, while she didn't break her arm (thank you gods for small mercies) she's a little banged up and has Retired To Bed like a smart woman.

I will be getting dinner going here in a minute or two and feeding her some protein and carbs and hot sauce to help her feel better.


Second thing: I wrote my poem for the week. It came reasonably easily (I finished a partially drafted poem first, which may have helped things along) and, for the moment, I'm feeling moderately confident about the possibility of having a Microchap finished - or at least drafted - by the end of February. Which will be a nice change from Not Much Of Anything outside of the collaborative work I'm doing with my girlfriend. It felt nice to actually write something.
I keep thinking about the "Polyamoury and Power Exchange" book I drafted... last year? Some time? That I haven't dug into editing.
It was a really horrible draft. Like I'm honestly not sure if this is thee kind of thing where I EDIT vs the kind of thing where I take the three salvageable bits and try to draft something better mostly out of whole cloth. But I'm thinking about it again - mostly, I suspect, because of how my relationship with Muse is progressing, but also because Babygirl will be arriving in town in, like, one month exactly (TBH, I'd like to convince her to hold off until Mid-March given her lack of snow-tires and intent to arrive here by car, but). Basically, things continue to get Realer on that front, and it's got me chewing on stuff in an "I wrote about this before" kind of way.


Third thing: I missed both Imbolg rituals I'd planned to attend last week, due to The Rona BUT both ritual groups incorporated ideas or liturgy provided by me, which feels really good. Babygirl and I did a long-distance Imbolg ritual together on Sunday night, which was also really nice.


Anyway. Dinner Awaits.


TTFN,
Ms Syren.

So I've started my (presumably first of many) query letter for my Glosa manuscript.

It's only 52 poems.
But that's still 11,200 or so words, so actually dandy for a poetry manuscript.
I know which poems my opening and closing pieces will be, and everything else is split into seven sections (though I may not actually mark them as such).

The publisher I'm querying is not a Poetry press. It's a Queer press that has put out a few (like maybe four) poetry books, but mostly sticks to fiction and CNF. I figure, given the nature of the project, it fits with their mandate enough that they might give it a go.

I've re-titled a bunch of the poems - mostly the ones that had obvious astrological or tarot-related titles - though given that this press's first publication was literally a tarot-interpretation book, that may not be helpful in this instance. Still, I feel better about it, so I'm going with it.

Excelsior, as sexy_romulan says.

So I'm sick.
This is irritating and frustrating, although part of me is enjoying the "guilt-free down-time" that comes with it.
the dishes are piling up like nobody's business, though, because neither of us is particularly healthy at the moment. Ghost is directing her energies towards finishing up for-pay leather work in the interests of making back the money she's lost due to missing work (the same bug + a doctor's appointment) over the past week or so. And I'm just a mess who can't go ten minutes without blowing her nose, apparently. :-P

None the less, We have emptied the last of the packed-stuff (er... sort of...) that was sitting on the living room floor, and it's now distributed appropriately around the house. And I've shifted some of the stuff in the boxes in the kitchen so that I was able to cart one box up to my Studio/Office (it mostly consists of lamps). The Studio is still a mess. I still have curtain rods to put up. And a mirror and a shelf (YAY SHELF!), and a slew of things to put away - ideally on said shelf - before it's a really functional space. None the less, I can at least move around in it, which is a help.

Still to do in The Studio:
Put up the curtain rod.
Hang the curtains.
Set up the rug (small, to go under the spinning wheel).
Empty the bags - one of winter woolies, a couple of bathroom stuff - into the appropraite recepticals.
Move the under-bed-storage-unit intot he bedroom and under the actual bed.
Move the beautiful - but fragile and ricketty - tea trolly to a different part of the room. Not sure where, though.

I have a list of books that I want to read this year:
Imogene Binnie's Nevada (novel - not sure what I'm going to make of the stream-of-conscious writing style, I'm a little worried it's going to read like Lisa Foad's The Night Is A Mouth which... I didn't like at all)
Dane Figueroa Edidi's Yemaya's Daughters (novel - though the prose is lyric & has a cadance like poetry - I'm looking forward to this one)
Casey Plett's A Safe Girl to Love (short story collection)
Trish Salah's Lyric Sexology (poetry)
Morgan M. Page's At Land (chapbook/novelette - I'm a little nervous about this one since psychological horror is absolutely NOT the kind of stuff I want to read[1])
Ryka Aoki's He Mele A Hilo: A Hilo Song (novel) and/or her Seasonal Velocities (poetry, short stories, & essays)[2]
Amber Dawn's Where the Words End and My Body Begins (poetry)
Leanne Simpson's Islands of Decolonial Love (short story collection - I went to a reading of this one a couple of winters ago)
Saleema Nawaz's Bone and Bread (novel - also: Hee! I went to school with her when we were little, and also when we were big. "I knew her when," etc).


I've got Morgan's novelette and Dane's novel on order - who knows when they'll arrive in the mail - and the rest I'll get ahold of as and when I can scrape together the cash to do so. But that's the plan. I can get Nevada from amazon.ca for about $20 (and Leanne's and Saleema's books for less than that), but Ryka's and Trish's books (in paperback) are both running at over $100, so... looking elsewhere for those, I think. I can probably find Casey's collection at Venus Envy, even if I can't find it elsewhere.
We shall see.

Links to Things You Should Read:
The Heat of Us: Notes Towards an Oral History - a short story in Uncanny Magazine that is absolutely glorious and makes me want to cry.
When Every Day is Judgement Day - Terri Windling on Perfectionism.
My New Year's Wish - Neil Gaiman on Making Mistakes (2012)

Anyway. So that's the world of reading.
I've started editing the first third of The Novel. I decided that it was probably a good idea to take a break from the content-production part in order to try and get the first chunk of Draft One tidied up enough that I could see the way forward a little more clearly.
It's almost 46,000 words long. Which is awesome, but also slightly frightening. The goal, right now, is to fix any obvious inconsistencies (stuff like "making sure I keep the names straight") and trim off 15,000 words of dead-weight, if I can manage that - ideally by combining scenes so that twice as many Relevant Events/Statements happen in half the space. Here's hoping.


Artsy/Creative Goals for 2015:
Get closer to finishing The Novel - ideally by finishing Draft One and handing it off to Ami_B for editing purposes
Write enough (and curate enough already-written) poetry to fill two manuscripts: "How to Cook A Heart" (an exploration of love, vulnerability, openheartedness, polyamoury, and emotional abundance through the lens/metaphor of cooking/growing/foraging seasonal food), and "We Are All Jezebel" (an exploration of the intersections of femme (empowered/autonomous queer femininity), slut (desire, lust, erotica), and sexworker (professional nake girl, pornographer, but also solidarity, and a bunch of other related stuff), with the idea that they'll be ready to perform, even if they're not much published, by June of 2015
Continue teaching myself to edit video with the goal of producing some sort of weird, dream-scape-y "music video" for a piece of poetry or similar
Learn how to make audio recordings using a cheap-but-serviceable mic and, perhaps, a looping pedal (or downloaded open source looping software) and try to do something arty and fun with it, ideally in conjunction with the above-mentioned video production
Sing more - both in terms of frequency and in terms of learning new repertoire
Grow food & make a garden - Not artsy, necessarily, but something that will feed me in more ways than one, so worth putting here none the less.
Figure out how to do contouring makeup, and get better at it


Anyway. So that's where things are at right now.


TTFN,
Amazon.


[1] Then why am I reading it? Because the author's an acquaintance of mine. Because if I want to do a show with her, it would help if I was familiar with her work.

[2] I admit, I'd prefer Seasonal Velocities, but it'll depend a lot on which one I can find at an affordable (read ~$20, ideally less) price.

Kintsukuroi - a Japanese word refering to broken pottery that has been repaired using gold laquer; it comes with the understanding that the object is more beautiful for having been broken.

YAY LANGUAGE! :-D

I signed up for Camp Nanwrimo (June Edition).

I have a "novel" that I'm working on, and figure that this will be some kind of a "tell the internet" push to Encourage me to keep at it.


I'm also checking out Inkscrawl as, who knows, maybe I can write up some speculative poetry that is (a) awesome, and (b) less than ten lines long, and submit it to them. Perhaps they will like it and publish it. That would be awesome. :-)

I have just written a "Tetractys" (with, granted, a slight variation to the form). Go me. :-)

I'm writing a blog post for Syrens.
I'm writing a blog post for Syrens that is turning out to be slanting towards poetry
which is maybe not that surprising because, when I let myself get vulnerable, show my hand a little, I dress my words in rhythm, coat them in simile, try to make my ugliness pretty. Bearable.
Bareable.


Anyway. That's where I'm at.
I need to return a library book shortly, so I figure I'll go do that.


TTFN,
Amazon.

I am in need of a poetry beta-reader.

I've got a piece that I want to submit to the queer issue of Stone Telling, but I need to make sure that the "queer" and the "myth" are both clear enough.

It's 85 words long.


Any takers?

Who's got two thumbs and is performing at Dyke March?

This gal! :-D

Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee! :-D

Greetings!

Still writing on Ghost's netbook, but wanted to post. My erotica show is this Sunday (the 26th) at 8pm at Venus Envy (Lisgar, a few doors east of Bank). $5 gets you an hour of queer chick porn in literary form. :-) Doors open at 7:45.

I confess, I'm advertising the thing entirely on Facebook. :-\ I need to drop a note to the venue manager (Shelley) and ask her to list it on her events list as well.

I have another six poems to come up with between now and then, and not a lot of time in-which to write them. Wish me luck! :-D

Okay.

So, in other news, Pearly_Diamonds (VoV's June Feature) and I are going to be doing an erotic spoken word show at Venus Envy, most likely on the 26th of June. (Watch This Space for confirmation and further information! ;-) The plan is that, after the venue-rental fee, half the procceeds would go to POWER (because what better organization to-which to give the spoils of a smut-reading?) and the other half would be split between the two of us.


What this actually means: It means that I need to come up with about 20 minutes (about seven pieces) of erotic poetry and prose with-which to wow people, in short order. :-) One 3-minute piece per day until the end of next week.

Which means I know what I'm doing this afternoon. :-)


We'll also likely be performing at POWER's post-AGM soiree in early July, if I can finegle it. :-)



So, yeah. That's my story for the moment.


Time to pour myself a drink and get set up on the balcony. :-)


- TTFN,
- Amazon. :-)