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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.
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.
