MOVING HELL BEGINS: I'm about a week away now from the big move. I'm leaving the loft after five years, and although I knew I had accumulated a lot of stuff (as you do), you never realize just how much until you have to move it. What I need is the BBC to send that Life Laundry host to help me sort and trash. I am a packrat by nature and have collected an embarrassing number of magazines, mostly from the UK. They have to go. I hate to see all those copies of Q, Time Out London and Vanity Fair go in the trash, but I simply cannot take them with me.
Tonight, my pals Kathy and Mark came up and carted off my old entertainment center. Kathy had been coveting it for years and now it's finally hers. She also took back the brick and wooden shelves she had left for me back in 1999 (!) when I moved into her old apartment down in Jonesboro. I'm buying all new bookcases from IKEA, which opens in Atlanta on June 29. Yeah...I know...it's soooo gay. Every gay guy I know is about to wet themselves over the opening of IKEA in Atlanta. Anyway...moving the entertainment center and all those bricks and shelves left me totally exhausted. My loft is a wreck. I can't wait to get to the new apartment and settle in. I want to nest and finish the next collection of poetry.
Before I leave the loft, however, I'm putting my novel, Conquering Venus, back in the mail. The first half of the book has undergone an extreme makeover -- its' now 13 pages shorter. I took the editor's suggestion at the publishing house and decided to cut away some of the exposition that slows down the narrative, create more dialogue and generally moves the story more quickly toward the novel's setpiece, the bombing of the Saint-Michel metro station in Paris. This event comes at the half-way point and radically changes the characters' lives. The editor said everything past the bomb was fantastic, it was just getting to the bomb that moved slowly. I think I've solved that problem. It will be his call. I'm also entering it in a couple of contests. Can't hurt.
This weekend is the Georgia Writers Spring Festival at the Smyrna Community Center. I'll be teaching a workshop at 3 p.m. on marketing poetry. The festival is a day-long series of workshops that should appeal to all types of writers. Come out if you can.
Oh...and nothing from Mary in the new Creative Loafing. With the Java Monkey Speaks Anthology being released on June 19 (I co-edited it with Kodac Harrison and Cherryl Floyd-Miller, so I'm quite proud and excited), the slam team going to the nationals in August and Voices Carry 2 set for Sunday, Sept. 11 at the Carter Center, there are so many more exciting things to focus on.
Tonight, my pals Kathy and Mark came up and carted off my old entertainment center. Kathy had been coveting it for years and now it's finally hers. She also took back the brick and wooden shelves she had left for me back in 1999 (!) when I moved into her old apartment down in Jonesboro. I'm buying all new bookcases from IKEA, which opens in Atlanta on June 29. Yeah...I know...it's soooo gay. Every gay guy I know is about to wet themselves over the opening of IKEA in Atlanta. Anyway...moving the entertainment center and all those bricks and shelves left me totally exhausted. My loft is a wreck. I can't wait to get to the new apartment and settle in. I want to nest and finish the next collection of poetry.
Before I leave the loft, however, I'm putting my novel, Conquering Venus, back in the mail. The first half of the book has undergone an extreme makeover -- its' now 13 pages shorter. I took the editor's suggestion at the publishing house and decided to cut away some of the exposition that slows down the narrative, create more dialogue and generally moves the story more quickly toward the novel's setpiece, the bombing of the Saint-Michel metro station in Paris. This event comes at the half-way point and radically changes the characters' lives. The editor said everything past the bomb was fantastic, it was just getting to the bomb that moved slowly. I think I've solved that problem. It will be his call. I'm also entering it in a couple of contests. Can't hurt.
This weekend is the Georgia Writers Spring Festival at the Smyrna Community Center. I'll be teaching a workshop at 3 p.m. on marketing poetry. The festival is a day-long series of workshops that should appeal to all types of writers. Come out if you can.
Oh...and nothing from Mary in the new Creative Loafing. With the Java Monkey Speaks Anthology being released on June 19 (I co-edited it with Kodac Harrison and Cherryl Floyd-Miller, so I'm quite proud and excited), the slam team going to the nationals in August and Voices Carry 2 set for Sunday, Sept. 11 at the Carter Center, there are so many more exciting things to focus on.
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GAV
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