Getting Ready For New Orleans

I spent the weekend, mostly, inside. I bought food on Friday evening and cooked my own meals and only ventured out yesterday for a Poetry Atlanta meeting. 

There's always a bit of frenzy before I leave for a trip, and it's already started: laundry, packing, finishing some editing projects and, of course, racing against the clock to finish things for my day job. I brought home work from the office. Yawn. 

Megan Volpert, her lovely lady Mindy and I are heading out mid-morning on Thursday for our road trip to New Orleans for the Saints and Sinners Literary Festival. We plan to arrive in time to get checked in to the hotel and then head over to the Gold Mine Saloon to check out the reading series and hear James Nolan read from his new book. Looking forward to that! Friday is workshop day and I think I'll be in Dorothy Allison's class most of the afternoon. We do our big reading on Saturday. 

Today, I got a lovely invitation from the organizers of the Tallahassee Pridefest (the city's big GLBTQ celebration) to come and feature at their literary event and sit on a panel June 10. I'm pretty sure I'm accepting. I've never been to Tallahassee, nor have I ever thought of going, but I'm feeling adventurous these days. 

There's something else big cooking behind the scenes that I can't talk about yet. It seems to be a season of secrets on some poet's blogs right now, so I'm throwing my hat into the ring. Let's just say it will be beneficial not only to me, but writers I love who aren't getting the recognition they deserve. 

Gotta go get to work on my mix CD for the drive to the Big Easy. Mix cd...sigh. That just doesn't have the same romanticism as mix tape.