Weekend Update

I was a bit disappointed in the turnout for Saturday's Stonewall Reading at the downtown branch of the Atlanta Library. Even some of the performers didn't bother to show up. Bad form. Still, it was great to hear some of my favorite poets read, including Jessica Hand, Robin Kemp and Megan Volpert, who debuted a piece of her new "Andy Warhol project." It was 96 degrees on Saturday with the heat index at 100, so maybe that kept a few folks indoors.

Yesterday, I got my shit together and submitted poems (yes, I'm still a poet despite all this fiction blather) to two literary magazines. I've got work coming out in another lit mag later this year, the introduction to an anthology in the UK and, fingers crossed, a couple of poems in another anthology coming in 2010.

I think I mentioned on the blog before that work on the sequel to Conquering Venus has been at a standstill. On Saturday, another piece of the plot fell into place that had been eluding me for months. I have a beginning and end, it's just finding the connective tissue between the two that has been difficult. Conquering Venus takes place in 1995, the sequel two years later, beginning the day that Princess Diana dies in Paris. I'm 99.9 percent sure the third book in the trilogy will take place in 2005 -- a full 10 years after the events of Conquering Venus. I digress. You all still need to read the first book before you hear about the other two. I have a four-day weekend coming up, and I plan to use most of that to work on the sequel.

South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford was probably dancing through the halls of the govenor's mansion belting the Evita soundtrack all weekend, since the untimely deaths of Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson knocked him almost completely out of the news cycle. The cartoon above sumes it up. Thanks to Joe.My.God. -- my favorite LGBT blog -- for the image.