Spent the earlier part of the day going over the pdf's of feign from NMP. The typesetting and layout GORGEOUS! (I get way too geeked over fonts.) Just a few things to be fixed--my dreaded missteps on "its" and "it's" (even when I know the rules, I still persist in screwing it up), some extra spaces, and a wonky line break. Otherwise--perfection. We're still hammering out the release date, since the other book is coming out round then. At least there's no overlap in the poems. Even though I considered keeping them as one big whopping 100 page manuscript last summer at the height of my book fever, I'm glad they weren't in there when Ghost Road accepted it. They just didn't fit, subject-wise and stylistic-wise...plus I've added alot to them in the past year. There was this weird break in my work around the fall of 2004, which was where the old book ends and feign poems started. I was working on errata around then and that might be part of it, something differing pretty greatly from my usual repetoire. They were supposed to be a full-length book themselves, but wound up shorter and I was ready to move onto new stuff. Looking at them now, I realize, at 40 pages,they're pobably just as complete a project as the fever almanac is at 60, which does just continue to blur those lines between "full-length" and "chapbook."
It's not a sure thing just yet, but we might be using the bird collage on the cover in black and white. I went looking for pictures of mechanical or wind-up birds a few weeks ago, and decided to send it, to illustrate what I was going for, and they seemed to like it. Now that I think about it, it's perfect actually, especially with the sentence diagrams tying in ith the first poem. The poems also have alot birds, alot of machinery and metal. the idea of falseness, fakery. When she was in town, Sarah G. mentioned at Quimby's about her unintentional addiction to writing about birds..I seem to be afflicted similarly the past couple of years--probably one reason why I loved her book so much when she submitted it (also the cover art by Elisabeth Pellathy.) I mean look what dulcet is about--birds and a dead girl, of course. It's a sickness..
Yesterday, I fished out my camera, which even with the flash broken, still takes fairly decent pics in the daytime. Thus my new profile pic, here and on the website, and also some other shots below. Note the sliver of kitty peeking from behind the laptop, which is what I usually have to contend with when trying to work, moving cats repeatedly off my stuff.
This weekend's entertainment line-up is more Japanese horror movies. Last night, something called Marebito, about subterrerannean vampire creatures, not scary but at times sort of disturbingly erotic with the whole sucking thing. Tonight's offering--Dead Waves, which is supposedly about exorcisms.
