The past couple weeks have been heavy with the winter blues and a bug that knocked me on my ass last weekend worse than any in a decade, and so was thus spent shivering and fevery in bed and in the aftermath sniffling and coughing all week long. Queue the usual January malaise. Add in some weird dreams about my mom and I've been off kilter much of this month. This weekend is predicted to be a particularly wintery one and already there is a lot of snow of the sort I was hoping we'd be able to somehow slip out from under winter without and yet, here it is. So I am determined to drink tea and make soup and not go outside during the entire three day weekend. Tuesday brings the usual semester hours and my earlier-in-the-day studio hours which are always more productive and sane.
I did finish up the swallow series and get more of a start on my (as yet untitled) doomed Hollywood starlet set of poems (using as inspiration my Black Dahlia and Hollywood sign ghost research I've been doing the past couple of years.) Starting my day in the studio will also regulate that useful writing schedule again, which has been in flux since mid December and more scattershot recently after breaking for the holiday.
I'm still in the progress of navigating sites away from Tumblr. The dgp site, which used to land on the domain page it always has and feed into Tumblr now just lets you navigate from that very first page. For the past few years, it took you to a news page that I really only populated with new releases anyway and never much news. We always had some Tumblr followers, but it was never our primary source of social media traffic, so I'm not sure I'll see a difference in how people get to the shop portion. The info pages are now in the shop proper (and actually make sense since people are occasionally in the online store and try to find submission guidelines and such in there, and now can instead of going back out of the Shopify site. I'm still trying to figure out exactly what to do with wicked alice, less important since I'm going to be doing issues, but I still need a launch/info page that is ideally not Tumblr. I'm just really tired of having to appeal things when their bots deem any nudity adult content, which its very obviously not. I feel like since platforms come in and out of vogue anyway, and less people have been using tumblr as a social media option anyway (even the Library has nixxed Tumblr) they may have just put a nail in their own coffin.
Preparations are underway on a new batch of chaps and the Mansion anthology, plus getting the December releases out into the world. I'm still working on some of the last 2018 releases, but a couple of the first of the 2019 books have been hitting the site as well and this year is looking very auspicious. I will not be able to go to AWP this year due to work (we are still down 40 percent of our positions in the library) and money issues (I haz none on the disposable income front), but keep an eye out for some author organized events that are in the works and that I'll be providing books for.
In the Library, in addition to getting mad disrespected in a committee meeting this week that left me furious, preparations are humming along for spring events , including our Strange Fever's colloquium. (see poster above), plus some fun little things in February like a rom com trivia night, a collage pendant workshop I've been shopping supplies for, and our Surrealist love letter reading. We're still working on developing the idea for our Artists & Scholars Colloquium in early April that condenses much of what we usually do across the span of a semester into a single intensive day. (which will either be amazing or an utter nightmare--not yet sure which..lol)
