dgp notes | july 2020

So we find ourselves midsummer, though the world is still terrifying in places and apprehension inducing even at it's best.  I have been settling back into a modified work schedule at the library, which strangely has given me a bit more structure in my day and dedicated work time for the press, which has been nice. While quarantine was this lawless land of scrolling the news and trying to be useful in a position where only 50 percent of what I do could be accomplished at home (and thus feeling compelled to produce like a maniac and have no work life boundaries lest I be furloughed.) I feel a bit sounder in my work/creative life balance that I can, most days, leave work at work and then come home to work on creative things.

I feel like I'm coming out of a mental fog that prevented me from deep diving on things like galley prep and cover design, so those are things that I am finally feeling up to.  We are slightly behind on the initial schedule, but there is a bit of wiggle room since we took on considerably less titles for this year after i was feeling way too overwhelmed in 2019 (I am still overwhelmed, but just for different reasons this year). There is also more space between titles, which will allow for more orders to be shipped without getting behind or chaotic in my shipping. I feel like 2019 was the year I bit off more than I can shew and I failed in so many ways, but I am trying to remedy this and set new plans for the future. It occurred to me, that this beautiful thing that I built had become a sort of prison in the fall, and leaving the rental space I could never really afford was a big part in beginning to heal that. 

Then again,  spring also had me floundering and feeling like I didn't quite know what the point was--to writing, to the press, to being creative in a world where people were dying en mass. Just a general feeling of hopelessness and disillusionment that made it impossible to write, To make things in general. To care about e-mails and ever growing to-do lists. . And just being terrified (of getting sick, of losing my job, of having no savings) and allowing it to fester.  I wanted to run away.  From everything.   But it occurred to me, especially as the summer began, how important, in these times, that we continue to do the work we do. The best we can do.

I hope to see you on the other side of this month more caught up on things and in remarkably better sorts. Also to dig in on reading subs for the next year, which are waiting in the inbox which feels far less scary and overwhelming now than it did two months ago. 

  Until August...