Another holiday weekend that seemed surreal, though his was a bit different and less sad since I rarely spent Easter with my parents. It wasn't usually a holiday where much was happening anyway, particularly in more recent years. With the family rift on my mom's side and my dad's side of the family never really gathering for Easter, most the holidays most often found me in the city and gnawing the heads off chocolate bunnies and making zombie jesus jokes aplenty. This time, I was at J's boss's house again with groups of new people and more familiar strangers, which was the same sort of chaos as Christmas, just with more guests. I hid a large part of the pre-dinner mayhem outside on the patio having an introvert crises and watching the planes take off over the sky from nearby Midway, where it was warmish as the sun went down, but eventually the cool air forced me back inside.
My windows have been, however, open the past two days, and last night, I slept like the dead and woke up earlier than usual. It's amazing how much open windows and sunny days impact my mood and energy levels..almost as if I was an insect in a jar you suddenly took the lid off for. I wrote articles all morning and worked on cover designs all afternoon. I wrote a poem. I made art reels and graphics. I didn't hit that 5pm wall where I need a nap. In a week or so, I suspect we will start to see some green on the trees if its not there already.
The NAPOWRIMO poems continue to go well, but I may switch up projects in a few days and move on to something else. I suspected this might be a shorter series, so am planning where to turn my efforts next. I will be deleting each one after a few days to edit and polish next month perhaps. At this point I do not yet know if they are a fit with the RUINPORN mss. or maybe something entirely new. Thematically I think they fit, but tonally I'm not sure. May will be for editing and regrouping and then turning my attention toward COLLAPSOLOGIES, which has been sitting printed out on my desk since the end of last summer. I am hoping to get it into shape and ready for publication by mid-summer, but we'll see how it goes. I also am thinking of making a new series of video poems for summer since last year's project was so much fun (I've been making shorter bits, but they're just mostly reels and social media content.)
I am also going to start submitting individual poems to journals now that I've been getting more organized and systematic about creative things in general, which seems like the antithesis of art, but more that I am better at sticking to routines and structure and have made room for time to do some research on markets and guidelines and actually get some poems out there in the wilds. I also have a lot of work built up that has not, and will not for awhile, see the light of day..mostly GRANATA pieces from last summer and the HOME IMPROVEMENTS series I was working on at the end of this winter (and that go along with those most recent collages.)
