notes & things / 7/14/ 2025
Summer continues to happen, though admittedly I am tucked inside more days than not, with small nighttime forays out for date nights. Last week, we tried a new restaurant down in my old haunting grounds of Lincoln Park using a gift card we got from the wedding and walking the couple blocks to the place and then back, buzzed slightly on margaritas and stuffed with fancy tacos, it felt strange to be out and walking around in the world (many of our movie theater outings involve a lot of connected parking garages.) I guess its a difference between commuting daily and having to walk or take public transport everywhere vs. driving everywhere. It's also been way to warm for many random neighborhood wanderings this summer. I feel like I spend less time out in the world even while going out much more than I used to somehow. Considering how terrible the world is, this may be a good thing. We're panning a couple overnights (including the drive in!) in the next few weeks, so that will help me feel less caged up surely, as well as making plans for things like museum and planetarium visits over the next couple of months. Plus, theater outings as soon as the coffers refill from wedding spending.
Mostly, I am working. On articles, on the memoir project, on new poems. Or, depending on the day's focus, on layouts and cover designs and assembling orders and author copies. This tales most of the day each day, even on weekends, punctuated only by outings later in the day, after the sun has been vanquished by twilight. We're still in that period when the days feel long and full of possibility. I know it ends, it always does, but even inside, it helps my mental health immensely to see the sun set well after 8pm. Lately, its been stormy and rainy like much of the country, with banks of clouds moving in late in the day. It feels much more like June weather than July weather, but June was unusually hot this year ,so who knows?
I've wrapped up the swamp bird girl poems, and have been submitting them with a couple of successes and a few pert no-thanks. Today I pulled out some pieces from earlier in the year that needed a revisit from the MIDNIGHT GARDEN manuscript that has been languishing untouched for awhile. I even manages to polish a few up that were closer to done to submit, though labeling them feels increasingly harder. Some are shorter, and therefore more like prose poems. Others span a page or more and have paragraphs and are more akin to flash fiction pieces. I tried a little of both in terms of markets, so we'll see if they sink or swim. I am also getting things ready for the Patreon re-launch, where you'll be able to get, this first month, a copy of WILD(ISH), some cute botanical prints on fancy paper, postcards, and a fun sticker. Plus bonus digital content. I would like to group monthly offerings around themes or vibes, so we'll see if I can keep that up (I already think September is going to be more oceanic and sea-inspired.) For August, if all goes well in my proofing of it, you'll be able to get your hands on a special deluxe print version of EXOTICA, so of course, that month will be sideshows-inspired.
In the in-betweens, there are small treats amid the horror of the news daily and my penchant for aimless doomscrolling, including fruit covered Dutch babies with bacon (see above), lots of coffee, frozen cocktails in the evening made in the new blender, and good shows about serial killers (we've moved onto Hannibal, which I am loving, but have never seen and don't have a lot of familiarity with the novels or films beyond Silence of the Lambs..)
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