notes & things | 12/22/2018

I will be away from the blog  as we come into the holiday so this is about as close as I will get to an actual Christmas post.  I'll be spending a few days at my dad's with no real gathering plans outside the immediate family.  I sometimes feel like holidays were these great big shindigs and presents and food, but when you pluck the central people out of them (ie my mom and my aunt) , they sort of dissipate, as has most of my enthusiasm for the holiday.

Since I can't skip it entirely (believe me, I thought about ways to do this but none have seemed feasible) I've been trying to get into the spirit by watching x-mas horror movies like Black Christmas and Silent Night, Deadly Night and making cookies, even wrote a christmas-y poem in the swallow series, but I've since resigned that there is little than can pull me out of my holiday funk.  I do realize that yesterday's solsitice means we are on the upswing in terms of longer days, so today's dark at 4:30 pained me a little less than yesterday's.

Today, I did manage to polish off all but a handful of responses for next year's slate of chapbooks.  I have a few more rejections to send out, but the acceptances have been notified. I will be working on galleys for the last of the books from this season and the first few of next in the coming weeks.  I am also mailing out tomorrow a giant batch of orders and author copies I've been working on the last couple weeks.  When I get back, things will be a bit more orderly in general processing.

I'll be back on Thursday for a couple free days in the studio, and then some time off at home through the New Year. I'm hoping to work on editing some of the work I've finished recently, another poets manuscript critique,  and to play around with some art endeavors I've been hoping to get to.. I'll be back here with my usual year end round up post and some more writing related discussions on poetry and place  and some things I am hoping to get to work on in the new year, so stay tuned..