notes & things | 5/7/2025
Much has been afoot in the in-betweens since my last update. Most days are still chilly and early-Mayish, but the trees and greenery prove otherwise, with everything blooming along the sidewalk. The magnolias outside the catholic school were there then gone, but thankfully, we managed to be out early enough (we are usually moving about in the dark) I caught a couple of glimpses at their peak as we drove by. I scheduled and appointment with my tattooist for the end of this month to add some more to my shoulder, which is, if you remember the first ones I got on my forearm just two years ago.
In the past two weeks, I somehow turned 51. We are in saving $$$ mode for the wedding, so instead of going out for a lavish dinner, we stayed home while J made nachos and margaritas and we watched one of my all-time faves Tucker and Dale vs.. Evil. My gift was an Evil Dead tee with the Necronomican and the words "Reading is Fun" on the front. I have pretty much accepted I will never feel this age or that. In my head, I hover somewhere in my late 20s/early 30s indefinitely just with more mileage now, less ability to see in dim light than I used to have, and random aches and pains outta nowhere. Time feels long and rubbery like saltwater taffy that just keeps churning.
My days are mostly writing, writing, writing, but also listening to the Moulin Rouge soundtrack on repeat since we saw it a few weeks back. Also wedding planning, all the tricky track details of which are being procured and ironed out, with really only food and shopping we'll do in the last couple of weeks to plan for. Our rings arrived over the weekend, but we do still need to write our vows. Invitations and their envelopes are currently almost ready to mail with the calligraphy lettering being finished up by my mother-in-law-to-be (who does this sort of thing as her job and has won awards for it, so they will be good.) I daily change my mind on which of the three potential dresses I will actually be wearing that day, but it will all shake out in the end as we get closer.
I got the proof for WILD(ish) last week and set immediately to making any edits or final margin adjustments. This book is thankfully not as long as RUINPORN (just under 100 pages), so is much speedier to get through the proofing project. The cover is looking great. I've also been working on another round of dgp releases and getting the final few responses out for next season's books. Though the number of selections is not as large as past years due to time constraints, the ones I've chosen are a lovely lot I can't wait to show you. It's hard to believe I am facing down another round of submissions this summer already since it took so long to manage these.
In other more creative work, I finished up the sci-fi-inspired group of poems and launched wholeheartedly into revisiting the Greeks, this time tackling Iphigenia, which I did a series of collages (see above) about a couple years back and would love to turn into a full-zine. So far there are ten of them shaking around. I seem to keep circling back to mythology with regularity, with so many ways it has impacted past projects, obviously GRANATA, but also things like TAURUS (a contemporary retelling / exploration of the minotaur story.) This week we get to see Hadestown on stage (a musical about Orpheus and Euridyce), so that should be some excellent fun and probably my next Broadway soundtrack obsession.
In movie news, I cannot recommend seeing Sinners more. We've seen it twice and will likely hit the theater a third time in the coming week. It easily pushed its way into my top-5 vampire genre films. The first time we saw it, we paired it with The Ugly Stepsister, a Norwegian horror retelling of Cnderella that had the only scene in my life I almost couldn't stomach. It reminded in its themes of The Substance, but somehow darker and more grotesque (if that's even possible.) Other screenings have included a fun horror/comedy anthology called Freaky Tales, the video game-spawned Until Dawn, and Rosario, a bit of Mexico-inspired folk horror.
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