Time for another book

Well, my mother's birthday was, in fact, February 7. I visited her and my dad and Owen. The baseball cap that was hooked onto a little marker at Owen's grave in September 2000 is still there. As I left the cemetery, I noticed something I'd never noticed before: A couple of headstones were memorials for people who died in the Holocaust: so there was a birthdate, but no date of death.

Worked a bit this morning on a small anthology I'm going to publish through Proper Tales: it's work from my November 2005 Advanced Poetry Boot Camp. Really interesting little project: gonna be a good one.

As for my own writing, the novel is crawling along, maybe 5 pages a day on average. I expect to be finished this month. I sure wonder about it. And I've been writing a poem every couple of days, as well. On the weekend, I poured my Chile poems into my ongoing poetry MS and it seems I've got a book there now. After the novel, I'll concentrate on that.

Yesterday I got a batch of photocopied reviews of Confessions, from Anvil Press. There were a couple I hadn't seen before. One said I was angry, another said I was whiney. They were pretty neat. I'll post excerpts on my website sometime soon. I imagine that's the last of the Confessions reviews. Better get another book out there!

Tonight: a reading in the Draft reading series. Me and John Barlow and Tricia Postle and Beth Follett and Julia Steinecke. Me and John were last seen coming to verbal fisticuffs (verbicuffs?) on the Lexiconjury listserv. Feels like it's my first reading in a long time, but maybe that's because Chile felt like six months instead of 24 days. Not sure exactly what I'll be reading. Probably bring a heap of stuff and choose at the last minute. As usual. Finished a poem today that seems really unusual (for me). It's called "Bowser's Blue Assassin. Kev gave me a title the other night, but it's so absurd (and funny) I couldn't tell if he was serious: I think, though, that that was the challenge. Maybe I'll take it up this afternoon.

Saturday I give a breakfast talk for the Writers' Circle of Durham Region. The topic is: chapbooks. Gotta be in Whitby at 9 a.m., which is sort of barbaric. But the Ass Ponys'll get me there.

Over and out.