06 November 2011
Breathing is Overrated
11/06/11 01:19 PM
Busy busy busy. So busy. I have a lot of respect and awe for people participating in National Novel-Writing Month, because while they’re all cranking out an average of 1500+ words a day, I’m looking at my schedule and trying to decide whether it’s more important to eat, sleep, or breathe. Decisions, decisions...
However, the biggest recent drain on my time is done, because Volume 1 of Constellations is finally out! This is a new literary journal run by a local acquaintance of mine, Nina Alonso, who was tired of the journals she read only publishing the “edgy” work currently in fashion, so she decided to start her own. She knew I was handy around computers, so after she’d accepted a bunch of my work for the first issue, she asked if I could help design the thing, lay it out, and get it turned into a real, physical thingy.
The closest I’d come to that sort of task was putting out four issues of a zine back in the mid-nineties (otherwise known as the “Microsoft-Word-5.1a-and-office-photocopier-abuse” days), but I was game to try, and I’m quite happy with how the final proof came out. Copies are now available for order at CreateSpace; they’re also up at Amazon, if that’s your bag, but please be aware that the journal will get a lot more of your $10 if you buy from CreateSpace than if you buy from Amazon.
Volume 1 is 6x9, 96 pages, and contains a slew of poetry, fiction, and a sprinkling of black-and-white art. It includes my poems “Abstraction in Green,” “On Call,” “Homographia,” and “Twelfth Night,” as well as a very short story I once wrote called “Speed Reading.” Now that the issue has been published, I’ve moved all of these from the password-protected pages into the main poetry library here on the site. It’s mostly older work—a lot from 2006, and nothing more recent than 2008—but I still at least like it all, even though that phase of my life is decidedly over.
And now that I’ve produced someone else’s literary journal, I have to say, I’m darn tempted to start my own. You know, in my voluminous spare time.
However, the biggest recent drain on my time is done, because Volume 1 of Constellations is finally out! This is a new literary journal run by a local acquaintance of mine, Nina Alonso, who was tired of the journals she read only publishing the “edgy” work currently in fashion, so she decided to start her own. She knew I was handy around computers, so after she’d accepted a bunch of my work for the first issue, she asked if I could help design the thing, lay it out, and get it turned into a real, physical thingy.
The closest I’d come to that sort of task was putting out four issues of a zine back in the mid-nineties (otherwise known as the “Microsoft-Word-5.1a-and-office-photocopier-abuse” days), but I was game to try, and I’m quite happy with how the final proof came out. Copies are now available for order at CreateSpace; they’re also up at Amazon, if that’s your bag, but please be aware that the journal will get a lot more of your $10 if you buy from CreateSpace than if you buy from Amazon.
Volume 1 is 6x9, 96 pages, and contains a slew of poetry, fiction, and a sprinkling of black-and-white art. It includes my poems “Abstraction in Green,” “On Call,” “Homographia,” and “Twelfth Night,” as well as a very short story I once wrote called “Speed Reading.” Now that the issue has been published, I’ve moved all of these from the password-protected pages into the main poetry library here on the site. It’s mostly older work—a lot from 2006, and nothing more recent than 2008—but I still at least like it all, even though that phase of my life is decidedly over.
And now that I’ve produced someone else’s literary journal, I have to say, I’m darn tempted to start my own. You know, in my voluminous spare time.
