Sabbaticalling: Weekly Roundup #12

We'll jump right in here:

I  finished the short novel that was taking me pretty long to read. I also made a trip to the library and stayed for three hours, reading up a storm about fairies and elves and gnomes and garden gnomes, which are NOT the same thing. Online it was all about Fence, Blunderbuss, Flapperhouse, Queen Mob's Tea House, Electric Literature, The Toast, McSweeney’s, and The Paris Review. Then I listened to the last third of the most recent episode of The Catapult.

I submitted both prose and poetry to websites and journals. The prose got immediately rejected from two places, but I'm waiting on a third. The poetry did not get immediately rejected, though I did receive a few rejections from older submissions. I also received an acceptance, so that evens it out cosmically.

Photo by Kaeti Wigeland. During workshop.

After workshopping with my artist friend this week, I revised some poems. I didn't write any new ones. Research, note-taking, and revising were more my speed this week.

I got the educational freelance gig I applied for last week, so I spent some time this week doing business stuff like printing and signing and scanning contracts for this gig and for the reading I'm doing in CT next month. I also worked on planning some new Poets in Nassau readings and some more of my own.

Staying in my house for the most part has been wonderful. I like staying at home. I rarely get antsy. That means when I get out in the world, it gets to be overwhelming. There are people everywhere! I read for Flapperhouse at the Pacific Standard with a wonderful line-up of writers, and the room had other people in it, and there were people in the bar and people on the street and people everywhere, walking, driving, standing, breathing. Like, lots of people. These were all nice people. At least the ones I met were.

Probably the most out-of-the-ordinary thing I did this week was buy a domain name and start building a website. I enrolled in a free Coursera course about website building, and it shows a lot of step-by-step planning for building something on Wordpress. I'm already familiar with Wordpress as a blogging site--because I'm a blogger--so I jumped in and did it. Pretty soon, all my info will be up at christinamrau.com. I don't know if I'll keep blogging here or move it totally to there. I mean, I've been blogging on Blogger since 2005, first with Livin' The Dream and now this. Moving out of here completely would be pretty interesting. Terrifying. But also interesting. We'll see how it goes.