A Week on My Own (Again?)

A post from 2022 started with, "Odd weekend, since Anne left around 11am Saturday to go to Santa Ana to see two sisters from out of town and I had the whole weekend to do my own thing, whatever that turned out to be."

How times have (not) changed: Anne left around 11am last Friday to go to Santa Ana to see two sisters from out of town and I have until newxt Monday to do my own thing, whatever that turned out to be.

I found myself going through boxes again.  It's a bit annoying how my creative life got thrown into boxes and stuck in closets over and over again.  Now, there are whole bankers boxes full of "stuff".  I am sorting those into a box of old printed manuscripts, a box of notebooks & journals, anything that looks like art, a pile of music-related bits, plus a box to shred, a box for scrap paper, and a box to recycle.  

I also have about 4 bankers boxes full of old contributor copies for every zine I ever contributed to.  And another box of issues I was not in, but they were part of subscriptions or whatever.  I remember getting a lifetime subscription to Dreams & Nightmares for $50 back around 1989, and they're still putting out issues.  I promised myself I would keep them all together, but they're all over in different boxes, tucked onto shelves and such.

I also updated my "convention box" of available copies of chapbooks and zines to take to conventions or writer meetups.  A creative person should always have some things available for sale, even though I suck at selling things.

Those printed mss are obsolete but maybe some family member would be interested in getting a Priority Mail flat rate box full of weird stuff.  Sadly, the 2 or 3 boxes I sent to my Mom way back when came back to me after she died and we went out to Arizona to clean out her apartment.  2007?  Hard to believe she's been gone for 17 years.

I wrote some small new pieces and started typing up missing bits from old tiny notebooks from 2002 and 2007.  Normally, when I type up a piece, I put a checkbox with my manuscript code on it, plus a big check mark.  What code?  It's simply the piece of work (A for art, F for fiction, NF for nonfiction, P for poems) followed by a two year code, then the sequential number within the year.  So the flash fiction I just adapted from an old scribble became F24-2, the second story of 2024.

I spent a few hours updating my list of open markets.  So many of the ones from 10 years ago are gone.  It seems like they all have too many rules now.  The submissions pages are so bossy, with things like "We will not tolerate line breaks between paragraphs," or "If you submit again before you hear back from us, you will be banned for life."  It's not a hardcode combat video game, folks.  We're working together to come up with little volumes of goodies.  I never blocked anyone in all my years as an editor, never micromanaged.  Some of my favorite submissions showed up in the mailbox as manila envelopes full of handwritten scraps and doodles.

Anyway, I mostly received a very warm welcome from the editors I know who were still active, and placed a handful of stories and poems.

I also spent time updating all my spreadsheets, so I don't accidentally send out reprints without knowing it.  And I started a new WordPress page with all new credits pages, because 90% of the links on my old site were broken.  It was just easier to update all sources side-by-side in one long project.