Okay- Time for an update.
Painter is doing great. He's gained the appropriate amount of weight for his size and is pretty mild-mannered. He doesn't cry much and seems to enjoy hanging out more than anything. He's abnormally strong and is already trying to roll over and crawl. I've got footage of it because I know no one will believe me. We take him out in public a lot and he seems to be doing fine with everything. He likes cold air, too. The only problem with going out is that you get hounded by the Baby People. You know, those people that, while they're strangers, have no problem coming up to you and wanting to see your baby. Then they croon to it and are really talkative and pretty much just stand there in front of you loving the baby. They're okay, but it still takes up a lot of our outside time and mostly, I have no idea what to say to satisfy them so they'll move on. Also, I'm already getting tired of having to explain and/or defend why the baby's name is Painter. There is no reason. We have a lot of painter friends. We liked it. We came up with it long before we decided to have a baby. They say that's bad luck, but that's just an old wives tale. You run into lots of wives tales when you have a baby. Things various people will tell you are sure-fire remedies, or ridiculous bits of information that supposedly really work, like a heads-up penny is good luck, heartburn while pregnant means the baby will have lots of hair, or the electoral college.
My publishing campaign has thrown a shoe lately. I'm not sure what happened. I was receiving a lot of responses up until about three weeks ago, then nothing. The mailbox is empty now. I don't get anything, rejections, acceptances, maybes... nothing. It's confusing because there are so many of them that haven't gotten back to me yet, and I've never had so many publications past due on their stated response periods at one time. I prefer rejections to uncertainty. Well, who wouldn't? But, I'll hear something back soon.
A lot has happened since the last entry... Let's see: We got out of the hospital finally, were there for six days. Maisy had a C-section, which put her out of commission until very recently. Painter is almost a month old. Maisy had her 24th birthday on the 27th of February. I got a proposition while we were still in the hospital from an editor involving my poetical fugue theory (Kunst Der Fuge has it, there's a link on my main page). Basically, I emailed Florentin Smarandache the link and asked if he wouldn't mind taking a look at it. He's the editor of Paradoxism, and also a well-known professor of mathematics. My fugue theory deals heavily with mathematics and some rather intensive formatting (recursion, voice extension, lots of metrical devices that play out systematically in their own variable habits...). He liked it and asked me to write an essay linking it to the paradoxist art movement. Well, that was the day my son had been born, so I put it off for a week, but eventually wrote it. I hadn't written an essay in over a decade and even back then, I always made-up my sources and lied my way through it. But, I'm all grown up now so I figured out what to do and wrote the essay. He agreed to publish it in his 5th International Anthology of Paradoxism. Essays are an entirely different world than poems. I had a tough time with it, but I suppose everything worked out.
In addition to the Fat Tuesday group on Yahoo!, I was invited to join the First Step Press group, and yesterday joined the group for NetAuthor. Let's see, the last rejection I got was from here in Oregon. Oregon is proving to be my curse. I can't get any footing here at all. Just about everything in Oregon has rejected me. The Jefferson Monthly picked up one of my poems, but they're not a writing or poetry magazine. However, they ARE in Oregon. I'm still waiting to hear back from the Northwest Review out of Eugene.
Also, people should go check out www.miraclefruitstudio.com. Elijah Brubaker and Alissa Nielsen set it up to highlight some of their good work. These kids are beautiful. Go look.
Just about finished with my new main page. I should be able to set it online in about two or three days. It's more graphic than my current one, and it will help to remove some of that bloggy look so many blogsites have now. Don't get me wrong, I'm really pleased with blogspot at this point, I just don't want to be a template-baby anymore. Everybody's site looks like mine, vice versa. All of the templates are popular.
That's it for now. Actually, that's not it, but that's all I'm saying for now. I'll throw a few pictures in.
No comments:
Post a Comment