My poems are registered as weapons...

Note to Jay Robinson of the Barn Owl Review: Hey, sorry about the top of your head. I sometimes wear duct tape wrapped around my scalp when reading poetry, to avert just such injuries. You might try that.

Seriously, I was quite floored when I read this interview and found such nice things said about my poem! All the more so because judging from the buzz around ye olde blogosphere, there's going to be a lot of really fine work included in the inaugural issue of Barn Owl Review.

I've had so much good news lately that the only thing to be done is to get cracking and send out a bunch more poems. That way I'll get a bunch of rejections and the world will be restored to its rightful balance.

:)

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This writing retreat looks really lovely, doesn't it? It's not one of the fancy ones where you get to stay there for free and they feed you and everything, but the cost seems pretty reasonable, and it looks to me like a place where one could get a lot of writing done.

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According to this article, the debut album by Two Nice Girls is being re-released, with extra tracks and essays and photos! This is totally awesome news. I was a huge, huge Two Nice Girls fan back in the day. Their most famous song was "I Spent My Last $10 (On Birth Control and Beer)" and part of it went like this:
I spent my last ten dollars
On birth control and beer
My life was so much simpler
When I was sober and queer
But the love of a strong hairy man
Has turned my head, I fear
And made me spend my last ten bucks
On birth control and beer.
Imagine that, totally tongue-in-cheek, all countrified, with wailing steel guitars and so forth. It was brilliant. They also did a great mashup of "Sweet Jane" with Joan Armatrading's "Love and Affection" and (though it wasn't on aforementioned debut album) one of their songs actually mentioned my all-time favorite book of all time, Harriet the Spy. They were big fun in concert, too. I am so ordering this reissue. You can get it via cdbaby (right here!), which is one of my favorite places to order music. They're fast, and all their customer communication is really adorable.

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90-plus degree heat for the past three days, and predicted to have more of the same for the next week and a half or so. And this being Indiana, it's humid, too. This weather makes me miss the ocean! I hope you are all staying cool, calm, and somewhat collected.