This Thursday, Other Voices--or more specifically I, along with OV Managing Editor Kathy Kosmeja--heads to Los Angeles for a long weekend of readings and festivities. For me, the trip will be a milestone of sorts in more ways than one.
For starters (though less to the point here), it will be my first trip away from Giovanni, who will turn 8 months old the day of my return.
It's also only the second time I'll have ever been to Los Angeles in my adult life . . . and I hope the first time it will not rain the entirety of my trip.
But the bigger issue here is that it will mark the end of a frenzied 9 month period--from my release party on January 20--of readings from MY SISTER'S CONTINENT. I'll read three times while in LA with some of my favorite writers (and definitely my favorite Californians!), and then, other than a panel/reading at AWP in February and a gig at U-W-Milwaukee that same month, I am officially hanging up my shingle. It's been a great ride, better than I ever expected, but the length of a pregnancy is definitely long enough to spend promoting a novel, and I will be relieved to . . . well, never check my Amazon.com ranking again, basically, and to officially move on, in all ways, to new projects.
As anyone patient enough to read this blog whenever I manage to post to it knows, my life is more than a little chaotic lately. Actually, this has always been true, at least since I became a mother while simultaneously running a nonprofit business and writing and teaching--but traditionally all the chaos has been "good chaos," and has feuled my energy rather than depleting it. Since June, though, with both my mother and my husband's mother facing serious health problems, while my dad is partly disabled, the issue of "how busy I am" has become more of a stress than a thrill. To no one's surprise except perhaps my own, even a fair bit of mania cannot render a woman super-human, and I have hit a decided wall in terms of not being able to take anything else on without all the other balls I have in the air falling on my head. Each ball seems to have a label on it: Mother, Daughter, Writer, Wife, Editor, Daughter-in-Law, Teacher, Friend . . . even Grant-Writer, Event Planner, Advance-Copies-of-O-Street-Sender-Outer, Parents' Chauffeur, Play-Date-Organizer, Homework Supervisor and Lunch Packer. And so the one that says "Blogger" keeps falling down and rolling away, and I am too busy to chase it. So I must announce that the OV blog, while hopefully not "dead," is going on official hiatus until things calm down here in my neck of the woods.
OV will continue to list our forthcoming events on our website, www.othervoicesmagazine.org and will make any announcements for submission calls or other developments there. We will maintain a link for our blog on the website so that OV readers can check in from time to time to see if we're resuming our dialogue on the publishing world here--and if you know me personally, you can rest assured that if I have your email address, you'll be getting a personal signal when we do.
Thank you--anyone who has visited us, ever--for supporting indie publishing, and for supporting OV in particular. Wish Tod Goldberg luck for the SCBA Awards dinner this Saturday, and if you live in the Los Angeles area, come say hi at one of our readings, listed in the last entry to this blog.
Despite my initial skepticism about blogging, I've missed having time to write here these past couple of months, and will look forward to doing so again!
Cheers,
Gina
Recent Comments