New Review of Unexplained Fevers at Escape Into Life and Geek Girl Con

Thanks to Kathleen Kirk who wrote a really thoughtful review of Unexplained Fevers at Escape into Life here.  As always with reviews, I know it takes time and energy away from your own writing, so I really appreciate it! I love the title of the review: “Diagnostic Mysteries!” Sounds like a House episode!

I’m finishing up a presentation on “Geek Girl Poetry” for Geek Girl Con this Saturday (8 PM) – with a media signing with my panelists Kelly Davio and Nicole Dieker at 10 AM, bright and shiny! (I hear Amber Benson, who played Tara in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Jane Espenson, one of my fave Hollywood writers, may be around the media signing area in the morning as well, so keep your eyes open.) Going to Geek Girl Con is always fascinating, and I tend to always run into an artist or writer I admire there. I’m hoping I sell some books at the early signing (since it’s actually before our event, which has never happened before…) but the whole experience there is usually really fun. We’re supposed to have dry, sunny weather all weekend, too – almost never happens this late in October, so that’s a bonus.

I’ve been working on a little fiction story and let me say, working on fiction really makes me appreciate how much more work fiction writers have to do to create a decent story compared to a decent poem – just about the time you feel like you’ve got your plot and characters, you have to go back and smooth out transitions, check the language, think about dialogue – it’s a lot! This could be because I haven’t tried writing fiction very often, and so my skills are rusty. It turns out my fiction stories are a lot like my persona poems – same themes, same kinds of voices – just sustained longer, and I have to take them somewhere, like carrying them around in a backpack through a journey. They have to learn and grow, and such, I’ve heard. It turns out all of my characters have mutations and strange illnesses, too, and usually their origins can be traced back to pop culture or fairy tales. Oh my gosh – now I have to worry about trying to publish in two genres? Ha! Well, I won’t worry about that until I’m done with this story, anyway.

October has been was busier than I intended, and now it looks like November is crowding up as well – the final big Jack Straw reading at the Seattle Library on Nov 2nd, then a Bushwick musician/poet pairing on November 9, and I guess I’m giving a craft talk at Ballard Library on November 14! I thought I was supposed to have some time off after the Poet Laureate gig was over!