Artist for the cover! Love the collage I was able to obtain by an emerging artist in the flash world. Should have the front cover in less than a month. Maybe I'll wait on the cover reveal?

​I was at a flash lunch yesterday with writers I like and someone asked me to describe the book and once again I failed utterly. It's a strange book. I think that's actually good.

I love Sarah Fawn Montgomery's idea for an AWP panel. Unfortunately one of the panelists hasn't responded with the information she needs for the proposal. I hope they do by tomorrow night, the deadline.

I got the long marketing questionnaire to Mad Creek Books last Sunday and they had their meeting about my book on Monday. It's official! They have a schedule for me. THE LUNATICS' BALL will be part of next year's spring season, with a projected pub date of May 23, 2027.

Suddenly there are more hurry-up tasks: the most pressing being the art for the cover, which they want by next week, though I couldn't contact the artist until they approved my recommendation in this week's meeting. I hope they come through. I've contacted them several ways, but haven't heard back yet. (Won't name them here for fear of jinxing the request.) And I need to start on blurbs already, several from people very difficult to contact.

Sarah Fawn Montgomery is proposing a panel for AWP—Shaping the Silence: Women Writing Memoirs of Madness— with some great experimental memoirists. I'm really excited to be included, though I know AWP turns down a lot of proposals. I love all of the other prospective panelists, and Sarah Fawn has been a strong influence on my writing. I wrote about. her in a Substack when she published an essay of  mine in her new magazine  for neurodivergent and chronically ill writers NERVE TO WRITE.

An avalanche of hurry-up tasks at CRAFT, since the contest results came back for our annual Memoir Excerpt & Essay Contest, and we had to come up with two editors' choices immediately, and to edit five essays for publication in June (that means now and last week) and solicit and edit author's notes. Roxane Gay's choices were not what we expected, but they're excellent, and I'm doing collaborative edits on my very favorite right now.

I have a new Substack post on my recent creative nonfiction and on hybrid writing in THE LUNATICS' BALL by way of the essay I wrote about Geoff Dyer, which is partly about that. I never wrote a blog, or read blogs for that matter, but I can see the appeal that they had. You write something and then you post it. No looking for publication venues or worrying about whether what you've written is a coherent essay.

I should hold off on the interesting subjects: it will be almost a year before the book comes out, so it's really too early to start promotion.