All apologies

Also, I'm gonna be laying low this summer. I'm a big talker and big slacker, so I don't want to go on and on about what I'm doing or not doing. If I get something done, you'll hear about it. If I don't, which is way more likely, you won't.

I'm just trying to cut out everything extraneous, while also trying to grapple with a huge addition to my debt load. I'm used to debt, having lived with the knowledge that I get poorer every day, just by existing, all for those three years of youthful folly. I've worked on that but there is still a ways to go, so now there is farther to go. This is not as expensive an error financially, but possibly a bigger one in terms of its impact on my future. I am trying my best to be proactive and type my way out of it.

I spent this weekend indoors (not really much to be proud of for me), and actually realized that I like being alone. I need to do it more often. No pesky phone, no distracting internet, just me and some books and my laptop, and I hope to maintain that for the rest of the summer. There are few other things I'll be doing; saying goodbye the Jacksons, who I will miss dearly, seeing my mom when she's in town, seeing visiting friends like Wendy Spero.

I'm going to the outskirts of Seattle for 3 days at the end of July and returning to the fabulous Minneapolis, where everyone is incredibly nice and there are amazing cupcakes and the Fringe Festival (I'll be doing a reading and open mic at < Smitten Kitten the evening of August 10th), and I may do a very quick Martha's Vineyard trip at my grandmother's urging, but other than that, I'll mostly be at work or at home, where I should have been the last two years, instead of off doing this and that all adds up to a big fat nothing. I won't catalogue it all, but all those dumbass book parties, all the comedy shows, pretty much everything is just a reminder of my failings, but those are for me to reckon with. Like I said before, I'm used to being a failure, it's what I know, what I'm, dare I say, good at, but I'm trying to find new things to be good at, like succeeding. And of course I'll be at our cupcake events (July 14th is Cupcake Arts & Crafts Night and in August will be another Delicious Sandwich Social).

So apologies now if I don't make it to your party/reading/event, if I don't answer your calls and emails. I'll be back in September or sometime around then and will post here occasionally, but I'd rather save the real writing for things that matter. For now I'm gonna make like I don't live in NYC, which sometimes, despite my recent umbrella purchase, I wish I didn't.

I do have a few little projects I have to finish, trying to stay enthusiastic about them. I'm reading up to make the selections for Best Sex Writing 2009 before I turn it over to guest judge Brian Alexander, stuff like Mary Roach's Bonk, Gail Belsky's anthology Over the Hill and Between the Sheets, David Levy's Love and Sex with Robots, Dagmar Herzog's Sex in Crisis: The New Sexual Revolution and the Future of American Politics. Another project is a call for submissions for Bottoms Up: More Red-Cheeked Erotica (possibly NSFW, deadline July 14th, but sooner submissions very welcome). I'm in pretty dire need of stories, so if you know any erotica writers, send them my way as long as they can follow instructions, I have zero tolerance for those who don't (and you'd be surprised, there are many who just blithely disregard guidelines). I'll be making a book trailer for it. My very first time and helmed by a woman I think is brilliant. It will debut before the end of July. So promoting Spanked and cupcake blogging and writing, perhaps in vain but I have to try, is what I'll be up to.

Have a great summer everyone.