Yes, it's snowing so hard that the tree branches are carrying huge, fluffy piles of snow; every once in a while, one of them gives under the weight, swoops down, dumps it snow, and then quickly comes back up and starts collecting another load. I weep for my flowers. Ah, my snapdragons, my ramunculus...
But I'm in a pretty good mood nonetheless. I caught up on some sleep last night; went to bed around 11:30 and woke up at 10:00. I had had fine plans for getting some writing done this morning (when I woke up at a projected 7:00 a.m.), but y'know, the writing can wait a little. It's okay.
The main thing I'm working on this morning is drafting some letters and faxes for Bodies of Water. The first stage of this project (while the over-the-transom subs accumulate unread) is finding that big name (ideally more than one) that will lead the collection. This is a remarkably tough thing -- it's hard to find big names who are available to write new fiction. I'll settle for a reprint if I must, but even that is tricky. I would adore some help with this -- all I need are suggestions of good, literary authors, who you think could write something sensual. They should be somewhere between midlist and top of the list people. Here are some of the names I'm currently writing to -- most of these are tremendous long shots: Isabel Allende, Dorothy Allison, Nicholson Baker, Samuel R. Delany, Chitra Divakaruni, Laura Esquivel, Neil Gaiman, Mary Gaitskill, A.M. Homes, Ginu Kamani, Salman Rushdie, Vikram Seth, Jeanette Winterson.
I would really appreciate any suggestions for more names for this list! If you send anything, please attach a suggested title for me to read, plus any notes on why this would be a good author to solicit work from. Help?
I'm going to get back to drafting that letter; I'll talk to you later. In the interim, let me point you to something very beautiful that Susannah sent me: The Century Project. I sent him a note saying I might be interested in posing. But frankly, the thought terrifies me as well.
12:30. I'm taking a snow day! I decided to stay home and work today. My students don't have class because they're working in groups, and I'm being pretty productive at the computer, enough so that I can feel semi-justified in staying inside in my flannel pyjamas rather than trudging through the still-falling heavy snow. The tree outside my window is covered in lemon-green buds; it's so wrong for them to be coated with snow.
Kevin's still fast asleep -- he came to bed around 4 last night. This is fairly typical for us; when we lived together in Philly, we were often on a schedule that was about 4 to 8 hours off from each other. Interestingly, that worked really well; since we both spent a lot of time working at home, it gave us several hours of uninterrupted work time. In a way, it was very focusing for me -- I knew I had this window of time alone, before I had to interact with anyone. I wonder if people with kids who get up early in the morning to write feel the same way...
I did take a little while to take photos of the other two collages, so you can see them. I'm pretty happy with how they both came out. You may notice that I've raised the prices a bit -- that's because the person who bought the first two insisted on paying me more for them; I think her subtle way of hinting that I was way under-pricing them. Who am I to argue? So they're listed at what she paid for them, and I set the initial prices a little higher on the others than I'd originally planned -- you can blame Barbara for that extra $10. :-) There *is* one of you who has dibs on "Beneath the Lemon Tree", at the original price -- if she wants it, she gets it at that price. I think I'm going to work on "Sitting Under a Tree" next; I suspect it's going to be similar to "the bones want to fly" in style -- doubled glass, one layer etched, torn paper, pressed leaves and petals. That kind of thing.