It is good to hear your voices. I think my favorite reaction came in an an email from a friend who said, "Only because you ask: I prefer the mundane narration of your life. It's like checking in on the progress of some interminable three-decker Victorian novel."

How I love those novels myself. Tedium combined with melodrama: what could be more lifelike?

The draft chapter on Shelley is more or less finished, and I'll need to go back to editing tomorrow morning. (Though will that even be possible? It's April school vacation, so I'll also need to spend every day next week sitting in a parking lot waiting for my son's track practice to end.)

I'm reading in Portland on Wednesday at noon. (And my car is fixed: I didn't even tell you about my car, did I? The one that became undrivable last week, as I was heading down to Portland for my previously scheduled reading. If you were there, I hope it was good, because I wasn't.)

I'd like to think I'll be digging up a little garden soil this week. (Hah. Thank you, Norse gods, for canceling spring this year.)

And today I am going to do my damndest to reconfigure my thoughts about employment. How can I do what I do and actually get paid for it? (If any of you know anything about setting up a nonprofit literary outreach program, contact me immediately. It would also help if you could add and subtract because I can't.)