Tonight's the night of my Poetry Society of NH presentation on creating characters in poetry: 7 p.m., EST. If you'd like the Zoom link, please contact Jimmy Pappas at psnhevents@gmail.com. I think I'm prepared for it, but of course I had to wake up with a jolt at 3 a.m. just to make sure. Sigh.

Stove guy is coming this afternoon, so here's hoping that trouble finally gets sorted out. Otherwise, today will be a regular work day: copyediting, tweaking the presentation, wrestling with Proust, and so on. I'm trying not to worry about the inauguration, but in this era it's hard not to take doom for granted.

Oh, stop it, Dawn: enough of the doom wailing. Tonight we'll be talking about how we can take charge! How we can learn from the masters; how we can experiment with new ways of seeing and expressing! It will be fun! You should come! You don't need to write poems. You don't need to regularly read poems. And I guarantee that Trump will not be there.