One of the comforting rituals of home-Buddy bowing to Lucy
Right now I’m in Florida on a trip with my partner to spend time with her family. When I return I’ll spend a few days at home before heading to Phoenix for 4 days at the Golden Crown Literary Society convention. I’ll be on a couple of panels there as well as attending workshops and hopefully meeting other writers and readers of lesbian fiction. It should be great fun, and I may even get some writing done there. Then it’s home again for close to a week before leaving for L.A. and the Lambda Literary Foundation Emerging Writer’s Retreat. I’ll be in classes with Katherine Forrest, Claire McNab, and others, and it should really be inspiring. I’m sure it will be intense as well.
In September I will be going up to Minneapolis for a reading at Amazon Bookstore, accompanied by some Chicago friends and meeting up with some Minnesota friends. Amazon was recently purchased by Ruta Skujins, just in the nick of time. It’s previous owners were retiring from bookstore life after years of providing a fantastic bookstore and community service. I’m so happy that Ruta is having me up to read from Sometimes Quickly.
Finally, and most exciting as far as I’m concerned, is my month long residency at the Mary Anderson Center for the Arts in Southern Indiana. MAC is located adjacent to a friary and is home to 8 visual artists and writers at a time. There I’ll have nothing I have to do but write, a luxury almost too rich to even contemplate until I get there. I hope I don’t freak out.
But wait, aren’t I a Realtor also? How can I just keep going out of town as if I didn’t have any job at all? That’s what distinguishes today’s Realtor from those of the very recent past. Business is so bad, we are free to do almost anything we want! I may be one of the few realtors who is viewing this as a good thing. But then again, I’ve done well enough during the first part of the year that I can continue to support myself through the second part. And what business I do bring in the second half of the year I will be splitting with my good friend and fellow agent, Alley Ballard. I’m almost glad business is slow. I’m just starting to get back into writing my Weston College book and I really want to finish that this year.
Traveling for me means moving away, physically and mentally, from being a realtor whose life is interrupted countless times a day and into being a writer, focused on the project at hand. I don’t make my living by writing, so I have to respect and work hard at my real estate career. By my real heart goes into the writing, something I’m learning and feeling passionate about. I’m so lucky to have both things.
