Erin and I have been celebrating. On Friday, we found a box on our doorstep. Its contents: twenty-five copies of Ghost Maps, ten of which we got for free as part of Wolsak and Winn’s payment, the other fifteen of which we bought for at a deep discount so that Erin could sell signed copies on her website.
After a brief, shaky period, Erin has gotten back into her writing, working on a number of poems, including her next developing book, Seal up the Thunder. Thunder is about Erin’s journey of discovery as a Catholic who’s basically reading the Bible for the first time.
She has also received, it must be said, hate mail. The Bible is such a sensitive topic for sensitive people, I suppose, and any attempt Erin has made to interpret some of its passages (fairly faithfully, I might add) has brought her a slew of about a half-dozen admonishing e-mails each time, most of which are fairly polite, but one of which definitely crosses the line into poisonous.
I’ve had one or two trolls make an attempt to vandalize my comments section of some of my posts (primarily this one, which seems to irk some people for some strange reason — I’ve cleaned it up) and one person who snarked back at me for my political comments elsewhere, but nothing that has the scent of organization that Erin has faced.
It just illustrates the risks you take when you put yourself out into the public and draw attention to yourself. Fortunately, it’s not been hard to remember that most visitors have been kind, courteous and geniuinely appreciative. The interest in Erin’s Ghost Maps has been quite strong, and I feel now, more than ever, that we might be able to make a go of this writer lifestyle after all.
Jordan Cooper is right: this picture is an excellent illustration of the word unaware.
It has been a busy weekend, not to mention a week. Alternatives Journal is gearing up for a number of publicity events to promote the magazine in general and the upcoming issue on food in particular. I’ve crafted a few press releases and flyer candidates, and I am going to be manning the Alternatives Journal booth at the Kitchener version of Word on the Street on Sunday, September 28.
I love this job!
I’ve also taken a few ideas from Erin’s redesign of her website and applied them here. The archive links were getting a little too large to include on the page and this and other cleanups should make this page quicker to load. In doing my changes, I appear to have fixed the problem which prevented my site from showing properly on Firebird and Netscape. I still have some formatting problems which I’m slowly fixing up, and I have an annoying little gap in the menu bar located on the header of this site. Does anybody have any suggestions how I can fix this, or some way I could mask the gap?