Suzy’s in pretty good shape, she had a checkup this week and was told that it would be about two weeks before she’s able to resume all normal activities. Her mobility is very good, but she still runs into some pain when she tries to lift anything too heavy. She’ll be taking my place at a booth at the All Arts Market this week with our friend Lindsay, who will be selling some of her photography. Suzy will have copies of Returning the Favor for sale at our booth, and hopefully my order of Red Dirt Review will come in tomorrow and she’ll be able to have those as well. I dunno if they’ll make it in time or not, but they have shipped.

I have a few more things on the publication front to report – my poem “Aftermath” is now live on The Dead Mule’s March issue. I also had four more pieces accepted this week, three by Calliope Nerve and one by Writer’s Bloc. I’ll link up the other places once those are live. That brings me to 11 accepted for the year, so I’m pretty thrilled with that. I went down to the SC Book Festival last weekend to check it out, and made a couple of good contacts with publishers. A couple of them expressed some interest in Choices, which I think I’m renaming to I Made the Devil Do It.

I also put up some Red Dirt Review shirts in my Zazzle store, so head over to the RDR site and check those out. I think they’re moderately cool, but I’m a little biased. So I’ll probably not be able to post much the rest of the week, and then I’m headed straight back to Atlanta on Sunday, then to the week of endless boogie. I’ll try to post photos from the shenanigans that ensue. A

And I got a badass lucha libre mask to wear while I party!

For the record, this person is an artist, so it wouldn’t be too out of line for these thought to occur to her and for her to have done that very thing. But she didn’t. She had drawn a fake moustache on a piece of paper and taped it over her mouth. Which is also funny, but not at all the same idea. And I might need new glasses.

But regardless, I thought it would be cool to get all types of people to send me pictures of themselves wearing words. Their favorite words, their least favorite words, words that make them cry, words that make them laugh. Then I’ll put all the pics into some kind of montage and make something cool out of it. Because words are important. And I think it will be an interesting experiment to see what words people think are important and what words people are interested in putting on themselves somehow.

So here are the rules – I want no more than three pictures from people. You can send me one, two or three. But there can be only one word per pic. I don’t care how you transmit the word – it can be on a T-shirt, a tattoo, a piece of paper stuck to your forehead, written on your tits in Sharpie, sprinkled on your junk and written in glitter. I don’t care. But make it be an important word to YOU. I don’t give a shit if “spaniel” means a dog to everyone else, but if it’s what your mom whispered to you when a thunderstorm was coming and it made you feel better, then “spaniel” is important to you. I’d love it if there was a brief explanation of the word and its significance, but that’s optional. I don’t care if we see your face. I will not edit photos, so don’t put anything in the pic that you don’t want on the interwebs.

Think of it as performance art. Your chance to be part of a Karen Finley show without the dry cleaning bill. Email all the photos to john AT johnhartness.com. And pass it along. I think it would be cool if I got pictures from strangers telling me why “mouse” is their least favorite word in the world.

Update – Here’s the first one, and it’s a great blend of image and word. It has begun, keep it going!

Every year since 1994, I have been in attendance at the Southeastern Theatre Conference annual convention. Since 1996, this has been part of my job, to go to the show and drum up business. This year I’m teaching three workshops, hosting a reception and will generally behave only moderately badly while on the company’s nickel. Typically this is the trade show I get the most joy out of attending, as it’s more a gathering of several hundred old friends than a work outing. And we get a bunch of business out of the show, which doesn’t hurt my feelings. So this year my love for SETC will be tempered a little by the party I’m missing in Greenville. Both events have some similar appeal – these are groups of disparate individuals brought together by a love of either poker or theatre, and I only get to see the attendees once or twice a year. It just sucks that this year the two events that are the brightest parts of my spring overlap. Oh well, drink one for me in G-Vegas, and I’ll drink one for y’all in Lexington.

Anybody wanna join me & Suzy in New Orleans for Memorial Day Weekend? A friend of hers from high school will be down there at that time, and I’ve got a shitload of Marriott points burning a hole in my account, so I’m gonna eat up about a week of vacation time and travel to NOLA. Lemme know if you will or can be anywhere close and we’ll hang.

And in other upcoming ridiculous news – the week of March 9 may be the sickest concert lineup I’ve ever done that didn’t involve a festival. If you’ve got the chops, you oughta just hitch a ride with me for the week. Tuesday night in Atlanta I’m going to see Reckless Kelly and Cross Canadian Ragweed on a double bill at the Variety Playhouse. Then Wednesday I’m driving back to Charlotte to see They Might Be Giants at the Visulite (it’s the 20th anniversary of Flood). Then Thursday night I’m going to see Robert Earl Keen at the Neighborhood Theatre. I’ll probably take Friday night off, but if I can drag my ass out, Acoustic Syndicate is playing Friday at the Visulite. Then Saturday night is Southern Culture on the Skids.

Then Sunday I try to recover. Merlefest is around the corner, with a killer lineup, so get your ticekts or be a big fat loser!

But I have had another poem run in The Deuce Coupe this week, and I’m really glad they picked it up, because I felt like I really nailed this one. Sometimes I feel really good about something I’ve written, and sometimes I’m just “meh” about it. This one I really liked right off the bat, but I knew because of some of the imagery I’d have issues getting it picked up. So I was really pleased when it found a home so quickly.

Tonight it’s off to dinner and then Reservoir Dogs, directed by a friend of mine and featuring several others. I’m reviewing it, so I’ll let you know when the review runs. And I had a great recording session last night with Special K, we got two more episodes of the Gambling Tales Podcast in the can and ready to go, so now we can take our time planning the next few. It’s picking up steam, but slowly, so spread the word!

Why the change of heart? Because I like to read on the crapper, and these turned out to be about the perfect size to put on the back of the crapper. And the poems and stories are short enough to work out to about the right amount of time for a good sitting session, if you get my drift. So head on over to RDR and download a copy for free, or order one for $10.

Yup, life’s getting pretty much back to normal, which means I’m busier than a one-armed paperhanger. I did manage to get some submissions of my work ready this weekend, and sent a bunch of stuff out. I’ve been using Duotrope’s Digest to search through a bajillion places online that accept poetry, and I’ve started limiting myself a bit. As I get rejections (and a few acceptances) I’ve decided to start only sending out the stuff I feel the best about. I know that seems like a no-brainer, but in the rush to get submissions going, the temptation to send out mediocre product is pretty overwhelming. But that dilutes the brand, and since I am my brand, I need to make every effort not to have stuff out on the world that isn’t my best work. Unless it’s here, because it’s almost acceptable to be mediocre on your own blog. Almost.

So as I clear my current round of submissions, I’m going to focus on sending out fewer packets and making them stronger submissions. I’ve found that when I send out stuff that I feel really good about, it’s just a matter of finding the right market for them. For example, two poems that I wrote and got rejected from their initial 2-3 submissions I still felt were really good poems, so I kept slinging them out there until I found a place where they would stick. Dancing with Fireflies was picked up by Victorian Violet Press, along with a reprint of Gingham, from Returning the Favor.Those should run in their May issue. Now I might be the last person you’d expect to have a poem in something called the Victorian Violet Press, but the stuff they run makes them a very good fit for those particular pieces. And Deuce Coupe has picked up another of my poems, called Death of a Small-Town Sports Hero, which I really like because I think I got the imagery right in there. I’m not sure when it’s running, but it’ll be soon. Their turnaround time on responses and publication is pretty super-fast.

Now both of these poems had been initially rejected by the places I first sent them to, but I really felt good about the pieces, so I kept on plugging. But as I received a few rejection letters this weekend, I started to realize that I had submitted some things that even I didn’t like! So no wonder they weren’t getting picked up. So I created another sub-folder in my Writing folder, labeled “Meh,” for stuff that I’m done with, but I’m just not crazy about.

Oh yeah, folders. That’s how I work on stuff. I tend to hand-write my first drafts, because it just feels better to do it that way, a little more visceral. Then I type it into Word (I save everything as a .doc because some folks can’t open .docx, and it just saves me a step) and put it into a folder labelled Work in Progress. Then I typically let it stew for a day or week or whatever, until I get on an editing binge, and go back over and tweak things. Very, very few pieces do I consider ready to send out after just the second draft. The typing bit always turns into a revision phase as well as a transcription phase, which is probably another subconscious reason for creating the process that way. Even the pieces that I do think are finished after the second revision usually go through one or two passes in that draft.

So once I’ve gone back to a piece in the Work in Progress folder, and polished that turd until it shines, I move it into a folder labeled Ready for Prime Time, which in my head means it’s ready to be submitted. Once it’s submitted, if it’s sent to a place that allows simultaneous submissions (and unless the venue is typically very cool or very fast, I only submit to sim/sub venues) it goes into a folder that reflects that. If I send it to a venue that doesn’t accept sim/subs, it goes into another folder. Then I log the submission into an excel spreadsheet with the title, venue and date submitted. Once I get a response, I update that info and date into the spreadsheet.

If a piece is rejected, I take a look at it again to see if I think it needs more polish, and if I don’t think so, it goes back into the submit file. If it’s accepted, it goes into the Accepted folder. So this whole process takes some time to manage, and sometimes I get carried away in the whirlwind of that mess and forget to write and polish. So I’m going to cut down on my volume of submissions to no more than three submissions per week, and focus on only sending out work that is a solid representation of what I want out in the world with my name on it. After all, I have a blog to post drivel on, right?

But still, if my unspoken goal for the year was to have one piece accepted each month, and I’ve had seven acceptance letters by mid-February, I think we might be doing okay on our plan.

Here’s a video of “Better Home” that I recorded a few nights ago in my home office.

But I had a good time at the Open Mike and will definitely be back next month. Everyone was very welcoming, very supportive, and generally very good. I was concerned about the quality when I first arrived, because it’s hard to know going in what the level of suck will be at any open mike event, but there were only a few people all night that I thought couldn’t really write, and one of the best ways for them to improve is to be exposed to better writers. Several folks weren’t terribly good performers, but I might be a little bit of a snob there, with 20 years of theatre in my background. But most people were pretty good, and one girl in particular did a slam-style memorized piece that was just beautiful and made me wish I’d done video of the whole night so I could catch her performance.

She was one of only two people of color at the event, and it only reinforced the sense I’m developing about where poetry is sitting today. It seems like white people write their stuff down and read it out loud, while brown people tend to memorize their stuff and perform it. My friend Q is a member of the Charlotte Slam Team, and has been to the National Poetry Slam several times, and he’s one of the best poets I know. But I don’t know that he submits stuff to magazines and websites because I don’t know how much his stuff works in a written format. Watching him perform is fantastic, but if there’s no bridge between slam poetry and traditional written poetry, where is it all going to go? There are a lot of poetry events all around Charlotte every week, but they all seem to happen at clubs (and too late for me on school nights) that cater to a more typically African-American crowd. So I guess here’s my question – is performed poetry a “black thing” nowadays? Does that leave written poetry to be a “white thing?” And where does that leave people like me, white folks who are performers and writers? Is there a middle ground to bring the slam poets and the written poets together?

I hope all that doesn’t get me in John Mayer-esque trouble, but it’s kinda where my head is at with trying to figure out how to make poetry more vital to people’s everyday life.

I’m also a whiteboard guy, but that’s just because sometimes I need to see the flow of information to understand how all the electrons are going to get from Point A to Point B in the stuff I design. The addition of a 4×8 whiteboard to the wall of my office is one of the greatest things to happen since I got the dual monitor setup. But I digress.

So since I’m a list guy, and since I have multiple aspects of my life, I’m a multiple list guy. And since I’m a technology geek, I use EverNote to manage my lists. I wrote really briefly about this yesterday, and the Doc made mention of it on his blog, so I figured I’d go a little more in-depth into why I think this free application is the best thing since sliced bread.

Basically EverNote is just a list of lists, and a way to manage them. But it is a living document that syncs between the application on my computer, my EverNote online account, so I can access it from any computer anywhere, and my phone, so I can access any of my lists even when I’m not near any computers.

I keep multiple lists at all times, for the different pieces of my life. One is a shopping list, which reminds me that I need to buy cotton balls. So I just open up the shopping list on the desktop and add cotton balls. Now when I get off work and go to the store, I can call up the shopping list using the app on my phone, and cotton balls will be added to the list. Easy-peasy, as they say. It’s not like it’s anything earth-shattering, but I’ve found it very useful to keep track of all my lists, and cut down on the number of annoying scraps of paper I’m carrying around. You can find it online here.

You see, it might surprise the two people that ever come by here that I don’t know personally, but I’m a big fatass. And as a big fatass, I like to eat. So once I eat, especially in the winter months, I shift into my best impersonation of Fatassus Grizzliursus, or the sleepy-assed fat grizzy bear dude. So my productivity goes deep into the shitter after lunch. So this week, as I’ve been trying to play catch up after being home with Suzy for a week, I’ve been putting lunch off later and later. In addition to actually getting more work done, this has the added beneficial side effect of making the afternoon seem shorter, which is always a bonus.

The down side is that I’m not hungry early in the evening, which leads to eating a later dinner, which is not good for my other ongoing project – reducing the status of big fatass. I lost a few pounds last week when I wasn’t eating much, and now I’m just trying to inflict a little portion control on myself and get my gluttony under control. I also started lifting weights again, and I was so sore last week I could barely lift my hands to shoulder level. This week is a little better, so I’ll try to add a little more each week until I get back in a shape that isn’t completely round.

Last night I went to a local Tweetup, which was an interesting mix of web types, artsy types and elected officials. Everyone was nice, and I met a few people that were actually interesting, but it was a lot of people in a small space, which I don’t do well with at all. I left early, but enjoyed it. Unfortunately I likely won’t go back due to the level of discomfort that environments like that leave me in.

What I haven’t talked a lot about here, is at all, is that I really don’t do well in loud, crowded environments. When I was in college, I worked summers at the local amusement park’s amphitheatre, running spotlight for the bands that came through. I loved the gig, had a blast, saw some great concerts, but the cost was part of my hearing. Because of the way the intercoms were rigged, I lost part of the hearing in my left ear. I don’t hear the higher registers very well, and it’s a situation that’s exacerbated in noisy situations. My right ear is fine, so if you’re around me in a noisy room or at a loud concert, you’ll notice that I try to put you on my right side. I also try to do that at crowded restaurants, because otherwise I’m not going to be able to hear some of the conversation, and I hate to feel left out or that I’m ignoring someone.

This is pretty easy to deal with in a group of lighting people, because better than half my compatriots have some level of hearing loss. It’s just a matter of us lining up our “good ears” and having a pleasant evening. Since we all understand that it’s not a personal slight, but a physical malady, no offense is ever taken. But around folks with normal hearing, especially if you aren’t profoundly deaf and have none of the speech markers that go along with that, people think you’re just not paying attention, or worse, lying about it. Or women don’t understand why you’re leaning in so close when they talk, and think you’re getting in their personal space. It’s not any of that, it’s just that I can’t hear you. It’s embarrassing, and it’s a lengthy explanation when the inevitable “what happened” comes along, and that’s also embarrassing because it boils down to “I was young and stupid and thought that ear protection was for pussies so now I can’t hear out of one ear.”

So there are certain environments that I just avoid, and last night’s Tweetup, although pleasant for the company, was one of the environments that I’ll probably pass on in the future. So now you know why I don’t go to Haufbrauhaus, no matter how much I like the food or company, and why I can’t handle some other places or types of events.

Suzy’s improving every day – thanks to everyone who has emailed, called, visited or sent well wishes!

Until my wife gets sick and can’t clean up. So now I’m living like most of my friends do – working a full-time job and cleaning house when I get home each night. And let me tell you, this shit gets old fast. Tonight I have a Honey-do list half a page long just to stay on top of things, and if Bonnie hadn’t stayed with us last weekend I don’t think it would have been possible at all. Having someone to do laundry while I was doing dishes let me get ahead, and I’ve managed to (barely) stay there. So my writing time is pretty limited, because when I get home I’m dealing with feeding the two of us, then cleaning up after dinner, then laundry, then at some point I need to make a run to Target to refill a prescription and pick up a couple of things, then maybe late tonight I can sit still long enough to scribble a little. And I understand that this is how single people, or people with working spouses, live all the time, so I’m not asking for sympathy. It’s just an adjustment for me, and I figure that about the time I get used to this, she’ll be healthy again and things will start to get back to normal.

In unrelated news, check out Jessie Carty’s blog for my video of Gingham, which is available in Returning the Favor. I’ve pretty much decided to wait until I sell down to about 10 copies, then order another 30 copies. They come packaged in 15-copy units, so that just seems to make sense to me. Unless there’s another monthly deal at Lulu that makes it more reasonable to buy more copies. But nothing right now, because I don’t have anything in the immediate future that will put me in a position to sell many copies, and I don’t need to have them sitting on the shelf.

Also, Red Dirt Review submissions are open until Monday, so send me an email with some good stuff in there. Bam Bam and Dr. Chako will both be featured in this inaugural issue, so join the cool kids!