I got some nice responses to my first Scrapbook entry of 2012, and I really appreciate it. Sometimes it’s funny having a blog and not knowing who’s out there, so it feels good to get little notes from the Internet world letting me know that there are real people out there reading these words. Thank you.

Two unrelated things:

1) Just wanted to point you in the direction of Carin Makuz’s blog, Matilda Magtree, where she was kind enough to interview me. Carin and I go back to the Humber days. Her site is worth keeping in your bookmarks – thoughtful and beautifully written with great photos as well. And she picks a perfectly appropriate meal to accompany my book.

2) When I was in Toronto over the holidays, I picked up a bunch of my old zines. I’m going to scan some of the less embarrassing pages for an experiment I’d like to do this year to teach myself the basics of e-publishing. In the spirit of the recently released Magnetic Fields song, here’s a sample of a page from melt the snow #5, created at the height of my Magnetic Fields fandom (click to get a larger image so that you can actually read the teeny tiny type).

On Friday in Montreal it was a horrible rainy day. After work, I walked to the metro in that rain, but it had developed into the kind of rainstorm where your umbrella keeps turning inside out in the wind, and then you realize you’re going to get wet no matter what, so you put away your sad, broken-spoked umbrella, turn up the music in your earphones and curse a lot.

But it wasn’t so bad because I was holding 2 plastic bags filled with boxes of freshly copied zines and when I came home Andrew said, “Hello, published author!” and showed me my books, which had arrived in the mail that morning. I said, “I think I’m going to cry” and, given that my hair was a wet, frizzy mess and I was holding this droopy umbrella and too many bags, he thought something was wrong. “What happened?!” he asked, worried. “I’m HAPPY!” I said. I mean, obviously.

So now I have two new things I’ve made sitting in a pile on the kitchen table. You’ve heard a lot about the book, so here’s something about the new zine.

I keep thinking I won’t make another zine, but then, eventually I do. And because I wanted to write about my time in Greece in a tangible format and not just on this site, I put together a zine as well. Places & Things is mostly about Greece, but also other places I visited, and there are recipes too. This summer I read The Alice B Toklas Cookbook, and the zine owes a lot to that. Have you read it? It’s my favourite kind of food writing – more emphasis on the words than the practicality of the recipes. And this is even better because it’s filled with charming stories about Alice and Gertrude Stein travelling around France. There are recipes like “Bass for Picasso” and instructions for cooking 100 frog legs.  My zine (and recipes) are nowhere near as extravagant, but I respectfully borrowed Ms. Toklas’ format.

You can buy the zine from me here. I like to trade too if you want to go that route. You can also get it from me in person at Canzine in Toronto next Sunday or at Expozine in Montreal in a few weeks.

Oh, and I’ve been updating the book section of the site, so check it out if you have questions about getting a copy of it for yourself.

I started work again last week, and am remembering the good and bad things associated with so much structured time: the pleasure of being busy, but also getting worn out by it; feeling virtuous when I remember to pack a lunch, but savouring a few moments of calm when I escape on my own; after work drinks with friends; weekend brunch.

And balancing writing while you work full-time: I’m easing into that too. To tell you the truth, I haven’t written much since returning in mid-September. I spent one afternoon writing a very rough draft of a new story, but it still needs a lot of work. I’ve been getting some ideas and scribbling them on post-it notes, but they don’t count as actual work. They’re more like bait – I have things to work on if I want to, if I can figure out a way to organize my time. I’m giving myself some breathing room from my novel, too. I need distance and told myself to leave it alone until the end of the month. Even reading has taken a bit of a back seat – I can’t seem to sink into a book these days. While I wait for my latest online order to ship, which includes books that will snap me out of my reading funk like Darcie’s (It’s out! Buy it!) and Sheila Heti’s newest, “How Should A Person Be?”, I’m reading essays from Jonathan Ames’ “The Double Life is Twice As Good”, which I downloaded to my Iphone and is perfect for metro commutes.

This weekend, I relaxed into something other than writing and started laying out the zine I mentioned a few weeks ago. There was no writing left to do, just the tangible, visual stuff: cutting up the text, choosing images, figuring out the most efficient way to lay it out. I worked on the kitchen table for awhile, and when that got messy, moved to the floor.

(My dear friend Emily snapped this at Word on the Street last week)

I feel like I keep dangling these projects in front of you without telling you how you can actually get them. So here’s a run-down:

• I’ve compiled ordering information for Bats or Swallows over here, along with details about readings: http://bibliographic.net/book. It’s now available for sale on the Invisible site, and if you’ve ordered it from Amazon, I’m told copies are starting to ship. Some people got copies at Word on the Street last week in Toronto.
• The zine won’t be available until Canzine on October 24, and you’ll be able to buy copies of it directly from me.

The Toronto launch for the book is a go on November 8th. We’re figuring out the Montreal launch. I’ll be travelling to New York City at the end of November (for an unrelated fun reason that I’ll give you details for in a bit), and I really want to do a reading there. If anyone has any tips for that, let me know. At the very least I can do one while waiting in line for a Shake Shack burger, no? I still haven’t gone. Two birds, one stone.