Och, what a whirlwind!

I had a couple of days off from work last week, and now I need a vacation from my vacation! Last Thursday, I saw the Minions movie at a sneak-peek at the Alamo Drafthouse in New Braunfels. It was awesome. It's set mostly in the '60s, in swingin' London, with Jennifer Saunders voicing Queen Elizabeth, and of course Jon Hamm and Sandra Bullock as the main villains. If you're a fan of the mellow yellow fellows, you will love it. My new favorite word in Minionese is the word for electric guitar: megaukulele!

Your humble blogger, standing on one leg
with a sword on her head

Next was the Sultan's Feast, our big annual belly dance show here in San Marcos. Every Sultan's Feast is fantastic, but this one knocked it out of the park (with a hip bump). I consider it a real honor to be able to share the stage with so many amazing ladies.

Then was a dance workshop at Austin Belly Dance led by Roxxanne Shelaby, daughter of the original owner of The Fez Supperclub in Los Angeles, which was pretty much the cradle of American Cabaret style belly dance. Roxxanne held a Kickstarter campaign and has produced a documentary about The Fez. The workshop -- though I had to sit down about halfway through because I danced until the arches in my feet fell -- was hugely interesting and informative. It was a great experience.

And last night I performed a few poems at the weekly open mic at my beloved Triple Crown. I did one political-ish piece and two saucy pieces, including a poem about a "blue-eyed boy in a '67 Stang" and the raunchy piece popularly known as "the Excalibur poem." Favorite response from a stranger: "I have my '67 parked out back, and I left my blue contacts at home." Least favorite response from a stranger: "Make me a sandwich." Really, dude? (I responded with a "HEY! NO!")

Anyway, this week I am back to working on the novel, so most of my "spare time" is going to be devoted to that. I'll still make a few blog posts -- I intend to post a couple of excerpts from the current draft and then some lists that will probably be of interest to a few of you -- but mostly I'll be spending the next couple of weeks arguing with myself about a world that exists inside my own head.

Gettin' busy

My last post was bleak, but necessary. This one is happier.

I took a break from working on the novella this week so I could concentrate more on belly dancing because the big Sultan's Feast show is coming up Friday and for the first time, I am dancing in 3 different numbers. Eek! The costume changes alone are going to be feats of agility and speed. The show is two hours of lovely and talented dancers, with a meal catered by Euro Cafe. If you're in the area, check it out!

Saturday afternoon, I'm going to a belly dance workshop in Austin, and then Sunday, to get back into a writerly frame of mind, I will be performing some poetry at the open mic at Triple Crown. There are always some wonderful singer-songwriter types at the open mic, but there is poetry and comedy too. Signup starts at 7, and the show starts sometime after that. If you're looking for a mellow way to round out your weekend, come see me share words.

And speaking of sharing words, I will be doing some freelance work for SMTX/Bobcat Fans magazine here in town. It'll be great to spend a little time interviewing people, thinking up story ideas and writing about the town I love so much. I'm very excited about it!

Business and Busy-Ness

I am so bad at updating ... someday I'll get the hang of posting regularly for more than a few weeks at a time. But since January, I have been legitimately busy, and good things have come of it.

I made another round of revisions to my book manuscript and am letting it sit until June, when I should get feedback from the Writers League of Texas manuscript competition folks and a couple of friends. After that, I edited the manuscript for a romance novel that a colleague wrote, and there's reasonable hope that it will get picked up by one of the big romance publishing houses.

Now I'm learning HTML and CSS so that I can eventually design my own web page. (Yay!)

And, in my quest to get on stage at least 10 times this year, and out of my love for sharing my poetry with people who normally wouldn't give a damn about poetry, I'm going to be performing more regularly at the Triple Crown Open Mic on Sunday nights.

Between all this, I found out that my writing is gaining appreciation in Singapore, San Francisco and San Marcos. "The Soft Burden," the essay I posted here several months ago about the very odd family heirloom I'll be inheriting and all that it entails, was one of six finalists in the nonfiction category at the San Francisco Writers Conference contest this year. A poem I wrote about the same subject matter was published in Issue 3 of Junoesq, a Singapore-based literary journal for women. My blog post on the Just For Fun Parade from last April will be reprinted in the April edition of SMTX Magazine here in San Marcos. (I won't link back to that blog post here because it'll look so awesome in print, you should read it in the magazine when it comes out.)

And even with all this writing stuff going on, there is still the dance. I performed my first drum solo, choreographed by myself with help from my teacher Jamie Lynn, in February at Euro Cafe. It was terrifying, but I made it through and apparently did a pretty good job, and I hope to be able to perform it again soon -- if not here in town then at another venue. I'm currently in the middle of the 90-Day Belly Dance Challenge organized by Alia Thabit. It requires at least 20 minutes of improvisational dancing for 90 days. It's been an eye-opening experience thus far and I'm glad to have found something to get me in the habit of dancing without a plan.

Meanwhile, a bunch of my friends have been busy, too. Last weekend was the surprise party and fund-raiser for Christopher Paul Cardoza, the photographer who moved here just a couple of years ago and has done so much to document and promote the San Marcos live music scene, particularly the shows at Triple Crown. And now, with South By Southwest going on just up the road in Austin, many of our local bands are showing an international audience how we do things down here. Chasca, 4orms and Ghosts of Dixie are just a few of the local bands playing official or unofficial SXSW shows this week and I'm super proud of all of them and glad to call them my friends.

Spring is springing here in our happy little village, and everything is coming to life!

My absence, part 1: Doing the right things

I can't believe it's been six months since the last time I wrote a blog post. Well, actually I can ...

First, life got in the way. Recovering from the kind of heartbreak that makes a person rethink her approach to love, to life and to herself, I took a three-day retreat at a spa and resort up on Lake Travis. There, spent a lot of time alone, thinking, writing, walking around in nature, eating healthy food and enjoying the extra brain bandwidth that comes from being in an environment where I didn't have to make very many decisions. My food was prepared, my room was cleaned daily, there was a set schedule of activities, and I didn't have to worry about a thing. As I told my dad, it was an expensive vacation, but the only other place I could think of where other people would take that much care of me and just let me wander around pondering things is a mental hospital, and the spa and resort seemed less complicated to get into and out of.

Nathan Fillion photo op.
I forgot every word I know in 2 languages.

After three days on the edge of a wilderness preserve, I drove up to Dallas to be around people again. Throngs of people. Specifically, throngs of people at the Dallas Comic-Con. More specifically, Nathan Fillion. Who's just one guy but has all the power a of a throng. Honestly, after a bad breakup, standing next to Nathan Fillion for even 30 seconds is a marvelous thing for a geekish girl like me.

Dancing at Euro Cafe

And then there was the belly dance solo. I had been wanting to dance to the arrangement of "Kashmir" that Jimmy Page and Robert Plant did with Hossam Ramzy back in the '90s for what felt like forever. I had fallen too far behind on the choreography we were learning in belly dance class to catch up before our big performance, so I went on hiatus from class and stayed at home, coming up with choreography to the first 4 1/2 minutes of the song. I had a couple of private lessons with my teacher to show her what was doing and get some advice and ideas, and by the end of the summer, I had a solo. I danced it for the first time at my teacher's free monthly show here in town. A bunch of my friends came to support me, which was awesome, and I did a good job of dancing -- didn't freak out, didn't forget anything, didn't trip over my own feet and land in anybody's lap. And my first performance of my first solo did wonders for my confidence level and frankly made me love dance even more. Since this summer, I've been to Cabaret Dance Camp -- four days of dance workshops and sharing cabins at a camp on the Guadalupe River -- and a two-day workshop with Hossam and Serena Ramzy up in Austin, and I'm now working on choreographing a drum solo.

In August, which is typically the crappiest month of the year for me -- there's a long history of death and destruction in August -- I managed to get and stay productive. I went to a creativity workshop based on the main ideas in "The Artist's Way," and that helped me kind of unblock some things with my writing and gave me a lot to think about. I've been doing Morning Pages every day since the workshop and in some ways, that's left me with less to say online, but considering the kind of nonsense that comes out every morning, it's probably good that none of that is ending up online! And my friend Dave began a series of workshops on the Nordic Runes and how they relate to the subconscious. I have been fascinated with runes as divination tools and as writing since I was in high school, so I've found Dave's ideas to be fascinating and valuable.

At the Poe Cottage in The Bronx.
This is the nicest place in The Bronx.

In September, to get out of my own head for a little while, I visited a friend in New York City, where I saw Robert Plant in concert, stood inches away from Ewan McGregor in a boutique in the East Village, had tea in the "Physical Graffiti" building (which houses the Physical Graffi-Tea tea shop), visited the Edgar Allan Poe cottage and the Fordham campus in the Bronx, saw a ton of art and had a marvelous rooftop dinner involving coq au vin, three bottles of champagne and some pears flambed in bourbon. Oh, yes indeed.

Zepparella at Red 7
in Austin

And of course, in between all of this traveling and other frolicking, I have gone out to see a lot of live music -- a lot of rock 'n' roll, and a lot of other stuff. It's all been good for my soul, and I've met some pretty amazing people along the way. I'll be posting some pics from some of the shows I've seen later.

Anyway, all of this getting back in touch with myself and the world around me is a good part of why it has been so long since I have blogged. But just as San Marcos is my rock, my home base, that makes me feel free to travel knowing I will have a little paradise to come back to, so this blog is my home base -- something to return to after many flights of fancy and exercises in spreading my wings and fleeing from my comfort zone. Plus, all that time away has given me plenty of material.

However, there is another side to why I haven't blogged in so long, and the post about that will be coming soon.