I am now 57.0027 years old, and let me tell you, I feel every one of those thousandths of a year.

Dozens of people reached out yesterday to wish me a happy birthday, including many I hadn’t heard from in a very long time. It was a good way to end the week.

It was another busy work week, though less stressful than most of the past weeks. I only had to work on one project, and I was able to complete the things I needed to complete.

But enough about work. I am counting down the days until my long summer break, which starts on June 19. Grand Rapids LitFest starts the following Monday, and my calendar of Grand Rapids literary events is completely full for almost the entire time I will be off of work.

Reading

I am well into both Drag Queen Preacher and Human Capital, and enjoying both quite a lot. Taking college-style notes for Human Capital has helped me a lot, and I think I will repeat this exercise with other non-fiction books. What’s the point of reading such works if I don’t remember them a week later?

Writing

The Grand River Poetry Collective is publishing an anthology this summer. Final call for poems is June 30, so I am reviewing and editing, and maybe, just maybe, I will have something ready to go before the deadline.

One of my projects for my time off will be to do a deep edit on an old manuscript. I have chosen Neighbors, my project from November 2018. Already I have several significant edits lined up. With a little luck, I will have a genuine draft ready for review by the end of the year.

Weekly Writing Prompt

Subject: Possession, Super Powers
Setting: Lost City
Genre: Science Fiction

Listening

Blood, Sweat & Tears, “Spinning Wheel,” from their 1968 album Blood, Sweat & Tears. “Spinning Wheel” charted in the top 20 during the week I was born. It’s a damn good song!

Interesting Links

• “Alfred McCoy, A World Without America?” (Alfred McCoy, Tom’s Dispatch)
• The Global Justice Project – “The Global Justice Project attempts to set out a new vision for global progress in the 21st century: grounding human development and equality in planetary habitability. It explores the conditions under which the world could move toward this horizon and traces an economically and ecologically consistent transition path from 2026 to 2100.”