girlbomb: Janice Erlbaum

November 19, 2007

Pre-publication projects

With less than three months to go until the publication of Have You Found Her, I find myself doing a lot of typing, but very little writing. I’m trying to catch up on my emails, especially after receiving a disappointed note from a correspondent bemoaning the fact that it took me six whole days to respond to the latest batch of poems she sent me — if I had time to blog, she noted, surely I had time to read her work and respond to it. Indeed, I had time not only to blog, but to watch Survivor, Project Runway, and The Amazing Race, all of which I prioritized over this young woman’s poems, which are certainly heartfelt and adept, despite my alacrity in telling her so. Maybe I should switch to form letters — Thank you for sending your latest work; I read it and found it both heartfelt and adept — or, conversely — Thank you for sending your latest work; I think you should give up trying to communicate through language and express yourself solely through semaphore from now on. That would certainly increase my response time.

Besides answering email (most of which I am honored and delighted to receive, by the way; I’m always flattered that people choose to share their work with me, and am happy when they value my opinion), I’ve been trying to create a mailing list and database out of ten thousand sent emails and a bunch of little, semi-legible scraps of paper. That’s going really well, for about ten second at a time, and then I tend to lose focus and start looking at pictures of cats with funny sayings attributed to them. I’m also trying to redesign this website, having just bought the URL janiceerlbaum.com — after eleven years of using the online moniker “girlbomb,” I think it’s time for me to grow the hell up and start using my real name. I mean, I’m 38 years old, I’m hardly a “girl” anymore, though I am still, on occasion, a bomb. Also, Girlbomb is now only one of the many fine products in the quality Janice Erlbaum line. I’m vertically integrating my brand, like how Marc Jacobs has two labels, Marc by Marc Jacobs for the younger people, and just plain Marc Jacobs for the their older, richer counterparts. So, following that analogy, if you liked Girlbomb, your mom will love Have You Found Her.

But most of what I’m working on is just not going crazy. Three months to go, and outside of some data entry and diligence to my email, there’s not a lot that I can do right now. The waiting is almost worse than the writing — at least when I’m writing, I feel creatively productive, I can write in my notebook at the end of the day, Got four pages done, moving onto Chapter Six soon. Now I write in my notebook, Answered a bunch of emails, bought mothballs at Bed Bath and Beyond. Blogged about how I have nothing to blog about. The usual. Soon, I hope, I’ll have a wonderful new project to work on, something that will keep me from obsessing about pre-orders and long-lead publicity bites. In the meantime, if you’ll pardon me, I’ve got some poems lolcats to read.