Delayed Announcements

I was published in a anthology!

This is going to be short but not very sweet.

I have a few essays, a new chapter and another poem in the pipeline for this publication but I need time to edit these and I’ve had very little time to do anything lately. As I announced on Notes recently, I have been quite overwhelmed with work and life responsibilities. My job became significantly more challenging this year after my previous boss was let go. My department no longer has a boss. We are now under the content and programming department, so I’ve taken on the responsibilities of my previous boss without any sort of promotion.

I did somehow successfully project manage two back to back events (and when I say back to back, I mean they were literally 48 hours from each other). One of the events was a huge community festival that draws over 9,000 people a year to it. I not only produced that but also stage managed it too. Then 48 hours later, I was up at 3 a.m. so that I could pick up items in time to meet a caterer at my work around 5 a.m. for a special event that brought a very famous individual to our station. And then a day later another booth event. And now, in 9 days we’ll host another large community event to screen the season premiere of one of our original shows. The fun doesn’t stop.

Okay, so what? Everyone has lots of shit on their plates right now. Yes, but do they also have a beloved French bulldog who has suddenly stopped eating and is vomiting profusely? A dog that they’ve held in their arms since it was a six week old puppy?

After a week of being told by our veterinarian that I wasn’t complying with the treatment because I couldn’t get my dog to actually keep his medicine down due to the fact that he wouldn’t eat anything, I began force feeding him with a syringe. This was all happening the week leading up to the back to back events.

After three days of this, I watched my dog begin to hide away under our couch and curl his little paws up underneath is body as he shivered with a fever. I told my husband that our dog would die if we don’t do something immediately. I knew he wasn’t just sick with gastritis. I had consulted with Doctor Google and all signs pointed to bowel obstruction. Indeed, it was exactly this (not just one object but two objects in separate areas of his small intestine).

Note: You have to insist on medical care for your loved ones. You have to because sometimes practitioners aren’t necessarily connecting all the dots that you can see but they can’t.

So, last Tuesday morning, as I was working the early morning event with the famous person at our station, my dog was hospitalized and was undergoing emergency surgery. The day before this my husband had called to tell me that the vet said he might not make it since it had been so long since he’d started having symptoms, which prompted me to cry in my office at my work. This made some colleagues assume that I was having a meltdown from the work stress due to the back to back events, which wasn’t the case at all.

This update isn’t about any of this though. It is the reason I haven’t had a chance to write more here or announce things earlier when I wanted to. Anyway, without further ado…

This Thursday evening, I’ll be reading an essay of mine that was recently published by Huntington Press as part of the Nevada Humanities anthology series Las Vegas Writes. If you live in Las Vegas, I invite you to come out to this free event. You can purchase one of the books and I’ll be happy to sign it. I’m really excited to have the opportunity to read alongside other fantastic writers who live in Las Vegas. I’ve had a chance to read the proofs for this book and some of the work is very moving.

If you aren’t able to come to see the reading, I’ll see what I can do to share it with you in the next update. See below for more details.

xoxo