i feel very excited and happy to announce this publicly.

when it comes to how i eventually want to see my public, representative body of work "packaged", i never think about anything other than a single collection of my short stories. and i only think of that happening when i am very old or otherwise unexpectedly dead.

if there's more in me than the material for one collection, i surely don't know about it yet.

for quite some years now, i have kept a short list of the short stories i have written that i would feel entirely comfortable having published in a collection. as of this writing, out of the twenty-eight that have been published in periodicals, i have chosen two for that list. out of the stories on my computer that are written or half-written, and have never been published, i have chosen one, with my eye on a second.

i am very comfortable with this pacing.

this pacing, though, does not satisfy all my creative needs. nor do i wish to speed or bulk it up. what i would like, though, is a new letterpress project. i miss the hours of setting and cleaning type that the knitting tarot afforded me. i recognize that it is not safe nor possible to set type until my children are in school for the day, and that is still a few years off.

i have not yet physically combined the work we have done on ludovine, our press, and my own short stories. it seems natural that i would eventually try -- and it seems that the rate at which i approve of my own stories is particularly well-suited to letterpress work.

my plan, at this point, is to choose one of the three stories of mine of which i officially "approve", and -- after deciding upon some dimensions -- begin to set it in type, to be hand-printed as a small volume: one, single, letterpressed short story. i will hope to have the honor of having it illustrated by one of the talented artists in my life. ben and i will print it, and have it bound, in an editon of... who can say? a hundred? two hundred?

then, i will move onto the second story. then the third.

by the time a third short story has been typeset, illustrated, and handprinted and bound in a limited edition, i may have written, or completed, another story -- one that i have had the time enough to consider and know whether or not it belongs to this grouping.

in this way, i will determine which stories of mine will make up the eventual collection i wish to complete.

i will, simultaneously, continue to submit stories to periodical journals. the rate at which i have done this in most recent years is a mere fraction of what i would submit in the years when i published most. i do not admire a lot of the journals out there, and i certainly do not admire a lot of the writing. i have yet to be entirely confident describing where submissions such as these fit into my life as a writer. but those submissions are not the be all and end all, and have nothing to do, really, with what i now have planned for myself.

this feels like a real "life's work" to me, and gives me plenty of time for other life's work, like parenting, knitting, and living. this is how writing belongs in my life. i feel inspired by this plan, and feel like it is well-suited to my abilities and my dreams. i am writing, and, for the first time in many years, i have a nestful of "first readers" whose opinions and insights are very important to me. i am submitting, if only just to keep my hand in; and i am thinking about my little volumes, and the satisfying work they will give me in the years ahead.

when it comes to that eventual collection, i do not give any imagining to actually working with an "established" publisher. my feelings about self-publishing have become so much more a part of who i am and to self-publish "successfully" is a much more satisfying goal to me than having a book on the shelf in barnes and noble. i do dream, someday, of having a real love-affair with an editor of my work, but it is the relationship i think of more than the outcome, or product, of that relationship. it may never happen.

in talking about self-publishing a collection, it is hard to make plans, as i expect this to happen so far in the future that a plan made now would only be outdated techonologically. but, if i am typesetting each story i want to see included in this collection, then i want to consider publishing facsimile images of those letterpressed stories. digital publishing will allow us to consider a much larger edition, but facsimiles give you ALMOST the best of everything... and certainly a chance to see if ben and i get any better at letterpress as the years go on!

now, to butter up some of those that i would like to see illustrating my work. at least one of them hears me coming already, i feel certain.

thank you, universe, for helping me to see my plan.