I’ve been busy as you can imagine today. Printing.

This Friday is the first Friday of the month and I’ll be the featured poet at a local monthly reading here in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. I am fortunate (or unfortunate if you are counting on gas prices) of being situated, where I live, between Harrisburg, Gettysburg, York, Hanover, and Carlisle. I am, luckily, about equidistant between them all, which means that no matter which direction I go I can find a poetry reading almost any night of the week. I don’t attend as many as I did a year ago, but I do make my way to them all as often as I can.

This month will be a busy month. I am the featured reader tomorrow night at a coffee house in Gettysburg. Sunday night I host a reading at my church and will read some of my poems there. Thursday, June 19, I feature again at an art gallery in York. The art gallery feature will be what is called a “poetry bomb”, consisting of a single poem, but it is at the opening of a new exhibit at the gallery so the audience will be primarily artists and their family and friends and not poets, a unique type of setting. Tomorrow night is a box of chocolates.

I never know what will happen at Ragged Edge – the name of the coffee house. Sometimes the place is packed. At other times, there is a moderate turnout. Even a moderate turnout, however, typically brings in more people than some places do on a great turnout so it should still be good. But it is summer, which means the college students who attend Gettysburg College might have better things to do (like visit their parents back home, wherever that is for them). Again, it could be good, or it could just be a moderate turnout.

But what I’ve been printing for the last three hours are chapbooks. Down to only four of both self-published chapbooks that I typically sell at these events, I felt like I needed to print about 10 more copies each. So I did. Of course, you always have contingencies. My color ink cartridge started running out of ink at the end and, this is the real stinker, I had a flub with the paper on one of the chapbooks that caused the pages to be off and therefore 9 copies of it were totally worthless. I had to reprint them. Thankfully, I only needed the color printer for the covers and 17 of 20 survived with no color issues. Not bad.

I also managed to print out about 30 bookmarks. On one side of the bookmark is information about World Class Poetry and this blog. On the other side is promotional information for Ragged Edge Coffee House. This is a new initiative I decided to try. I provide the bookmarks for free to local bookstores and coffee shops that offer poetry readings and support the arts. A little self-promotional item that benefits the independent business owner and me in a reciprocal sort of way. If it goes over well I will likely offer them to other bookstores, coffee shops, and small business outlets that host poetry readings or support the arts in locations other than locally.

At any rate, all this printing has me tired. But it is a necessary aspect of self-publishing.