Drowning in words.

Well, it's been another great, but exhausting weekend. I spent the bulk of the day yesterday trying to help Busan find work pants for his new contract, because he's a big baby and needs the equivalent of a personal shopper/mom to buy his clothes. In the end, after coming with me to briefly meet up with a friend, we sent him off on his own to Dongdaemun to figure it out for himself. And he did.

Spent the evening in Itaewon trying to eat good food, despite the heat zapping our appetite. I haven't been one of Itaewon's biggest fans in the past, and I don't know if it has changed, or if I have just finally found my groove with the place (probably a combination), but I'm becoming more fond of it, these days.  It seems like every time I'm there I find a new great restaurant or coffee shop. The food is genuinely exciting. The atmosphere is far less bro-ish than it has been in the way I've experienced it in the past. It's good. And I'm happy to be just a straight shot on the subway away, soon.

Afterwards, I met back up with B to crash at the new place for the night. We watched Park Chanwook's new movie Stoker, which simultaneously bored and horrified B. I thought it was pretty good. Beautifully shot and weird and uncomfortable.

This morning, I finally managed to sleep in and get caught up on my rest, a bit. I think it's the million different directions I'm trying to move in all at once, probably, but I've been running on three or four hours of sleep a night for a few weeks now. I woke up again at 5:45 this morning, and just refused. Finally crawled out of bed just before 9. It felt good.

Came home early and got to work returning a dozen or so messages and contacts about IQ. We're doing great, as far as attention and interest goes, but I'm starting to get a bit nervous about submissions. I know it's really early, yet, but my fear from the beginning with this thing was that we wouldn't be able to drum up enough stuff from inside Korea, and we'd have to scrub it up and go international to make it work. I would hate to see that happen, because a big part of the motivation behind this little venture, for me and the other editors, is to open up a space for this kind of thing for foreigners within Korea. There are writers groups and meet ups, but as someone who lives outside of Seoul, it's been difficult to form a community here. If you don't live inside the city, you're mostly left to your own devices.

As for me, I don't feel the need to put yet another overworked, under-read journal out there into the world. I admire the people who do it, but I've never felt compelled, until I realized how much I missed that kind of thing here in Korea. And how hard it is, without following a million different blogs, to keep  up with what other creative people are doing here. Articles and information, photographs abound. But the creative work is hard to find. But I believe in my heart that it's being done. So, I hope we can get it together.

To top it all off, I spent another hour tonight working up another chapbook submission (which I should've done last week -- today is the deadline). It's another long shot at a press I'm way underqualified to be submitting to, but it's worth the shot. I'm all about taking the shots these days. You gotta reason that after a while, your aim has got to improve.

For now, I'm off to try to work on some new stuff.  Unplug my internet and enjoy some cyber silence.

Send your stuff!