So, this is the busiest week of my entire semester and by no means should I be posting here when I have two seminars to give this week and 30 essays to grade but HEY, I’m excited! About so many THINGS! I will admit, some of my excitability is likely that I love November. I mean, I hate the stress that November represents for grad students everywhere but I love the fact that I am technically able to get all Christmasy feeling, but people are really creeped out by it. It’s like, talking about Christmas for most of November is kinda dirty, it’s forbidden, it is taboo, and I LOVE IT. And since the obligations of Christmas have yet to creep up on me, it means that I can just listen to Harry Connick Jr. while I do the dishes and count down the days until I get to put up my Christmas tree. There are 21!

I’m not religious, and I like to think that I am really not that commercial but I love Christmas just the same. My whole life Christmas has been a much more low key, country, quiet, crafty, food oriented, family thing then it has ever been a money thing. Which is probably why I like it so much. Also I like snow. Shoot me. So anyway, what I’m trying to say is I get really excited about EVERYTHING at this time of year. I am almost done the semester and I am thinking about what Christmas crafts my Mum and I will do and what video games my brother and I will marathon and about all the cute little presents i’ve found while thrifting the past few months.

So what I am also really really excited about, is the Masked Mosaic anthology! It is so great for me to find a home for these poems. I am a strange writer, I write poetry, but it doesn’t read like most poetry because I lean towards a more narrative,vernacular style of writing than many poets. So I never know what to do with it, or where to send it, other then to my other poet friends for a read. So Masked Mosaic was a god send. A short fiction anthology that would take my poems as short fiction! I found out yesterday that they have both a finished cover for the anthology AND THEY HAVE A RELEASE DATE! So not only can you see the amazing cover of the anthology here but you can ALSO see that you will be able to purchases this piece of Canadian awesomeness on FEBRUARY 27th 2013! Which is, just so you know, my birthday!

This amazing cover is done by illustrator Steve Thomas. I always loved his stuff, so I was over the moon to see that he was doing the cover. You can buy things from him here!

The point of this post is that birthdays have never been as big of a deal as Christmas for me. But this year I am actually really really excited for my birthday! So I have a lot to be excited about. I am not at all excited about all the final essays and exams I have to grade. But that is just the hill I have to climb!

As a last note, I was going to say that I am sending off a rough abstract of my Walking Dead conference paper/post to this anthology about zombies and sexuality. So if it was accepted I would get the chance to expand my ideas from the blog post/conference paper and get into some more sexy specifics! If you are interested in sexuality studies or zombies send them an abstract! The abstracts are only 150 words and you have until Nov 9th to submit.

Thanks for reading! I will be back next Monday sometime with a few things to say. I think I will likely talk about how much I love anthologies!

-Emma