Eratosphere - Poems/award/thoughts on recent poetry readings

I haven't been here in a few weeks and see lots of interesting new links. And look forward to new Sphereian work.

Just back from a book tour in North Carolina and noticed that several of my poems from "Books and Culture Magazine" are now also on line. Here's a blog post that tells how they started:

http://thepalaceat2.blogspot.com/201...f-mystery.html

And here's the link to the poems: http://www.booksandculture.com/artic...f-mystery.html

Anything else I have coming out soon probably will have lots of Sphereians, so I won't add anything else except that I meant to say--and don't think I did--that my latest novel, "A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage," won another award, the Silver Award for fiction of the ForeWord BOTYAs, awarded at the annual ALA meeting.

For those interested in setting up readings for poetry, I have noticed a few things of late. I read poetry from "The Foliate Head" and "Thaliad" at Quail Ridge Books, Flyleaf, McIntyre's, and Malaprop's in North Carolina. However, I was asked also to read from the novel at all but Flyleaf. That had not been my plan, as I read from the novel last year and was planning to just do poetry this year. So that suggests some of the practical difficulty of doing poetry readings at bookstores these days. Two were solo readings, and two were with friends.

Another observation on readings: I believe this may be an unintended result of self-publishing, but my favorite regional indie in upstate NY has recently decided not to do readings any more because it's "not fair" to those people who can't bring in a good audience. This thought floored me, as I'm not sure where they got the idea that writing is fair. I thought it was rather unfair to those who could bring in an audience... So it's signings only now. Not sure if that's a trend or an anomaly.