What I’ve Been Up To, July ’13

Gigging

I played a few more gigs this month – Jack Murphy’s was lots of fun (pictured above), and the other bands there were lovely.  I’ve got a few more exciting ones lined up for August too – check them all out on my website.  I’m particularly excited about the Scarlets Kit Launch on 13 August, as my face is on all the publicity material in town!  So cool!

Writing

Most of my month was taken up by the International Zine Month blogging challenge, which you can read all about here.  Aside from that, I finally published the 12th issue of my perzine (pictured above, details here), and my article about bisexual invisibility was published in Bi Community News (You can buy a subscription to the magazine here, and read my article here).  

Reading

I read a zine every day for International Zine Month (above)!  Aside from that, I finally finished A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, which was fairly informative but pretty depressing – it spent too much time focusing on the bitter rivalries and politics of academia rather than the history of the ideas themselves, and eventually concluded that humanity was the universe’s worst enemy (I’m not saying I disagree with that view, but it was presented in a very pessimistic way, with little focus on the good that humanity has done for the universe, e.g. caring for other species).  To recover from reading such a negative book, I’m now on the Invincible Summer anthology by Nichole J Georges!

Some things that have made me happy recently:

• Getting a few exciting submissions for the 2 compzines I’m currently working on, Pandora Press and Sonorus: Feminist Perspectives on Harry Potter!  We’re still looking for more articles for both, so please consider submitting something if you’re into that sort of thing!
• Working on lyrics for new songs, and refining lyrics for some old songs!
• Spending less time online.  Twitter has really been getting me down lately – it seems to be full of bad news, misogynistic trolling, and bitter feminist in-fighting – and Facebook always puts me in a bad mood, so I’m trying to spend less time there, and more time doing things that make me happy, like watching good TV and films with my boyfriend, spending time with Toby, playing my piano, and reading zines.
• Going surfing with my friends down Rest Bay!  It was the first time I had tried surfing, and I had soooo much fun.