Update from Florence: Sharpmonica returns with a new look!

Friends, readers, lend me your eyes! After a two-month hiatus I am back with a new website, redesigned for your reading ease. Since my posts are my main feature over here, I wanted to expand the margins so they would read like actual editorial copy and not some weird 20-inch column that the intern screwed up last Friday. Well, here we are! I accomplished this with the assistance of a Fiverr web dev in the Khyber Pass (O 2022!) and paying more than I expected for the hosting subscription and his help, but still, within range, and this site gives me such particular joy – to be here, in this space, sharing my life and better thoughts with you – and sometimes some of my worse thoughts too.

Hopefully the design migration preserved all my subscribers – Waleed said it would. (O Waleed!) Let me know that you’ve successfully received this new post! Needless to say I have learned more than I ever believed possible about WordPress’s business model, tiered subscriptions, hosting services, and Fiverr.

Even though I have not been writing in this space, I have been very busy in the literary world since I was last here opining about climate change and Roe v. Wade. My essays have been picked up repeatedly for publication by Adamah, the UK journal based on Manchester for whom I have been writing regular for the past year. I got a lovely new gig writing for the website Romeing Firenze, which provides updated and savvy content for the educated traveller to our fair city. It’s based in Rome, but Firenze boasts the lion’s share of tourists to Italy per capita, so they’ve branched out. You can find my latest piece on very local, super-luxe Florentine fragrances here. So far for them I have been covering modern art and fine fragrance, which is all very much in my wheelhouse and suits me just fine. And last but far from least I edited a book-length poetry manuscript for an emerging American poet in Berlin, whose work was wry, upbeat, and insightful. I’m growing my business in editing manuscripts and academic articles so this was a welcome new project. Emma Sullivan posts her work to Instagram here if you’d like to check her out.

Remember to like and subscribe to get my updates as soon as I post them! I’ve got a lot of things to say and plenty of new comment and commentary brewing. As always.