A piece of flash fiction, kinda

It's been a year to the day since my last message. That feels wrong. My daughter will be seven in two weeks. A few times, I've woken up from a nightmare in which I turn forty, only to realize I was already forty-three. In addition to watching my weight, I'm editing an encyclopedia and judging a competition. It's painful. Meanwhile I translated John Banville's The Book of Evidence, which comes out at the end of the year with Rewayat Sharjah. (Yes, the Arabic title is The Book of Testimony, but that is much closer to the intended sense of giving evidence.) Robin Moger published his brilliant translation of a poem I addressed to Mohamed Al Mazrou'i while staying at his Abu Dhabi apartment in 2008, I gathered up the courage to publish my little English ghazal, I'm in Marguerite Richards' anthology The Ordinary Chaos of Being Human, and together with the late Àgnes Heller and other, fascinating compeers, I am part of the Goethe Institute-hosted "This Side of Populism". I was also very lucky to find an internationally minded literary agent genuinely interested in my English novel: Akin Akinwumi of Willenfield Agency. That's historic. My crawl stroke is getting better. I've been more active on Twitter as myself. тнє ѕυℓтαη’ѕ ѕєαℓ, which boasts a brilliant new grand vizier now, has its own Twitter. I have my own site. Recent events on тнє ѕєαℓ include Caroline Stockford on küçük İskender, an original story by Stacy Hardy, and my literary kindred Josh Calvo. You will have clicked some of those links, I trust. Here's a photo of Ismail Yassine in his youth.