An Old Bombshell Has Entered the Villa

I almost deleted this blog.

A lot has changed in my life since I last posted here. Maybe everything has changed, now that I look back on it. Some really difficult events in my personal life happened in slow motion in the second half of 2023. Everything from sudden death to loss of income to loss of property to desperate illness to, well… *gestures at the state of the world*.

My family and I completely uprooted ourselves and moved states… twice… over the next ten months. Just as we had begun to settle into our final resting place, the industry where I had worked for years was rocked, economically speaking, by politics and organizational changes and you-name-it. I turned, then, to putting many more months into righting my teetering vessel of employment. JUST as I felt my professional horizons clearing, I found myself pulled in the direction of focusing on helping my family get through some new difficulties…

Which is where I am, still, now.

As a writer, I want to tell a story with a beginning, a middle, and an ending. I want to find the deeper meaning in every event that happens. I want to see the cause and effect clearly, and a satisfying character arc. When I was trying to summarize the last two unblogged years just now, I found myself frustrated even in the telling of it, let alone the living of it. “But the main character is still stuck in a wintering montage!” my inner critic says. “She hasn’t fully recovered her strength! This is boring.”

I might not be in the ass-kicking heroine scenes… yet… of the current phase of my life, but I have been in a serious training mode for a while now that has taught me a couple of things. Writing fiction is really difficult to do when you don’t have protected time for it. I have protected time for my day job, and for my family, and for housework, and for friends and the business of life around me. For me, writing fiction happens in the cracks of light around those pillars, and sometimes I have days, weeks, or months where it’s full dark, no stars.

But the light always comes back. You have to be ready to seize it.

I’m not perfect at working in imperfect conditions. Often I feel like I’m hanging on by bleeding fingernails to a sliver of space in which to write something middling. But I’m not letting go. And for the last few months, pulled in so many directions at once, I’m pulling back when I can, hunting for those cracks of light. And I’m writing again.

I’m also trying to remind myself that I’m used to reading about historical figures long-dead. We can see the highlights of their lives, the linear journeys, the justified triumphs and tragedies writ perfectly. But that’s done with hindsight, and distance, and editorializing if not outright fabrication. I’m still mid-journey of my own life, and learning that the fabric of time folds and stretches in ways I never considered before. I hope, if anything, that my unfinished work towards understanding this about my own life will add greater dimension to the fictional lives I am building.

TL;DR I haven’t had a lot of time to work on my novel or blog for a while, but now I do.

“So where is the promise to the reader?” my inner critic is saying now. “Are you going to blog regularly? Is your novel finally ready for querying? Are you going to publish any new short stories or essays, you erstwhile author?”

HUSH. This is my blog, and my site, and my authorial career, and dammit, I am retaking control of at least some things!

This is a place where I am pulling back against the bonds of chaos. If you’re reading this, then I hope you enjoy the updated (and thankfully simplified) design to my website, which I had been struggling with and then put off for… a long time. I’m done counting months on things. It was a long time, and now it’s DONE. Links should be fixed, reading should be easier, and (*manifestation voice on*) I will have a “BOOKS” page here in a year’s time.

As I have ramped back up work on my novel, I will share updates (and probably, honestly, more questions for the writing community) as that continues apace. I am excited about things, again, which is a really nice feeling to have after a very, very long winter.

And as for this blog…

… No. I don’t think I’ll be blogging here much. I started this post the way that I did because, as I was finishing up the redesign of my site, I thought about deleting the blog entirely. It’s only a handful of posts as it is, who would ever care?

What would I even blog about, if I am shifting to a newsletter model?

There I go, burying the lede!

For a while now I have been developing what is soon to become my first newsletter. As so many writers have shifted away from blogging, and Twitter, and other old ways we had of putting our words out there, I found myself starting to figure out how newsletters worked. And then I started to get ideas… the urge to create, stories and thoughts that I wanted to share specifically in newsletter form, which I had never previously felt. There are ways to build community and dialogue within newsletters that seem to have died out a little with the other old networks and platforms, and I want to help build that, too. For a while now, I’ve found myself snatching free time here and there not only to work on my novel, but to plan out stories and thoughts for my newsletter.

Consider this the official teaser trailer to my newsletter. Coming next month, to a revived author site near you.

Then, there I was, cursor hovering over the trash can icon of this blog, when something told me to hold off. Not the inner critic, but something actually helpful, telling me there is still a place for these posts. The want, the need, to take a step back at what I was doing here, brought me back to a blank page, and honesty.

I don’t know how often I’ll be blogging here! What if I get that urge more frequently? What if I never post again? What will I have to say here that I wouldn’t say in my newsletter? “We will all learn that together at the same time” is the answer I shout to my inner critic and my inner helper and all the myriad opinions that I don’t claim for myself. Here we are, now, with 1,100 words on the last 24 months of my life as a writer and regular person. I enjoyed writing it, and I am cognizant of that as being really important to where I am now, too.