Hello my blog, hello my website. I’ve been gone awhile. The reasons are varied, but many of them come down to: I have been too overwhelmed by what’s happening in my country to manage regular blogging, too. In fact, it’s taken a terrible toll on my creativity. I’ve been working on getting more done, but I haven’t always succeeded. People who have been creating despite all of this, I salute you. I’ve been feeling much like I did when I went through my divorce – dry of creativity, unable to delve into story the way I need to, to finish novels or pull entertaining posts from my brain. I’ve mostly been either furious or grieving, and neither help me to write.

But – I am coming back. I refuse to let this white supremacist regime keep me from my own life’s work. We need art and stories more than ever, and I will do my best to contribute to that, and get my stories written and published. I will work to find ways around sorrow, around rage, to words and to actions. I will put in the work of creating, along with my work of resisting the harm that my government is hell-bent on doing.

So, here on my 45^th birthday, I am making a pledge to myself. Self-care is important, resisting is important, but so is the creative work. I have chivvied myself into a mental place where I can again feel story churning like a stormy ocean. I’m going to dive in, and see where it takes me. I’m going to post about it, and about my feelings, and about politics, and do all of this work. I think it will help. I know it will be good for me. So – a post a month, and several chapters a month, and all the story I can pull from the deep. I’m in the middle of my life, and I’m not letting anything stop me from being all the me that I am.

(Title is from a poem in “Commonplace Book of John Grimstone, 1372,” and also the song “Love Me Broughte,” by the Mediaeval Baebes.) (PS it’s me, I won me in the fight.)