It’s been a long time since I posted anything on this blog. I start and stop in fits, because, let’s face it, writing a blog regularly and expecting someone to read it, and be interested, can often be a very narcissistic undertaking, one that makes me feel a bit like I’m standing on the corner of State & Main with a cardboard sign that says in shaky handwriting, “Will take readers, willing to write anything.”

However, as 2016 opens, and 2015 is put to bed, and the amazing artistic icons of my youth are dropping like flies, (RIP David Bowie and Alan Rickman) I’ve decided to ‘get out on the water,’ so to speak.

In the last year and a half, I’ve left my job of 14 years, broken up with my partner of 17 years, realized my nephew – who we raised from the age of 12 – is now 29 and his younger brother is 23 with 2 kids of his own. My best friend and I just realized the other day we’ve known each other 25 years! 25!? A quarter of a century, and after bumping in to another friend on the street the other day, and realizing, “Yeah, Dan and I have known each other 30 years or more…” What? Am I my mother?! Shit. I’ve got a bath towel that is older (by 2 months) than one friend of mine.

All of this has made me realize that life is swiftly flowing by me, and I feel like it’s time to stop standing on the riverbank. So with that in mind, I’ve begun to finish some long languishing projects & goals including:

1. The SciFi young adult novel I started many years ago
2. Getting up onstage regularly to do stand up comedy (Info here)
3. Planning my tiny house build for the coming year

Time is short. As writer, Chuck Wendig, says:

“It’s coming. I know it. And so I cleave to the act of creation both to spite and to make sense of the ineluctable destruction.”

This quote struck me perfectly the other day as I was reading Chuck’s blog – one of the few blogs from which I get regular newsletters in my in-box. I subscribe because Wendig knows not only how to drill down, hunker down and “Write harder, Motherfucker!”, but also because he knows how to create community and inspire the people that follow him. He writes his blog so well, in fact, that when I was working at Bear Pond Books the other day I said, “There’s a friend of mine who just wrote a book about the Star Wars franchise. We should carry it, and the rest of his stuff. He’s good,” then I thought, “What? I don’t KNOW Chuck Wendig!” But it seems as if I do. His regular posts make you feel like you do know him, at least in the way you might know a person who works at the same job as you.

And he does. Or he could. All I have to do is start living, start writing, go back to ‘arting’ damn it!

All I have to do is “Art Harder Mother fucker!” and I plan to. Starting right now.

Kim