A New Day

This week, I've spent time thinking about how much my life has changed in the past decade. In 2008, I was fresh off the publication of my first book and in the heyday of blogging as a service, BaaS, if you will humor my acronyms.

Oh my, how life has changed.

In the time that has passed since my departure from BlogHer/SheKnows Media, I've ceased to have a professional reason to be on social media. And, to some extent, my appetite for it has decreased.

I finished another novel, which will come out from InkSpell Publishing in August 2019. It will be a labor of love, in that I care more about the themes of the book and in good sentences more than in the book's commercial success. That is a departure from my first two books. In those, I truly hoped for commercial success. Now, I understand a writer's chanches of making the front table at B&N are akin to a singer's chances of winning The Voice and then having a hit single a year later - so many people I talk to think somehow this art is different from that art, and ... it's not.

But that's okay.

There are too many people who think making art is only relevant if that art makes a living income. I know a lot of extremely talented artists and writers. Very few are able to survive solely on their art. Most depend also on income from speaking, teaching or brand representation. We no longer live in a society where artists have landed gentry sponsors.

So, why, if it is so hard to make a living at art, do we still make art?

Because it's important.

Rise up from your couches, oh, Americans. Break free from your must-see TV and your Facebook groups. You owe pop culture nothing.

You owe your soul everything.

I'm probably more than halfway though this life. I cherish all of you who have challenged me to jump off a platform beyond myself. I type tonight to remind you to do the same. This old blog is nearly dead, but in its last dying breaths, I encourage you to remember why we all started.

We wanted to connect. We wanted to be heard. 

We wanted to be bigger than we were from our couches, from our beds, from our little lives of quiet desperation. 

I may no longer self-identify as a blogger, but I was and will always be, a writer. And for the five of you who are still reading this blog, I think you do, too. 

We are writers. This is what we leave behind. 

Write good sentences. Observe your reality. Synthesize what you see.

Onward. 

It's a new day.