Hey there, fancy seeing you here. Especially since there hasn’t been anything new to see since *checks calendar* September. Good grief.

A few things have happened since then.

I ran for office, as some of you know, and lost. But in a conservative-leaning district I had a pretty good showing with 43% of the votes cast. Good news for future hopefuls, I think. I also fell off of an electric scooter as I was putting literature on doors, and still have knee pain from that… but I’m focusing on the positive election results rather than the fact that the pain makes me feel old.

There were a few holidays that were celebrated cautiously, but adequately. My oldest daughter lives in the same town we do, but since they’re in contact with more people due to kids in school, we asked them to quarantine for two weeks before coming over. They did, and everyone stayed healthy, and we ate well. Homemade lasagna for Christmas Eve will definitely happen again.

And in an exciting turn of events, I have been writing. Crazy, right? Calling oneself a writer but not writing is quite the trick. But a block, or dam, or some other word that means “nothing is happening” was unstuck, and I have been writing quite a bit of flash fiction and creative nonfiction. I enrolled in workshops with Tommy Dean, the editor of Fractured, with flash-fiction dream journal Smokelong Quarterly, and with OneStory. They were extremely productive, and I’ve been submitting work created in the sessions, and working on new stuff that I’m really excited about.

And not only have I been writing, I’ve had some work accepted. A flash story I wrote last year won a contest at Two Sisters Writing & Publishing. And a tiny piece created in one of Tommy Dean’s workshops found a home at Paragraph Planet. You can read it here by searching the December archive for Dec. 14th. I have a flash piece coming out this week at Janus Literary, and another that will be included in the Writers’ Retreat at Dairy Hollow publication, eMerge Magazine, this spring. And today is the last day to vote for the shortlisted stories for the February Retreat West prize, one of which is mine! They’ll announce the winners tomorrow, so I’ll update if I’m lucky enough.
UPDATE! My story, “Details About a Purse that Occupy the Mind As We Wait for a Prognosis” placed 2nd in the contest! It’s a cash award, so I’m thrilled not only to be selected, but also to put some money back into the bank to replace (some of) what I’ve invested in writing workshops this year.

And the cherry on top of all this great news is that I was invited to join the reader’s group at Fractured! What a thrill it has been to read others’ work and be a tiny part of bringing new stories into the world.

Last weekend I ran away to the woods to stay in my younger daughter’s empty house and participated in a workshop with Sara Lippmann, hosted by Bending Genres. It also helped me produce a couple of new starts, and Sara gave fantastic notes on them and another piece I started in one of the other workshops. It really makes me wish I had a writing group to help me refine and polish. I have definitely improved as an editor of my own work — it’s amazing/cringey to look at things I wrote a couple of years ago. But I think being a writer is knowing you’re never really done with a piece until it’s accepted somewhere, and even then you might still ask if you can tweak a couple of things before it goes to press.

Finally, today I’m getting back on the Weekly Writing Prompt horse. I posted a couple here ages ago, and then switched over to just putting them on Instagram. You can find the archive of everything I shared last year and follow along over there. There are a lot of fun images, and I hope they’ll help you as you work on new stuff. If you write anything you’d like to share, I’d love to see it!

I promise I’ll be back. And it won’t be five months before I post again.