A Hopeful New Year
I don’t think I’ve ever gone into a new year with quite this much uncertainty before. It’s hard to imagine what the world is going to look like a few months from now. Perhaps that’s why I’ve been focusing inward lately, on the things I can control: on home and family; growing, making, and preserving food; trading social media for video chat and hand-written letters; canceling professional travel engagements and planning family trips instead.
And getting back to writing. In 2016 I finished and sold a short story for the first time in three years: “Things That Creep and Bind” will appear in The Sum of Us, edited by Susan Forest and Lucas Law, in mid-2017. I was thinking of my grandparents when I wrote it, about their struggles caring for my mother in her illness. Those memories also brought up things that I learned from them about home-making, frugality, and self-sufficiency under adverse conditions, things that I’m finally learning to apply.
2017 will also see the publication of my first two comics issues: Pet Noir #3, co-written by Pati Nagel and myself, and Pet Noir #4, my first solo script. Both were capably edited by Kymera Press founder Debbie Lynn Smith.
As 2016 grinds to a close, there are still so many things waiting to be created, whether they’re books or stories or comics or gardens or events or any other form of art, craft, or expression. I’m sure I’m not alone in feeling that I can’t find it in me to greet the new year joyfully this time, to ring it in with champagne and cheers. So I’ll see it in quietly instead, with hope, creativity, and effort.
Here’s wishing you and yours a safe, healthy, creative and hopeful New Year.