I think I bit off more than I can chew.

This winter has been a season of death, literal death, the ending of things as visceral and raw as they usually are metaphorical. Grief moves slowly, tendrils lacing into corners you forgot existed until you have to pull it up like a weed. The roots always survive.

I’ve taken more time for myself, less for creation, but the frost is melting and the light is warming and perhaps it’s apocalyptic, how early spring comes these days, but it’s here no matter how I feel about it. Things are changing. It’s time for me to change, too.

I need to start creating more. Need to for my own well-being, not in the sense that I feel an obligation to or a need driven by other’s approval. I don’t suppose I ought to. I need to. I need it like I need air and food and sleep and community. I think sometimes about hands on walls, on how the earliest evidence we have of human civilization is art. It is perhaps the most basic impulse we have.

But I’ve never stopped having ideas. I want to bring them all to light, like little flowers in a garden. I want them all to bloom. I think there’s tremendous potential in embracing the emotional impact of a short story. Not every good idea I have needs to be a whole novel. But there’s still so many ideas, so many concepts, so many images I want to carve into the world.

I have to move forward the same way I always do: carefully. Intentionally. With color-coordinated office supplies, probably. A novel, a collection of vignettes, an anthology of shorts, a short, a short, a short. Poetry. I don’t write much poetry, and what does come out is more of the “notes app poetry” variety than the award-winning kind. But it has to come out, somehow. That, in particular, is a feeling I know.

Everything that exists has to end. But everything that you want to exist has to start, too.

Much love,

BH ❤