Month: February 2014

Well, hello there.
Halfway up this flight of stairs, I encountered a pair of fellow travelers, taking a break to rest. We'd already climbed so far, and they didn't know if they'd make it. But we did. And the view was breathtaking. All of Paris spread out before us.

Halfway up this flight of stairs, I encountered a pair of fellow travelers, taking a break to rest. We’d already climbed so far, and they didn’t know if they’d make it. But we did. And the view was breathtaking. All of Paris spread out before us.

I’ll admit, I’m not the most reliable when it comes to personal blogs. I have two and sometimes they get put on the back burner. Since 2011:

  • I changed jobs within my company, then moved on to new job with a new company. Both were good moves and expanded my professional opportunities and experience.
  • I moved to a new apartment, which needed some major work and spent about 7 months painting, repainting and fixing broken fixtures.
  • I took on a leadership role with a very active foodie social group here in Milwaukee.
  • I ran two half marathons and my first full marathon.
  • I ended a relationship, started a relationship, ended a relationship.
  • I worked hard on a proposal for a second book on jewelry making, only to discover that I didn’t actually want to write a second beading book. At least, not the same way I wrote the first one (following the traditional proposal – draft- edit- publish model). I’m planning to take a more segmented approach that I think works better with today’s publishing opportunities, and requires a bit less of a “drop everything and do nothing but work on a book for 6 months” approach.
  • I read well over 100 books.
  • I learned to garden.
  • I started biking.
  • I resumed working on my grad school novel (still in progress! There is so much research to be done when you write about a different era).
  • I started traveling again, something I didn’t have the time or means to do during the grad school years or when I was a contract employee with an uncertain future. I did a solo trip to Paris this past fall, and it was life changing.

It’s been a rich and full two years with a lot of creative fulfillment. But I want to resume and pursue the conversation I started here a few years ago. It’s true, I could just delete the old entries and start from scratch (I doubt my entire 15 former readers would notice). But it’s nice to have this record of how I thought about writing and reading and storytelling back in 2011. And the nice thing about being the author of your own story is that you get to decide where to start. So let’s begin again, in February of 2014.