The promise of a new year is tempting; of a new decade, almost irresistible. It’s been many years since I stopped believing there was a magic of refreshment in a new year, that the change would provide a practical reset, clearing away what was hard and sad from the last year and letting me start new. My best friend and I used to say at the end of each year, “thank goodness that one’s over: next year will be better.” We don’t say that to each other any more.
As with many things I’ve stopped believing in, I practice and celebrate the new year all the harder for being convinced there’s no magic in it. I need the reset, the clear delineation between what is past and what is new. Without it, it’s hard to see the changes: griefs and struggles seem continuous, the way a child’s growth seems continuous when you see the child every day. The new year marks pencil lines on a wall, an opportunity to compare how things were and how they are.
It’s been almost a decade — nine years and six months to be precise — since I started this blog. That year, 2010, set in motion huge changes for me. I spent the first half of the decade on an exciting new path, and the second half of it recovering from the damage it caused. Sifting through it all, what I want to keep and what I want to leave behind, has been a project of the last few years, which I think now is largely complete. This blog is something I want to leave behind. I nearly did that last year, but instead I wavered and ultimately doubled down on the blog, purchasing a domain for it, thinking that maybe I could still build on these old foundations.
This year, I considered the blog question again, and didn’t hesitate. There’s a year’s growth right there, a pencil line on the wall showing a decision that seemed impossibly fraught in 2019 and was resolved in a minute in 2020.
I have a new blog now at ginny-brown.com. As of this moment, there’s nothing on it, although I mean to change that very soon. Mostly what I want to write about these days is the process of writing fiction, and perhaps showcase some actual fiction pieces, and hopefully before the decade ends, use it as my core website as a published author.
If you’re still following here, as a surprising number of people are, and you’d like to see me over there, you’re warmly invited.
