{"id":6168,"date":"2023-02-19T20:31:40","date_gmt":"2023-02-20T01:31:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.silkentent.com\/Trees\/?p=6168"},"modified":"2023-02-19T20:31:40","modified_gmt":"2023-02-20T01:31:40","slug":"still-blogging-after-all-these-years","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.silkentent.com\/Trees\/?p=6168","title":{"rendered":"Still Blogging, After All These Years"},"content":{"rendered":"

February 19, 2023<\/strong>
\nSunday<\/strong><\/p>\n

Twenty-four years. That’s how many years\u00a0Markings: Days of Her Life<\/em> has been in existence. It comprises more than 700 posts. Tonight I spent a fair amount of time exploring Substack<\/a>, the hot new place many of the coolest writers use now. I have a presence there, and I will probably eventually publish there. But it will be different from what’s here.<\/p>\n

I’ve been silent here since December. I break that silence tonight because it’s time, time to write publicly again about my ordinary life as a suburban retiree, a writer, a reader, a woman of faith. I’ve been active on Facebook<\/a>, where I have more than 800 friends and 130 followers. Some of those friends are purposely inactive there, or are deceased (yet they get birthday greetings from so-called friends, who must not be paying attention), and a few of them are not even actual people. (A cemetery friended me!) Interactions there can get tangled. I miss this longer, less noisy form.<\/p>\n

I am, not unexpectedly given the season and the state of the world, depressed. That is, I am in a period of genuine clinical depression (my diagnosis is “dysthymia<\/a>: endogenous depression with situational increase.”) So tonight my heart goes out to John Fetterman<\/a>, my representative in the US Senate, who has checked himself into the Walter Reed Medical Center for inpatient treatment of his own “situational increase,” a course that will take more than a day or two to be effective.<\/p>\n

Other than that, I am reading (currently\u00a0The Many Daughters of Afong Moy<\/em>, by Jamie Ford<\/a>, whom I will be working with at the Looking Glass Rock Writers’ Conference<\/a> in May), and writing (the novel I have been working on for ten years now). It’s the first twenty-five pages of that work that will be examined by Mr. Ford at Looking Glass. On Thursday, I am participating in an online event<\/a> where he will discuss that book. I haven’t finished it yet, so I need to get busy.<\/p>\n

As always, Thank you for reading.<\/p>\n