Blurting

So, this post. This post is a blurt, because writing anything else first seems impossible.

I have been trying all week to begin the promotion of Adventure 3 of my book, The Oat Project.

I mean, it’s done! DONE. On Amazon, on my website, available. Finally! This is a reboot of sorts, because it took so long to get done.

But talking about it feels like a mountain to scale, like pushing clay through a screen.

Not because the writing isn’t good or worthy. It is. It’s taken me a while to really own it, but enough people have affirmed and confirmed that this path is the right one, that the words have helped them, in many different ways.

And this is my job. So the promo and marketing and further writing are the 9 to 5, the nuts and bolts, the career. I have to do this, must talk about it. But right now, it seems…simply strange.

It’s as though I am simultaneously intensely aware of how much things like this matter and how much things like this don’t matter.

And I simultaneously want to share my art with you and want to go hide in my room in my bed and not talk to anybody and sleep for weeks.

And explaining that is even difficult to talk about. My mother died on December 4th after battling cancer for almost five years. And on the way home from burying mom in Tennessee, on December 11th, my sister-in-law died and my brother sustained a brain injury (but lived, a bonafide miracle) in an accident on I40.

And I’ve been trying to push through and not mention it, have been trying to separate “work” from “life.” And it has not been working.

And as I struggled this morning to “get to it,” I realized that the reason my book is called a “project” is because it was done and is being published amidst life, amidst the difficulties, as a journey.

So I have to talk about these things.

So please bear with me in this process. Know that the joy and enthusiasm and verve I express these days are tempered with shades of grief and confusion…with Life, real life, the same sort of life you live every day. We would never see light without the shadow, after all, right?

And thank you. Thank you for being my community, cheerleaders, readers…my friends, beautiful friends. So here we go. Together. As it should be. Thank you for walking this journey of life with me.