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So.

Hello.

Are you still there? I’m still here. Battered and older but here.

Let’s see… It’s been nearly two years since I last posted. I don’t have a book or a story coming out. (And I don’t know when, or if, I will ever write a story again…more on that later). I don’t have anything to promote. But my friends and I were reminiscing about Ye Olde Blogging days vis-a-vis the continuously disintegrating social media landscape in the death of Twitter now X and having to pivot to yet another platform as Blue Sky and Threads and what have you pop up in its wake — and someone said, “We have to make blogging a thing again.” I am “Livejournal, Blogger pre-WYSIWYG editor” old, and I don’t know if blogging will ever be a thing again, but hey, an elder Xennial can dream kill time. Besides, sayang naman what I pay for domain hosting. So here we are!

(Tangent: during the “let’s make blogging a thing again!” discussion I brought up that I had just recently rewatched Julie and Julia and once again looked up how Julie Powell’s Julia Childs-tribute blog exploded. It was the early aughts, hosted by Salon.com, and started as text only. No pictures. No evidence as to the dishes Julie claims to have cooked. Just her describing her experience going through Mastering the Art of French Cooking. And people. Ate. It. All. Up. Can you imagine getting a following and a book and movie deal on the strength of WORDS ALONE these days? Unreal. And I lived through that time! Le sigh.)

Anyway. Back to this blogging thing. Where have I been and why do I say I don’t know if I’ll write fiction again? Well…for those who don’t know me IRL, since we last saw each other, and since the publication of Sugar Magic…my husband passed away. It was completely unexpected. It was his heart. It happened in 2022, a week after I turned 41, and it totally blindsided me. I felt like life took a baseball bat to my kneecaps then strung me upside down. One day maybe I will write more about him here. But let’s just say this: we had been together since I was 18. A big part of who I am I discovered with him and through him. To say that my heart is broken and probably will stay that way for a while, possibly forever, is an understatement.

And then I moved houses! Far away from my family! Because my husband passed in the middle of us building what was supposed to be our dream home. It is still my dream home — and I love it here dearly — but yeah. Yeah.

So now I’m a widowed single mother in a lovely house far from my family. It’s just me and Kid 2 most days, and I’m on school pick-up and drop-off duty. I’m so, so thankful that I can work from home. I am also thankful I transitioned from an extremely stressful “glamorous” role into a more behind-the-scenes comms one, which allows me to make this new reality work. But that means I write every day for work. Writing for fun…and the work that happens when you need to promote and sell what you wrote for fun — that is kind of beyond me now.

So yeah. Here I am. Blogging. I don’t know if I’ll keep this up. But I did want to pop in and say hi. This bruised, battered and broken-hearted soul taps the mic to say: Hello. Nice to see you here. I hope we see more of each other soon.