Hattie Is Back! (and so am I)

Gratitude is the word this week, but, for me, Thanksgiving also signals a time of renewal. The college where I teach always ends its first term with final exams the week before Thanksgiving, making Thanksgiving week a break week for both students and faculty before we start up again with new classes the following Monday.

This year in particular, I’ve been looking forward to the extra space and time to do the website makeover I’d been planning ever since switching to a self-hosted WordPress blog last spring. Also, for months, I have been playing with and fine-tuning my personal priorities in terms of teaching, writing, indexing, family, friends, reading, research—all of which are important and each of which, at some point in recent years, has suffered from neglect due mostly to my lack of planning.

It’s not a matter of having it all, since there’s a lot of “all” that I don’t even want. It’s a matter of creating room in my writing life for what is meaningful to me.

What do I have to show for my planning week?

• A new, cleaner look for my website and blog, with a different landing page and better use of the Standard theme
• A schedule of weekly posts on Creative Synthesis, the blog I write at Psychology Today
• A posting schedule here, too (I’m still fiddling with this, but it will be two or three times per week)
• The return of Hattie and Friday Flash Narratives!
• A makeover for Hattie’s blog, too (she’s never one to be outdone), with a return to sharing daily diary excerpts
• Hattie’s own Facebook page and Twitter feed

Come Monday, I’m ready to hit the ground writing! We can choose to make our beginnings when and where we need them. We don’t have to wait for January 1st or next year’s NaNoWriMo or any other “official” start date. In the oft-quoted words of T. S. Eliot, “to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from.”