On beginnings

The start of the school year always feels like the start of a new year for me: freshly sharpened pencils, notebooks with shiny covers, new backpacks, and budding friendships. More than anything, it feels like I’m being given a second chance to do something, to start something. And so, this blog was born.

My word for this year is “experiment”. (Around New Year’s, I usually choose a word to set the tone of my life in the coming year. This helps me re-anchor myself when I’m in a place of doubt or when I feel like I’m going off track.)

EXPERIMENT.

Experiment, as in:

more doing and less thinking.
measuring success by the number of times I try something new vs. how well things turn out.
being uncomfortable and doing it anyway.

So, this year, I find myself asking “why not” more often than I do, “why”. In my writing, I’ve taken up a longer project - a novel - rather than shorter pieces of fiction. I’m writing characters who are questioning more than they are accepting; who are stumbling, falling and then picking themselves up, more than they are standing on the sidelines.

So, that’s what I’ll be sharing with you in this blog – my experiments with storytelling, with motherhood, creativity and everything else I try, in order to live this one, crazy and beautiful life. A poem by author Neil Gaiman floated through my Facebook feed at the beginning of 2015 that I'm revisiting this season: