This will be my final post on this blog. For the past two months I've been trying to decide whether to write here again. There are plenty of ideas to pull about art, culture, and history for this kind of blog. I had ideas, but I lacked the passion even more than I lacked the time to post them here.
I continue to work on my book, and I'm still trying to get into the freelance writing business. If problems don't overwhelm me in my personal life and I can get my foot in the entrance to the paid writing world, juggling and arranging words in an aesthetic and educated manner will be for the remainder of my lifetime. I have books and articles inside me that I want to share that need to be written. A quote from Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison is "Everything I've ever done, in the writing world, has been to expand articulation, rather than to close it." I want to expand articulation as well. Too many have constricted and restricted it today by mediocre writing masquerading as art. Another Toni Morrison quote says, "If there's a book you really want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it."
It takes guts and talents to write art not rubbish. I have the guts, but do I have the talent? I truly hope so. I went through a sentimental phase as a writer. I also lost my confidence for a time, but it came back. Since I've been blogging beginning in 2005, I've had seven blogs. I deleted two. Two others were hacked into and deleted by someone I know. Blogging helped me to gain a lot of confidence in my writing. I even went through a period when I held blogs in contempt even though I was blogging. I felt it was vanity publishing, but blogging has become more to me than that.
Besides the experiences I've had in the last several years, blogging brought my dream of really sitting down to write a book to fruition. This is where I practiced. Readers feedback encouraged me to really go out and tackle the freelance writing business. Since my last post I have proposed an article to a children's historical magazine, and though my idea was rejected the editor sent me a personal note and told me that she found my idea interesting, however she couldn't use it for that particular issue. The rejection did not bother me because I didn't get a generic rejection letter. I got the personal touch. The EDITOR wrote me a handwritten note and found my idea interesting! There are possibilities.
Writing is a lonely business.
So much is happening here and now that needs to be addressed. I decided to started a new blog so that all of my long writing will not be in isolation. That blog is An African Woman Lost in Exile. In the last 6 months I have really gotten into Twitter, sometimes at an addicted level. There are some politically and socially aware bloggers that I follow on there. With so much going on in my life and in all of life today, I decided to start this new blog. A Very Fine Romance Redux was my baby for awhile, and I was a proud mother of it, but babies have to be let go of at some point so they can toddle on. I will look on this baby with fondness, but I have to let her go.
My new blog will on occasion feature art or some politically relevant historical figure, but this will be a political and social blog more than anything else. It will talk about hard acts that many people cannot deal with: racism (in all shades), war, religious bigotry, sexism, whatever pops up on the horizon or flies into the world's face or my face that I feel is worth commenting about.
An African Woman Lost in Exile is not about escapism. This is about the good, the bad, the ugly side of life here and now. So I encourage you to follow my new blog. Read it, get angry, weep, and learn.
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