Follow this Blog (or me). Now NEW and IMPROVED!

Interested in following Writing About Writing? Or Chris Brecheen?

If you're trying to follow Writing About Writing (or if you are trying to follow ME as a writer), it might actually be confusing to navigate all the different ways I am online and what goes where.

Writing About Writing is on several social media, but each medium is updated a little bit differently. Some get every post I make, no matter how major or minor. Some media are privy to a cycle of "reruns" where most days I cycle through the popular posts of the past so that new folks can see old posts they may have missed (and old fans can be reminded of treasured classics).

Some social media have different signal-to-noise. Some I update in other capacities. Some are fire and forget. In some, I post my writing that is not "about writing," like the blog NOT Writing About Writing. Other places, more strictly ABOUT writing, pretty much keep it to this blog and it's updates along with macros, puns, and "You should be writing" memes. A lot of people have left Facebook and almost everyone I know has left X (Twitter). 

Here are a few questions I get a lot:

What should you follow if you want to see everything I write? 

You want My Public Facebook Page. Follow it (or friend it if you check out the guidelines below). Though be warned that it can sometimes be like drinking from a fire hose. I will post everything I write, including reruns, but I ALSO post navel gazing, proto-posts, Jack-Handy-caliber deep thoughts, amateur political punditry, social justice thoughts, macros, silliness, and geekery. 

What should you follow if you basically want all the official posts I write, but not a bunch of crap about politics, video games, my day, or social justice?

You will get a higher signal to noise ratio if you follow my Tumblr, but I write about politics, video games, social justice, and sometimes my day, so I'm not really sure you can avoid that if you're interested in me as a writer.

What should you follow if you basically want the Writing About Writing blog, but almost nothing else. 

You want the Writing About Writing Group. TWO posts most days (one new and one rerun). There is one meme (but only one) that is the prior day's best from the page. I almost never post from my other writing, and I almost never post more than one meme.

What should you follow if you basically want memes, puns, articles, and "you should be writing" reminders and don't really care about reading my blog?

Okay, that's cool. No no. It's fine. Really. While I put some aloe on this burn, you want the Writing About Writing page. Lots of memes, macros, puns, and comics and it's easy to scroll past the occasional post from my blog.

What should I do if I want all of these things? All of it! Give me more!!

Follow the Writing About Writing Facebook Page, The Writing About Writing Facebook Group, and my Public Facebook Page. Then go to the following button on the page and set your preferences to "See First." I will warn you that you may see some repeat posts, but this if you want to miss the fewest things I post, this is the way.

Or if you don't like Facebook, follow me on Bluesky and Tumblr. The two together should have pretty much everything I write.

All nearby Mandalorians in unison:
"This is the way"

The "Join this site" button on the left, toward the bottom of this (and every) page. 

Following Writing About Writing through Google's Blogger allows you to assemble a collection of blogs you follow. Most people following the blog this way have their own blog through Blogger, but it's not necessary. (You only actually need a Google account, which many people have through Gmail.) You will be notified when I write a new post.

Pros- Shows all updates (minor and major). Updates in a timely manner.

Cons- No reruns. No posts from any other venues. Blogger usually takes a few hours to get the latest post up.

R.S.S. Feed 

Note: Google has recently discontinued FEEDBURNER, but if you still want an RSS and/or email feed, here is a page of alternatives. 

If you have an RSS reader, you may like to simply be updated by having your RSS feed updated with the text of my latest post. If you click on the Feedburner button AT THE BOTTOM of the page, you can subscribe to Writing About Writing through a number of RSS readers including FeedDemon, Netvibes, My Yahoo, Shrook, NewsFire, RSSOwl and more. 

One of many Feedburner alternatives at the link above.

Pros- Shows all new updates (major and minor). Updates instantly.

Cons- RSS feed does not include reruns (even the Greatest Hits I like to cycle through). No posts from other venues. Many RSS readers are JUST text, so you won't see the images that are part of the posts. Also, if you get a little behind on your feed, catching up feels Sisyphean and knowing the next update is coming feels like the sword of Damocles. (Gotta get my Greek metaphors on.)

Email Notification 

….has been disabled by Blogger.

I'm really sorry. I will keep my eye on a replacement. When I'm making enough to pay all the bills with writing, one of the first orders of business is going to be hiring a web designer to completely overhaul the site and have all the cool things that I can't figure out how to do.

Bluesky

I keep most short things on Bluesky. While I'm not ready to leave Facebook, a lot of my friends ARE, so anything that CAN fit into the 300 character limit, will, and if it can't fit in 300 characters, it'll end up in a post that I LINK to on Bluesky (or I'll post it to Tumblr). This DOES mean that Bluesky is going to see a LOT of my personal posts.

Pros- A glimpse into my private life.

Cons- Who wants to see THAT crap?

Twitter

No

Pros- Peace of mind. Not supporting a Neonazi. 

Cons- Are there really any?

Facebook Page for Writing About Writing 

(That heading is a link)

W.A.W.'s Facebook page is its whole own thing.

In order to build an audience on Facebook, I spend a lot of time posting memes, macros, "you should be writing" reminders, inspirational messages, videos, and whatever thing about writing I find interesting and want to share.

This may seem counterintuitive, but I actually try NOT TO POST TOO MUCH FROM MY BLOG. The audience I've spent years carefully cultivating will not stick around if things get spammy. Most of the FB audience is there for the shenanigans, not the blog cross-posting.

You can increase your chances of seeing posts by setting the page to "see first," but you'll never see everything……because Zucc. FB does something horrible frequently enough that if I could som

Click "See first" to see more. 
But because FB wants page admins paying money
nothing you do will ever get you everything I post.
(You have to visit the page periodically and go through our history for that.)

Pros- Lots of other fun stuff going on. 

Cons- Lots of other stuff going on which. Also the FB algorithm prevents page followers from seeing every post so some W.A.W. posts will get lost. Not a good place to get all the blog updates if you want them. Enjoying anything on FB requires a shower with steel wool and industrial cleanser. Facebook is the Antichrist.

Tumblr 

(The heading is a link)

I joined Tumblr after Facebook's 2016 round of content throttling. Then Tumblr started doing it too and THEN they axed LGBTQIA+ content because of overkill compliance with Fosta/Sesta. These days I'll post all my blog stuff (reruns too) including from the non-writing blog, and a few of my well received memes very similar to my FB group except more memes and I sometimes I share other Tumblrs or something a little social justice-y. 

Pros- Blog posts from all locations. Best meme of the day. 

Cons- Somewhat limited presence on Tumblr. And I share other Tumblr posts about social issues from time to time.

Facebook's Writing About Writing Group

(The heading is a link)

Different from the FB page, the Facebook GROUP will only have the blog posts (usually two a day) and a single macro/meme/infographic that is kind of like "The prior day's best."

Pros- Mostly just blog cross posts. (Reruns and current.) Once-a-day "best of" macro/meme.

Cons- Nothing else.

My Public Facebook Profile

(The heading is a link) 

My Public FB profile is a melange of personal updates, posts about politics and social issues, geekery, things I find about non-monogamy, introversion, and pop culture. But it will also include some "behind-the-scene" thoughts about writing, running a page, and the creative process. (And sometimes complaining about some of the people I run into on the page itself.) If you wish there were more "Social Justice Bard" posts, this is a place where you can read the proto-versions of some of them as well as the ones that never make it to the blog.

You might want to follow for a while and decide IF you want to send me a friend request. I'm definitely not everyone's cup of tea with the geekery and the social justice stuff. 99.9% of my posts are public, so you really wouldn't be missing anything except the ability to comment.

If you don't care for my (very) occasional social issues post on other social media, you will like my profile even less. I write about that stuff almost daily. I can be a bit much for people. I post a lot. 

I have a Commenting Policy for this profile. You should read it before charging in. ESPECIALLY before charging into a contentious post. 

If you do want to "FRIEND" me, send me a PM with your request. (Don't worry, I check my "Message Requests" inbox at least once a day.) That account gets around 100-200 friend requests a week. I reject most of them because I don't know if they're there to try and rent my page or just pick a fight in the comments. So send me a message along with the request.

Pros- See more of "me." Get "behind the scene" updates. See "alpha" versions of posts and thoughts that never quite make it.

Cons- I post a LOT. I am not shy about my liberalism/leftism. 

Instagram

(The heading is a link)

Yes, I even have an Instagram. It gets periodic updates as well as the the occasional selfie (although late stage capitalism demands that I point out my Patreon selfie tier is still the best way to get those). I don't really pay much attention to it since images (or short videos) are not the medium I work in.

Patreon

(The heading is a link)

Though Patreon is less of a social medium, my patrons do get pictures and content through various tiers that are not available to anyone else. Newsletters, early access to posts, and the occasional post about what's going on that my regular readers aren't privy to. 

Others? 

I would love if something better existed than these few (oft problematic) sites. I know there's shit out there like MeWe or Dreamwidth. Most everywhere seems to suffer from two things:

1- Everytime we move, everyone goes somewhere different and some people I never see again.
2-As soon as they get enough people, capitalism corrupts them to be similarly evil, so there's no escape other than to use social media in the most subversive way possible. 

Right now, I am also fettered. For all Facebook's throttling and trying to squeeze blood from my stones (and even restricting my account for no reason and not telling me why), running a page of 1.3 million is what has made it possible for me to be a working writer.

Everyone Needs An Unofficial Ted Lasso Puzzle Book

One of my true honors and privileges as an artist with far more reach than I deserve for the work I do or have done is that (provided that I do not abuse the privilege) EEEEEEVERY once in two or three whiles I can point at some art or projects that one of my friends is doing and give them a little boost.

It's not much, and it's a LOT less than people who get envious of my platform seem to think. I don't hit a button and make anyone thousands of dollars for their self-published NaNoWriMo drafts. But if their shit is awesome, they might sell another couple dozen.

Last year, my editor and a coauthor, both of whom are fans of Ted Lasso, published the third of three puzzle books. If you like word games and like Ted Lasso, they are a lot of fun. The coauthor supports a charity called Steps of Faith, and through that group (and a couple of steps I'm leaving out), met Jason Sudeikis—the man behind the Ted Lasso series. Jason autographed all three of the puzzle books and graciously allowed himself to be photographed doing that for the books' promotion.

Lift it Like Lasso Volume One

Lift it Like Lasso Volume Two

Lift it Like Lasso Volume Three

The coauthor that I mentioned also has a blog where you can check out her work with Steps of Faith and the way she ended up with copies of her own book autographed by the creator of Ted Lasso. Enjoy.

Rebecca's Blog

An Important Appeal

I need a new computer. 

Most folks on social media already know about this appeal, but for those of you following me in a way that avoids Facebook, you may not know that I'm struggling.

Gofundme link to help with computer cost--including the full story.

Hi folks. I really really hate passing the hat before I have been reliable about getting content out, but if you know what my last few years have been like, you know that I'm struggling financially already, and a portable computer will help me with GETTING the content out.

On October 21 (this year) I had a lot on my plate and mind dealing with a partner who needed surgery the next day, and I went on a 10k run and neglected to stretch out when it was done. (Never neglect your stretching. Even if your whole world is in chaos.) At about 3:15 am the next morning (the 22nd) I jerked awake in agony having terrible leg cramps and in doing so, I knocked my laptop and phone off of my bedside table and down onto the floor. My leg was spasming, and I fell off the bed....and right onto both. I heard my phone crunch into my laptop, and I knew immediately I'd cracked the screen. What I didn't know was that I wouldn't even be able to really turn it on. All I can see is the crack pattern (you can even see where the phone was) in the screen.

I just paid a $1200 car maintenance bill for my Prius's 100k service and then turned around and got hit with a $4200 tax bill from 2023. (I'm a freelancer, so I always owe and it's always a lot.) My life savings was completely wiped out and I can't just go get a new computer, so I'm asking for a little help.

$1700 should cover the cost of a new little MacBook air with all its taxes. I have some additional flex goals if this fundraiser goes extraordinarily well, but I will update those here and in updates if we get closer to this initial amount.

https://gofund.me/9d6708fb

NOTE- In the interest of full transparency and honesty, I want to let you all know that at this point, the laptop has been ordered. There were a couple of private donations (not through GFM) and my mom is giving me Christmas early. I called in favors I'd rather be able to say "actually, I'm alright--let's save it for a rainier day" but I'm at least going to be able to get back to work. So if you're having hard times, please hold on to your money.

What I'm adding as I go is the a DIFFERENT Gofundme for. (But since I'm doing this one, I think I better cool it for at least six months to a year.) If you've been following along, you know that the reason I usually just have money set aside for a new computer* but didn't this time is because of the last couple of years of medical bills.

[*I'm an artist. I don't spend a couple hundred on paints and canvasses every month, but I have my own expenses that show up every few years in a lump sum. Actually, buying a MacBook every four or five years is a lot less expensive than most people pay for art supplies it just requires I be smart about setting cash aside. I usually have a fund for it that I've been paying into, and I'm ready when it happens.]

I had colon cancer in 2021, and late that year they removed a tumor about the size of a softball and resected my large intestine. In fall of 2023 a complication from the cancer (but not a recurrence, thankfully) landed me in the hospital with blood vessels poking into my stomach.

For now my medical team and I are on top of everything. I get poked and scanned and double-end "-oscopied'  on the regular, so that I'm probably going to know if there's anything wrong in there before anyone who never had an issue. I'm healthy, in remission, and I can even look at a CT scanner without having a panic attack. All good things.

But even with pretty good insurance, the medical costs were staggering. Breathtakingly so. Copays. Deductibles (I'm still paying off the second hospital stay in payments.) Labs (SO many labs--even at eight dollars a pop, which is not too bad, I was adding a hundred a month to my expenses for a while). Prescriptions. Driving all over the bay area to see specialists. And so so SO much lost work. It took me years to get through the mental and emotional parts.

I conservatively estimated it at about $25,000 for the two hospitalizations. But with the lost work, it's probably closer to $50k.

I'm not trying to make THIS a medical fundraiser, but the reason I couldn't just go buy a new laptop the same day I crunched my old one is that I had been setting aside for it since my LAST new computer is because I completely wiped out my savings on medical expenses. So if we pull in a little more than the cost of the laptop, I'm using it to replenish what was lost to cancer and liver disease, and to replace a writing fund that I had set aside for my novel.

So if you want to contribute now, that's awesome. But the laptop is covered and there will be a separate Gofundme in six months to a year that is JUST for the medical expenses.

Where the money goes

$1650 Replacement MacBook Air 13 inch. (With a couple of upgrades but not all of them) and ALL taxes and fees.

$107 Otter Box external case with all taxes and fees (so hopefully this doesn't happen again.

$2243 Attempting to recoup losses from medical costs that led to not having enough to just replace a broken computer in the first place. (I usually have the money standing by because a professional writer HAS to be prepared to buy a laptop at a moment's notice--just like a painter needs to budget for acrylics, brushes, and canvases.)

$1000 Gofundme payment processing fees and estimated tax burden.

https://gofund.me/9d6708fb

Writing About….Stuff

Last night at about 8p.m., I passed my test to be a Certified Personal Trainer with the National Association of Sports Medicine. Cliché bored housewives, sex starved coeds, aging movie stars, naiads, and rainbow-spewing unicorns everywhere in the Bay Area suddenly felt the need to have brief but torrid affairs with me (but, alas, I will be strong and resist for professionalism's sake).  

I've been working on that one for a year (and a year of hell), putting writing on the back burner. But now it's time to get back to the writing work. And now I have the best side gig everywhere that structures my schedule and is the furthest thing from sitting in front of a computer anything can be. 

We've got a lot of new stuff I'm going to be writing about now. Stay tuned not just for writing about WRITING, but also writing about: 

• My journey as a certified personal trainer
• Writing about Health and Fitness (generally)
• Writing about Running (my posts specifically about running and running goals)
• Election stuff
• Polyamory (Ethical Nonmonogamy)  
• The Morrigan and Pagan Priesthood 
• Buy Me Lunch Answers [My deep dive into identity intersections and what labels (and going beyond labels) means to me]
• Reviewish [My always behind the curve reviews of media—some of it woefully outdated]

And old favorites like: 

•  Social Justice Bard  
•  Personal Updates 
• And of course Writing About Writing

I know if you've been paying attention at all for about the last oh….three years at least, you know that a lot has been going on. I don't mean like 2016 a lot with breakups and rising fascism. That WAS a lot, but it turned out that was a lot in the way that England is "cold" when you're coming from Barbados. There's still Siberia to go. I'm talking 2022. When cancer, miscarriage, death, eviction, and other stuff started landing. One disaster after another just kept pouring in like distant relatives at the holidays passing off fruitcake. Let's not dwell on that. It sucked. I got knocked down. I got up. It sucked more. I got knocked down more. I got up more. Rinse. Repeat. Here I am now feeling Sisyphus-caliber shredded…but like metaphorically, you understand. You push a rock all day, you get pretty swol. 

2025: Coming to a blogger near you!

I am metaphorically swol AF. 

After cancer, death, miscarriage, evictions, and more, I started to realize that what I wanted to do was NOT just go back to exactly what I had been doing—pedalling my flying machine ever faster writing about writing just to make ends almost barely meet. My entire year back in school to become a certified personal trainer was exactly because I couldn't keep doing twelve- and fifteen-hour-days in my chair, seven days a week, just to barely scrape out the bills. I want to write. I want to write about WRITING. But that's not all I want to do with every day. There are going to be other parts of my life too. 

One of those things, nontrivially, is the fact that I have become a priest of The Morrigan. My calling involves duties that go beyond writing and broaden the scope of the writing that I am already doing. I will be doing the work, but primarily I'm a writer, so even as I learn to incorporate divination and death doula-ing into my practice, I will also write about those insights and my—occasionally alarming—spiritual journey. Yes, there will be Social Justice Bard posts, personal updates. If anything, my duties as a priest to a deity steeped in sovereignty and battle will necessitate stepping things up on the social justice front. Yes, there will be those weird goofy posts where Writing About Writing is somehow a place with a weird ass cast of characters. And yes, there will be deep thoughts about writing itself somehow shoehorned into a 12 item listicle for the perfect clickbait…

…but I also want to write more about nonmonogamy, my own explorations through identity, my OWN fitness and health struggles, including pushing fifty but trying to be a better runner, and even the reviews on popular media I got into right before the wheels came off the bus. And fuck, I spent a year getting this personal-training skill set….I might as well write about it. 

Everything will be labeled (so you can skip past the parts you're less into), and you might see a deluge of "Menu level" posts in the coming weeks as I set up the pages that will link out to everything that is to come.

This process will form the backbone of a new chapter here at Writing About Writing. We're moving forward, but we're not going exactly where we were before. The train will still stop at all the old and familiar destinations, but we've added a few more stops along the way. 

All aboard.

High speed rail will be discussed in the nonmonogamy section. 
Oh wait…that's high speed railING. Carry on.

What I Did on My Summer Vacation (Personal Update)

**stares at computer screen**. 

**types "I'm back…"**

**delete delete delete**

**types, "I hope to be a little more productive now that…"**

**erases it immediately**

**types, "I don't know what the future will hold…"**

**highlight all/backspace**

**types, "So I know I said I'd be back but this thing happened…"**

**hits undo until all text is gone**

**types, "I'm not going to say 'I'm back' but I'm kind of ready for…"**

**close window—click box that says "Ignore" when the computer says changes weren't saved**

**sighs**

You know what….? (You don't, because it's really random, so I'm going to tell you.) Entire religions are formed around causation/correlation superstitious crap like this. And while my pagan priest ass is the last person to be giving the Spock-brow to some questionable beliefs, I'm not going to live my life in fear of telling you all what I am planning to write next because I think that only by keeping all my hopes and dreams to myself and never being optimistic that maybe maybe MAYBE I won't be pack ravaged by dingos. 

Besides, it doesn't really seem to be working. I either announce that I'm back and disaster strikes, or I hold very very still and quiet, and disaster strikes anyway. So I might as well make a spectacle out of the sheer absurdity of not even getting the full sentence of "I'm ba—" out of my mouth before a "Luck of the Irish" neon sign falls from the ceiling and lops off my right arm or something. 

I'm also not going to apologize. It's gotten ridiculous. Bless everyone who stuck with me on Patreon through the last few years as life had fun kicking me further down the stairs every time I stood up, but four YEARS worth of "Hey, I was just about to write and then this NEW thing in my life exploded like it was….well pretty much ANYTHING in a Transformers movie (anything that's not Optimus Prime)" is getting old. I'm hearing myself and thinking "Oh my fuck, Chris, will you SHUT UP!" I can write through pear-shaped—I have written through pear-shaped—I DO write through pear-shaped— but holy FUCK have the limits of that ever found me.

I spent this summer moving. Not one of those planned moves. Not a joyous upgrade (although I do like the new place). Not a carefully planned move with a careful execution. 

No…our landlord decided he wanted us gone. And since the city I'm in adopted rent control and a relocation fee (so that shitty landlords who want to jack up the rent can't just evict their tenants every couple of years), he tried to make it an at-fault eviction. Oh how he tried! We were in compliance, so nothing stuck, and we learned our rights REALLY quickly, so we knew we could have fought, dragged it out for months, and even probably ended up getting the relocation fee and maybe a countersuit. 

But Rhapsody didn't have a protracted fight in her. You have to be ready to have people threaten you, to call you names, to tell you all the awful things they're going to do, and to initiate those awful things. You have to be ready to be blamed for everything and told what a horrible and irresponsible and wicked person you are. (And since in two years, we hadn't gotten the landlord to acknowledge our repeated attempts to get me on the lease, it all had to be done while I lived in a room two towns over.) You have to be ready to come home every day to an official notification on your door demanding your contrition and telling you you have days to move. Rhapsody is a gentle human—one of the kindest I've ever met. She's barely over grief and dealing with health and parenting issues and a half a dozen other issues that make life challenging. She's trying to find a job in a field she retrained in just last year. She just didn't have the time and energy for all of it.

Every step is suddenly wading through oatmeal. You can't just pop the rent check in the mail five days ahead of time—you have to drive it twenty minutes to the lawyer's office as a money order, or landlord-fuckspork might pretend he never got it. You have to start looking for places because who knows if he's going to throw something at the wall that sticks. 

We ducked the worst of the legal bullshit (the asshole's FIRST move was hiring a lawyer), and traded a neutral reference to our new place for a month's notice. 

And then the move began. It's very different when you don't know it's coming—when you can't plan it, prep for it, get some boxes, round up a strapping friend who likes pizza, get your kids to pack some boxes ahead of time of all those toys they are totally, absolutely going to play with again. It's also different when you're moving a whole house—I can't really remember the last time I moved more than a room. Packing, unpacking. Finding movers. Figuring out when to move. You end up with piles of stuff in the new place because you need the boxes to go back to the old place and get another load (because you didn't have time to stockpile boxes because it was all so sudden), so you just dump a box out where it's not right in the way and keep going. There's trashing what can't be given away and no one wants to move—sometimes including furniture. Cleaning the old place. Unpacking. Organizing. The whole time, your life didn't slow down because you weren't able to SCHEDULE this move—it just HAPPENED, so your calls and dates and visits and trips are all still on the calendar. It didn't help that Rhapsody was having a bad flare of chronic pain and while Treble and Clef can be a little helpful, most of the heavy lifting (in this case literally) fell to me. 

From beginning to end, it was like six weeks of absolute, unmitigated bullshit.

And you know (you don't, so I'm going to tell you)…after a four fucking YEARS of being like, "Oka,y NOW I am obviously done with this cavalcade of tragedies and can get back to writing—oh I appear to be throwing up blood/getting evicted/having alien spiders hump my mouth/whatever it is THIS month," I am so fucking ready to get back to my creative life. I don't even care about "productive" at this point. I mean I CARE because that's my paycheck, and I'm going to end up having to be a human statue on Fisherman's Warf if I can't get my income back up to snuff, but really, I just want to write again.

Back. Not back. It doesn't even matter. I'm just going to do what I do. This summer sucked. And this year was hard (and I'll talk about that in another post). And the past four years have been this horrifying nightmare. But we're moved and even though I still have that last level of organizing where you're like, "Yeah it goes here now, but I think I want it to LIVE somewhere else when I have the time," I'm not going to wait another minute to get back to my creative life.

A (School) Year to Remember. (Personal Update)

There is about to be mischief. 

I've written so little in the past few months—the past couple of years, really.  

I'd like to hope that the period of low productivity is coming to a conclusion, but I know better than to state definitively that "I'm back." This way lie chaos and despair. I may as well start an activity with a rousing, "What could possibly go wrong?" or look at the cloudy sky and say, "At least it isn't raining." 

Such words tempt fate.

No…at this point saying "I'm back" isn't actually just TEMPTING fate. It's more like waving your dangly bits in front of fate and sneering, "I TRIPLE DOG DARE you to do something about it." It's finding fate, and giving it a wet willy and saying "What? Stop me if you're so fucking powerful!" The minute the typing fingers press the keys of that ending "K," a Tesseract would open up and me from the future would come out and say, "I know you think you're back, but trust me that you need to leave your house through the back door if you don't want them to find you!"

"Who?" I'll ask.

"There's no time! We have to go now." Future Me will say.

"You just showed up from the future. Why didn't you show up…like, you know….thirty or forty seconds earlier so you…I….we could answer this critical question. Or better yet, like a couple of hours. That way we could have lunch and a conversation, I could ask a few follow-up questions. Maybe quiz you to make sure you're really me. It's not as dramatic, but it would really help me get through this situation which I'm guessing you REMEMBER as being super confusing."

"I did jump in forty seconds early. You just wasted it deconstructing the trope." F.M. will say.  

"Shouldn't you have remembered that you…I….WE…(fuck, what is the right pronoun?)…spent the first forty seconds—"

"Holy fuckwaffles was I ever this annoying?"

Never do figure eights around collapsing black holes, okay? It's just not worth your chill. 

ANYWAY…

I'll just say this: I have a schedule with built-in time to write in a writing conducive environment—a thing that hasn't happened in a couple of years.

No. Wait. That's not dramatic enough.

Enter Ian McKellen in Gandalf robes. Looking out over the forest of my works in progress. "A thing is about to happen that has not happened in an age."

Gandalf: "It is not despair, for despair is only for those who—"
Aragorn: "Why do you TALK like that?"
Gandalf: (pauses) "This is going to be lit, bro.
Do you have any idea how long things have been FUBARed around here?
Shit's about to be legen—
wait for it…and I hope you're not lactose intolerant because this next part is
—dary."
Credit: New Line Cinema

I now have the drive and will and motivation to get back to writing. Not like this mere mortal daily writing stuff of habit building, practice, discipline and regimen, but really digging into content and deadlines again. Drive and will and motivation have happened with increasing frequency in the last year but not when I had time. 

Time has happened, but usually only when I was stressed and depressed and overwhelmed and needed a break in the worst way. 

I haven't had BOTH those things at the same time in…well it might have been early 2021. And…(~glances nervously around and whispers~) nothing absolutely terrible has happened in a couple of months. I have a career pivot path forward that includes writing but also some really exciting other work I want to do in service to my community and in the name of The Morrigan. 

So let me tell you a couple of stories. One about the past, and one about a possible non-"I'm back" future that may involve some tiny modicum of back-ness that I only dare whisper. Because anything more than a whisper and it might disappear, it is so fragile. 

Or it might grow tentacles and tear up the foundation of what I'm building. So yeah…let's whisper.

The Tale of What WAS

Last spring (2023) was full-throttle grief on the Rhapsody front. I've written about what happened, but haven't really had the bandwidth to put more in-depth thoughts into article form yet. (They ARE coming.) I don't want to retread that ground from square one because even though it's been months since I wrote it out, from this blog's perspective it was like three articles ago. Suffice to say that the mourning had only just begun and the tears were fresh and bitter.

It was a difficult time. And when I say that, I need you to understand that it's like saying the cultural zeitgeist of the '80s involved a "little bit" cocaine. You know…like just a line or two. Rhapsody and I haven't really caught a break in three years. We almost don't even know what we look like outside of a crisis. Before the new relationship energy had even worn off, we were dealing with a miscarriage, health issues….that turned out to be cancer, surgery, and recovery. She went through a major breakup. And as both of us felt the clouds parting a little bit and life giving us some space to breathe, the death hit.

For months, I didn't even try to be anything more than her support. That can be harder for me in a lot of ways than going through the thing myself. Cancer was hard, but supporting someone in grief turned out to be harder.

Spring started to warm up into summer and we both started to feel the winds of change. She knew she wasn't going to keep being a baker. I knew that I didn't just want to go back to 60 hours a week of Writing About Writing*. Both of us hatched intricate schemes for the next phase of our lives, and we both knew we were going to be going to need some formal education, and some non-formal certificates and training for the work we wanted to do. 

[*If you're just joining us, or haven't been paying attention, Writing About Writing isn't going anywhere. I like blogging. It's just going to be joined by some other kinds of writing and play co-career path to some other stuff I plan on doing. I still have every intention of doling out my F-bomb-heavy writing on all who will suffer it. We might need to adjust to a 3-day-a-week posting schedule, but we will still be here.]

We both signed up for classes in the fall, and summer turned into "hurry up and wait." To say nothing of the tribulation of trying to keep Treble and Clef entertained. Grief was still a frequent visitor and overarching specter, and there were sometimes days and weeks of solid hardcore support that kept me from doing much else at the time, but at least the difficult spots were starting to be punctuated by fleeting moments when Rhapsody remembered to breathe. Moments turned into the occasional day. Days turned into the periodic good week. The anniversaries were hard again, but the trending line has been that the torment and maelstrom of emotions have been relaxing their grip. 

And then it was fall. Time to hit the ground running. 

For me, my angle of study was to become a priest of The Morrigan. Priesthood isn't for the faint of heart, especially with a deity like this one. I've written about the beginning of my journey in other places (including my struggles with my own disbelief), and those posts will continue. The fall semester was bananas. I was taking a six-month intensive class ON The Morrigan (which will be starting again soon if you're interested)out of Ireland from a native Irish Draoí in addition to 10.5 units of kinesiology coursework so that I could get a certificate in personal training. That's in addition to the regularly scheduled life stuff and the more-than-occasional support mode. 

I had hopes of starting to write in fall, but if anything I was always desperately behind. I was always turning things in at the last minute and/or with effort more mediocre than I'd have liked. I would start to catch up and then fall apart again.

And then, of course, I was hospitalized. Another thing I've already written about, so I won't rehash it here. I wanted to write in the hospital since all I was doing was sitting in bed, but it's not quite like a day off. Actually, it's nothing like relaxation. You're tired. You're in pain. You're worried. And in my case, you're trying so so hard to keep down the panic attacks from the medical trauma from two years prior. 

And that fucking beeping machine keeps you up all night.

I've recovered from that, by the way. I didn't need a long recovery like with abdominal surgery for cancer. I was in the hospital for longer, but I recovered faster. Still, it took a few weeks (and I got a bad respiratory infection right as I was getting better). I'll need upper endoscopies (in addition to colonoscopies—isn't getting older GREAT!) on the regular to see if any varices have worked their way into my stomach, but now that we know what to look for, I'm okay. I don't drink. I don't have hepatitis. And though they don't know why my liver has cirrhosis (true of like 1/3 of cases), it's not getting any WORSE, so with some preventative care I may never even need a transplant or anything. Liver transplant priority is measured on something called a MELD score, and mine is currently low enough that not only am I not on any kind of list, but if I literally walked into a transplant facility holding a liver, they wouldn't do the procedure. They would probably ask where I got it though, and then I would have to come up with something pretty quick.

"It followed me home?" I'd say.

"And its owner?" they'd ask, furrowing their eyebrows.

"I must away to my ravens," I'd say, throwing a smoke pellet to disappear.

Anyway, I have to pick up about half a dozen more points to be a candidate and dozens more points to be prioritized. Which is all to say that even though I almost died, right now, things are pretty okay. 

Unfortunately when I got back, I was behind on everything and finals were looming in the distance, so there was no time to do something ridiculous like starting a publishing routine.

I finished up my finals (all As!) and with the vacation, instead of vast oceans of time to dig into writing, I got caught in the drift of that untethered time between end-of-the-year holidays where even knowing what day it is often a shock*. And then a trip to Boston. Suddenly it was spring semester again.

[*At one point I was having a conversation about "Tuesday," and I swore it was like four days away, and she said, "I'll see you tomorrow then." And I was one, three, five, seven, and nine because I literally could not even.]

It's Monday, bruh.

Then school started, and before I could even figure out what traffic would be like getting onto campus at 9:30 and where all my classes were, we hit the anniversaries. Those moments of loss that Rhapsody experienced—the attack, the moment brain activity stopped, the honor walk. Each their own dirge of pain and reliving. 

Right when I was feeling like, "Okay, I've given Rhapsody my best. Now it's MY turn to be supported," I got Covid. I had to go into isolation for a week. Covid led to brain fog, and let me tell you that shit is no fucking joke when you're in school. I couldn't think. I had no executive function. I sat and watched deadline after deadline fly by, wondering what the hell was wrong with me. Thinking was like swimming in oatmeal. My entire program was starting to unravel and I couldn't make it stop. 

I walked into my mentor's office during her office hours one day and told her I might need to drop several classes if I was going to salvage the ones that were left.

"You're going to be a great trainer, Chris. I watch you with your internship clients and you are amazing. I really want you to succeed. What would it take to keep you in?"

"More time?" I offered.

So she gave me a fistful of extensions. Some of these assignments were WEEKS overdue before I even walked into the office. She told me to get them in by the end of spring break. And so I just started knocking them out—one by one—and pulling forward. It ate up my spring break, which I had hoped to use to get some writing done, but I caught up.

This next part is boring. Let's do it as a montage with the Rocky theme song playing in the background. Here I am studying. Here I am studying in a different position. Here I am turning in my late shit. Here's another one of me studying. Here I am in my internship doing personal training. Here I am coaching a group personal fitness session of Tabata. Here I am studying some more, but this time with a National Association of Sports Medicine book in my hand and wearing glasses.

Here, let me help with the visual. 
This montage is going to break the fourth wall, apparently.

And then it was finals. So like…more studying. Cue another montage. And here we are. I have the official NASM test soon (not for a class, but the actual professional test), so I'm spending my days reviewing the earlier chapters and taking practice tests. I'll be trying to find clients and book out sessions—hopefully at least a couple a day. But my goals required a massive surge of front-loaded effort. I had to complete 20 units in one academic year or I was going to take another 8 months to finish (summer and ANOTHER semester). A 10-unit semester isn't much for a full-time student, but I was doing a lot more.

Adding thirty hours a week to adult responsibilities…no wonder returning students have their own little kiosk help desk. 

The Tale of What IS

There's something a little different happening now. 

Time AND energy. 

Together. 

Like the Reese's Peanut Butter Cup of writing. Two great opportunities that go great together. Not that I've ever been shy about saying that a writer has to CREATE both of those things if they ever want to pay the bills with their wordsmithing (and I have the PLUMMETING writing income to prove that the opposite is also true), but sometimes life is throwing cancer and death at you, instead of personal scheduling conflicts, World of Warcraft raid guild demands, and "too many" people who want you to show them just exactly how your tongue ring works. 

I don't ignore my own advice. I never stopped writing. But I did stop blogging and working to get articles up and worrying about my "productivity." And now I'm….well, I'm not going to say it. But let's just say that I have both ingredients I need, and I'm not in the middle of my world exploding for the first time in too fucking long.

I'm not going to say it though.

Yeeeeeaaaaah.
So if we could go ahead and NOT have a miscarriage,
life threatening illness,
cancer, surgery, a long recovery with trauma, a major breakup,
death, liver failure, long covid, brain fog, 
or try to change careers completely in the next few months….
THAT'D BE GREAT!
Thanks a bunch, life.

The Tale of What MIGHT BE

There is a lot more I plan to do, including learning to be a death doula, mediation training, and even some fun stuff like learning Tarot and martial arts to start up side gigs. Writing has been wonderful and rewarding beyond compare, and I'm absolutely not stopping either my blogging or my fiction writing, but financially, it is a completely unforgiving career. 

I loved paying the bills with writing. I was so proud of that. The fact that I pulled that off was literally a childhood dream come true. It was asynchronous income (which is why I'm still making SOME money), and that has saved my life in a maybe-not-entirely-hyperbolic way these last couple of years. (Seriously. Thank you all who stuck it out so so much. I would not have made it without you.) But it took twelve- and fourteen- and sometimes sixteen-hour days that I don't have anymore. And the bills that it paid were bare bones. 

So I'm hoping to create something more like ten side gigs in a trenchcoat moving forward. A few fitness-training clients. A few tarot reads over zoom. Writing. Maybe in a couple of years, I'm running a small business out of a local storefront that does fitness and martial arts classes on a sliding scale or free to the community. I have to survive capitalism, but I think I can also create something that will give back. I'm called to do other work (in a way I write about elsewhere), but also shoring up my income with something as different as possible from being in front of a computer for hours. I found that fitness not only helped me get out of the chair and feel better, but it helps me focus and make more of the time when I AM writing. I don't actually NEED fourteen hours when I'm fresh off a workout, rejuvenated, feeling good, it's 10 A.M. and have to be done by six for another client. 

I do still plan to make writing the core of my career work. I just want other things too.

But first and foremost, I want to start posting again here on WAW. There's fiction and projects and some compilations and a book and…and so much I just dropped when my world imploded, but I've got to start banging out articles again. I need my audience back and my income back and that foundation for everything else I'm about to attempt.

And then there is a tremendous amount of "digging out" to do. The blog basically needs spring cleaning. While I've been barely treading water, I have articles that are half done. Entire series that are unfinished. Links that go nowhere. A whole overhaul worth of work that needs to be done.

And during this, I will be taking the NASM, trying to find clients, and launching a small side gig while continuing my education and learning the rest of the suite of skill sets that I'm going to need. It's exciting. It's a lot. It's a lifetime of effort. 

It's a calling.

So here we go. I'm bac—

**power goes out and a Tesseract opens**
**in the distance, sirens**

Hospitalized (Personal Update) Health and Writing

A month ago (on a sun-kissed Monday), I went to the emergency room. I wouldn't come out of the hospital for five days. Then I would convalesce at home, get an upper respiratory infection, and it's probably only JUST NOW that I'm starting to feel a little better. 

This is that story. I will tell you that there will be medical procedures, emesis, trauma, and an objective discussion of weight gain and loss (not as a goal but simply as a matter of fact).  If any of those things sound like they would be upsetting to you or ignite some of your own traumas, then you may just want to read to the bold section heading, and call it a day.

I'm okay now. My full recovery took about three weeks even though I was discharged after five days. And right when I was feeling better, I picked up an upper respiratory infection that knocked me out for another several days. Doing school on top of everything else was hard enough. Being BEHIND on school has been its own super nightmare. There are a lot of things I'm behind on in my life. I sort of thought that being bedridden was going to give me the time to get to all those things I'm usually too busy running around to do, but as it kind of turns out, that's unicorn rainbow spew. It isn't real. What actually happens is that whatever reason you're bedridden in the first place is going to make it pretty hard to do anything but convalesce. 

So right now I'm behind on…well, everything. Everything. From phone calls to peeps to school to, of course, writing. I had to prioritize the academic classes I'm taking and spend two weeks doing five weeks of work (in five different classes), and it's only been in the last couple of days (since finishing my second midterm on Wednesday…which I did not do that well on) that I've not felt desperately behind. And now I'm moving into the last two weeks, so I'm feeling the pressure from other directions. 

[If you're looking for the writerly wisdom for all this, I try to bring it home below.]

Okay, but what happened? (Trigger warnings above)

I typically have low platelets and have to be careful—very careful—if I'm bleeding more than just a little. For me a bad cut can turn life threatening. I'm not supposed to go skydiving, and my career of juggling chainsaws was cut tragically short.

The greatest dream I ever had was torn to shreds like the torso of my 
friend Aspen (who can't even juggle balls) trying to pull this off one Tuesday afternoon
in early March.
So tragic.
Do not even attempt to contain your tears.

It's all part of having a jackhole liver. My liver is cirrhotic, and we don't really know why. (I found out that this is true for almost a third of people with cirrhosis.) There are a couple of possibilities, but no solid answers. But one thing is for sure. It spends a lot of time taking drags off of cigarettes and saying in an outrageous French accent, "Ah yez. I remember ze early aughties. Back when ze platelets flowed like wine in a Sex and ze City episode. Oh Miranda! Zoze were ze dayz."

Well, it turns out that ANOTHER thing that can happen from having a messed-up liver is that veins can start pushing into your stomach—eventually far enough that their lining is eroded, and they start filling the digestive tract with blood. When your stomach is full of blood, the results can be….dramatic.  

Like exorcist dramatic. 

Hello. I'm here because there's literally no "throwing up blood"
GIF that isn't absolutely awful.
Let's just focus on my cuteness.
Mew!

Anyway, I did that in the waiting room of the Emergency Room after being too dizzy to walk, and needless to say, I didn't end up waiting as long as the guy who skinned his thumb "really really bad."

Five transfused units of blood later, they had me stable enough to do an endoscopy, discover the problem, plan this really cool procedure to like fill my veins with Krazy Glue or some shit, so they'd wither and stop fucking bleeding into my stomach. There were a couple of days of observation before they sent me home with a fistful of diuretics to keep down the fluid in my peritoneal cavity, and home I went to try to recover. I was 20 pounds of fluid over my admission weight when I was discharged. (Which was bananas because I had had about three meals in five days and one of them was a "liquid" meal—which means you get some sugar-free jello and a cup of broth.) Once the diuretics started, over the next four days, I peed out like 30 pounds of liquid. (Like, no seriously—thirty pounds of fluid can make you bloated like you wouldn't believe. It's like four GALLONS and change.) I went from looking like a stuffed sausage to my skin kind of hanging off my bones a little.

So that was fun. 

And yeah, right when I was almost better, there was an upper respiratory infection. Not a cold—this was the real fucking deal. Fevers of 102 at night and coughing up a lung. I think my white blood cell count was tanked from the hospital, because everyone in two households got this infection but I was the one it absolutely leveled like a papier-mâché reproduction of Tokyo in the final reel of a Godzilla movie. 

Okay, no more gory details. Back to the touchy feely.

Where do I go from here?

I get back up. 

I dust myself off. 

I keep writing. 

I've lost a lot of income in the last couple of years as I recover from cancer, then "ha ha, no, REALLY" recover from the trauma of cancer, pivot on my career goals, get buried under school work, and lose weeks of productivity to everything from helping my nesting partner grieve the brutal killing of their boss and friend to being hospitalized.

I get it. I haven't been writing the way I used to and the economy has shifted even further away from most working class being able to make ends meet. People I know (including me), who used to have a few hundred dollars of discretionary income every month, are now barely getting by, and several of us trying not to bleed out our entire savings before we learn a new skill set. Even folks who were infinitely patient with my lack of updates through my cancer have noticed that I've fallen way off from then. I would never expect people to hang on ever, but it's been especially understandable lately. 

I'll rebuild that crowdfunding when I'm able to re-establish a regular practice of writing. I'm still determined to keep all my work (other than some newsletters) free and pass the hat instead of going traditional publishing or paywalls or anything like that. There may be some compilations made into ebooks, but the source material will always be available. 

So more than ever, I'm writing because that's what I do. Because I love it. I'm writing because not writing is the real difficulty, and I feel depressed and anxious if I neglect it. Maybe it's not much more than a Facebook post on any given day. Maybe it's for school. Maybe it's one more half-done article. But I sit and I write. It's not for money—that's dwindling. It's not for fame—whatever snippet of online infamy I once has disappeared these last couple of years when I stopped putting out two or three articles a week.

Now it's just me and the writing.

Which is all it ever is for most people.

And even though THIS isn't the most prolific time in my life and no one is asking me right now how I write like I'm running out of time, the wheel will turn. Life will shift and there will be time and energy (together…in the same room) again. And I will still have the habit and the routine and the discipline. But that will combine with the opportunity. And that's when things get exciting.

A lot of people can write (or sing or do their art) as long as everything's pretty smooth sailing. What a dedicated writer (or singer or artist) has to confront is how to handle things when the waters are choppy. Life is going to happen, and at some point, it's going to happen HARD. Someone's going to die. You're going to get very sick. You'll have a kid or two. Your world will turn upside down. That's when it's easy to quit…or maybe take a break that ends up lasting the rest of your life. 

And I'm not here to tell you what to do in those moments or what makes you "real" or how much you really care about your writing (or art) if you can't find the time or energy. I'm not here to tell you to get back on the horse in X amount of time. I'm not that inspiration-porn problematic for one, and moreso, I'd obviously I'd be a hypocrite if I tried.

What I AM going to tell you is that when that absolutely mind-numbing moment of shut down or overwhelm or frenetic chaos or debilitating depression/anxiety/whatever clears, and you have your first lucid thoughts after the upheaval….if those thoughts are of writing (or music, or art), hold onto that. 

There's more there about what makes you tick there than you know.