I just realized something.

It’s been exactly two weeks since I created this website and started posting on my blog. In those two weeks, it’s gotten well over 2,000 hits. That’s amazing. (I know there are blogs that get thousands of hits a day. But for a brand new website? About writing and art, by a writer who hasn’t written a bestselling novel? I mean, that’s a lot, you know?)

So I wanted to say thank you. Thanks to everyone who followed me here from my old blog, and to everyone who is visiting for the first time, from all over the world. (Some of the places you come from, I can’t even pronounce. Although I’d like to visit . . .)

Please feel free to share with your friends, subscribe if you’d like, add me to your RSS feed, or friend me on facebook. And of course, please feel free to comment! I’ll keep posting, once or twice a day. I’ll also keep telling you about my writing – where it’s coming out, what I’m struggling with, how my writing life is going in general. And I’ll keep telling stories.

I still remember creating this website, on a Friday night after a particularly difficult week when I needed something to do, something that had to do with writing. I was feeling as though I had somehow been unfaithful to myself, let all my ambitions lapse. After all, I’ve wanted to be writer since I was at least twelve years old. I spent time and money to go to the most wonderful writing workshops (Odyssey, where I will be teaching this summer, and Clarion). And I started to write and publish, to the point that I published In the Forest of Forgetting, and was nominated for and won some prestigious awards. And then life became overwhelming, with a child and a teaching position and a husband who was finishing his doctorate. And I just couldn’t keep up. Something had to fall to the wayside, and it was writing.

That’s not going to happen again. Creating this website, updating all of my information, posting to the blog, were all ways of saying to myself, and to the world in general, that having a writing career (in whatever form that was going to take) was now my primary focus. And that I wasn’t going to allow myself to be distracted from it. Oh, there are plenty of things I still need to do in the world. But my writing is important, at least to me, and it’s what I want to spend the rest of my life doing. As I wrote in a comment to a blog post, I think, it saves me every day. And in some small way, I hope it helps others as well.