February 19, 2023
Sunday

Twenty-four years. That’s how many years Markings: Days of Her Life has been in existence. It comprises more than 700 posts. Tonight I spent a fair amount of time exploring Substack, the hot new place many of the coolest writers use now. I have a presence there, and I will probably eventually publish there. But it will be different from what’s here.

I’ve been silent here since December. I break that silence tonight because it’s time, time to write publicly again about my ordinary life as a suburban retiree, a writer, a reader, a woman of faith. I’ve been active on Facebook, where I have more than 800 friends and 130 followers. Some of those friends are purposely inactive there, or are deceased (yet they get birthday greetings from so-called friends, who must not be paying attention), and a few of them are not even actual people. (A cemetery friended me!) Interactions there can get tangled. I miss this longer, less noisy form.

I am, not unexpectedly given the season and the state of the world, depressed. That is, I am in a period of genuine clinical depression (my diagnosis is “dysthymia: endogenous depression with situational increase.”) So tonight my heart goes out to John Fetterman, my representative in the US Senate, who has checked himself into the Walter Reed Medical Center for inpatient treatment of his own “situational increase,” a course that will take more than a day or two to be effective.

Other than that, I am reading (currently The Many Daughters of Afong Moy, by Jamie Ford, whom I will be working with at the Looking Glass Rock Writers’ Conference in May), and writing (the novel I have been working on for ten years now). It’s the first twenty-five pages of that work that will be examined by Mr. Ford at Looking Glass. On Thursday, I am participating in an online event where he will discuss that book. I haven’t finished it yet, so I need to get busy.

As always, Thank you for reading.