Return of Spinster Aunt

Well, well! Just like old times!

It's been a while. In fact, it's been over a year since I updated this old girl. I've enjoyed just now going back and reading some out-of-date reader comments ("Your blog post on this topic is stunningly stupid").

Lately I've been blogging more over at Boroughs of the Dead, where I mostly write about macabre NYC history. Still, there are a host of other brilliant thoughts burning in my brain that I've got to share just for fun, and now that ALL OF Murder She Wrote is on Netflix, well! You can imagine I've been thinking up some pretty exciting blog post ideas (J.B. Fletcher-inspired fashion shoot, that's the first one).

And then there's Maude.

No really. I'm also watching Maude! (Note to self: possible blog post title = Their Eyes Were Watching Maude.)

It's been a busy year for me. Besides ramping up business over at BotD HQ, I've also been slogging my way through my first adult-length novel, a ghost story. (Writing, not reading. I have read a whole novel written for grown ups before, I promise.)

I was unsure as to whether I should continue to blog here at all, what with being busy and grown up and all. But you never know when I'll want to unleash some stunning stupidity on the world. Also, would you want to live in a world without my remarks on Dale Carnegie, the Hams and Jams catalog, and whatever this is?

Reading through my old posts -- which are hilarious, by the way, I don't care if you're not supposed to praise yourself, fuck it, they're error-riddled and bizarre and terrible but also insane and entertaining and funny -- it occurs to me how long it's been since I wrote anything for FUN. Remember fun? It's a thing I used to do when I had regular employment, before I became an "entrepreneuse" and suddenly every hour that I wasn't working was an hour I wasn't making money. (Money, it turns out, is a thing you need to survive.) Writing for me now has become sort of joyless -- I just used the word SLOG for god's sake -- and it took rifling through blog posts from 2009 to see how emotionally downtrodden I've become.

It's like Harold Diddlebock says: "Maybe they were right to fire me. I've gone soft. Your mind gets dull after twenty years working the same job, taking the same train every day, sitting at the same desk doing the same work, taking the same route home again."

So fuck it. Prepare for an onslaught of my nonsense, misuse of commas and the word "frankly," cryptic remarks apparently ungrounded in reality, and a host of other idiocies. Also be prepared that this blog might veer toward the personal, with less carefully curated quirkiness (oh, I'm on to you, Circa-2009 Spinster Aunt!) and "information" (though I will continue to assiduously post monkey-related news items... and gorilla-related news items). I just want to regain the joy in writing that I lost somewhere along the way. Before I started thinking of writing as a thing that had to be done, as an assignment. Something to sell. Something to be reviewed. A thing to be bought. One endless to-do list.

Professional writers sit down at their computer every day and write, they say! Yes, but.... that can't be all there is to it, can there? All I know is I used to enjoy this more.

Now all this isn't to say that I am not capable of writing any more. If anything, I've gotten better at my craft, more skilled, more polished, gone to more profound levels in my work. This is all true. (Especially if you're reading this and you're an agent or an editor. Then it's doubly true, I'm amazing.) But I sort of lost the.... nonsense of it. And that was the thing I really used to love. The sense of wonder, of "being puzzled at what we do not know.”

I need to get back to this. I need to bring some genuine wackiness back to my creative life. I need to have more foot-care-and-Maude nights with my funniest friend. (The health of your feet is so important, I can't stress that enough.) I need to remember the thing that I forgot.