Month: December 2024

Good Morning, Goodbye, Hello, and Hope

/ Katie / 2 Comments

Good morning, New Year’s Eve.

And goodbye, 2024.

What, exactly, should I say about 2024? Perhaps that it was a year of change and challenge, immense joy and incredible fear, deep and new and all-encompassing love, disappointments and expectations and successes and surprises and sleepless nights.

I hope that 2025 is kind to me, and to all of us.

I hope that in the new year, things get better and not worse. I hope my family stays safe and happy and healthy. I hope that love and comfort and peace find the people who need them most, and that all people remember that we have more in common than we think, and more to gain through compassion than through hate.

I hope that this new year brings joy and music and fun and good stories. I hope that the beach becomes home.

I hope that Lucy grows and learns and knows every day how loved and wanted and perfect she is.

I hope that I make good mistakes – the kind that lead to lessons and laughs and not too many consequences – and that I learn, too, and that I create, and that I discover more about myself and who I am as a mom, and as a writer, and as a human. I hope that I can bring those things together in harmony.

I hope.

I hope.

I hope.

That’s what I have. That’s what we all have, always. Hope is undying and eternal and as powerful as we allow it to be.

I choose power. I choose hope.

So, goodbye 2024, and thank you. For everything.

And hello 2025. Let’s work together to make something good.

A Big First

/ Katie / 6 Comments

It’s a big deal, meeting your very first celebrity.

Lucy kept her cool. (She is the coolest.)

But in all seriousness, these first memories…I just had no idea how special they would feel. It’s like looking at life through all new eyes. I know that sounds trite, and I suppose I’m sort of late to the party. But here I am. I couldn’t have known, couldn’t have totally undserstood, before. I can only be in the moment I’m in.

And that’s one of life’s great discoveries, isn’t it? And one of its most beautiful and hardest lessons.

We only have right now.

And y’all, this is such an amazing now.

The Long (Break) and the Short (Story) Of It

/ Katie / 4 Comments

Here’s the short of it: It’s been over a year. I am so ready to get back to writing. And I mean, real writing. Like, creating. You know, the magic – putting words together and making something that didn’t exist before it came together on a blank page.

Here’s the long:

Having a 1-year-old, and the year and change in between her birth and now, is busy, crazy, different every day, and exhausting. It’s also amazing, inspiring, fun, and its own kind of magic. Lucy is my whole life, and finding ways to bring her needs into harmony with my own has been a challenge that I meet in novel, interesting ways every day. Some days, I succeed, and we’re both satisfied. Some days, I…don’t succeed quite as well…and she is happy and her needs are met and I have not even brushed my teeth. Time for writing? Nah. I barely have time to eat. “Well, you’ll make time for what matters.” Dude, have you had a baby? SHE matters. More than anything else. But I matter, too. And I do want to make time.

So, where does that leave me? What does it mean?

It means that, for the next month, I’m going to sit down at least once a week and jot down ideas, and good lines of dialogue, and when I can, a few paragraphs of beginnings and endings. And come January, I’m going to start posting short stories again.

I don’t know if I’ll do a theme like I have in past years, or if I’ll try something different. Back in October of 2023, I posted the start of something fun, and maybe I’ll revisit that. I would like to know how it ends.  

I don’t know exactly what my writing will look like in the new year, but I’m going to do it, and there will be stories. I hope you’ll read them!

But for now, Lucy’s waking up from her nap.