Hear that creak and the bang of train cars moving out?

After a long hiatus, the wheels are turning once again!

2015 was a doozy of a year. Well, I take it back, it wasn’t as much of a doozy as it could have been (I mean in the scheme of things it was pretty decent, though I lost a human friend and a cat friend, adjusted to my dad’s moving in with us and began to weather the vagaries of dementia & aging, and our family continued its globalized multi-continental hijinks (if not convulsions)), we at least had a roof over our heads, good food to eat, and the general trappings of what passes for otherwise-normal in this society. Nevertheless, I hit the writing doldrums and didn’t put down hardly a word except for the basic, functional and utilitarian type.

That’s ok, though, because you know what? Previously written words don’t just dissipate. They sit on your hard-drive or in a manila folder or spiral-notebook and wait. Patiently.

When the levers got pulled and the tracks slid together and the train engineer got the all-clear to stop idling the 6,000 horsepower engine and start ‘er up slow — well, lo and behold the boxcars were still there, ready to come along behind at a slow chug.

I ran a poll with a bunch of other writerly types and confirmed that my title choice for a short story collection isn’t half bad. Shifted Visions wasn’t the top pick, but it was close enough to the leader that I could keep it – it was my favorite of the 20 or so I tested.

In case you’re interested, other contenders were:

• Peripheral Visions
• Light Dances at the Edge of Hope
• In the Small Dark Hours

A few that didn’t make it into the finalists’ category are going to be used to title individual stories and one of them required a story to go with it. That’s the one I’m working on now (with varying degrees of success, I’m out of practice and -not surprisingly- kind of flighty, though I’m persevering!).

In two days I’ll also have the results of my cover poll. Maybe I’ll post my first attempts to create a book cover here and see what you guys think (assuming there is a “you guys” reading this 😀 ).

Anyway, I had to stop anguishing over the fact that I hadn’t posted here in a year and stop beating myself with the “need” to start again with something really wonderful. Just start.

Here it is, in all its work-train glory, a kind of beat-up and homely, slow-to-get-rollin’, mode of transport: a long-time-coming blog post about a long-time-coming short story collection!

Woo-hoo! (make that sound like a train-whistle, now!)

image credit: Samuel Zeller from unsplash