All Good Things Must Come To An End

 

Fourteen years.

I have begun this post a dozen times and then torn up each version. This feels like composing a eulogy for a deceased friend. Romancing The Genres has become my friend, I'm going to miss them.

Fourteen years.

My very first book, PULL, a Young Adult novel, had just been released by a small publisher called Westside Books. I was a brand new published author invited to join a new group blog, Romancing The Genres. I was thrilled to represent the YA genre in the group. 

And now it comes to an end. Romancing The Genres comes to a stop after this month.  The blog outlasted my publisher. Westside Books closed its doors almost a decade ago. In the years since, I wrote three additional  books, Being God. Courage and Unlawful Orders, for different publishers.  I also retrieved my rights for Pull  and re-released it independently, and sold over a dozen short stories to magazines.  I am still getting orders for Pull, a novel about a Young man who coses to enter an apprenticeship program for construction rather that take on the burden of college debt.  I love being ahead of my time.

Those fourteen years passed quickly, and the world changed before we noticed. I did realize that blogs were decreasing in importance. Romancing The Genres is the only blog I regularly read these days. I haven't even posted in my personnel blog in over a year. These days I, like so many others, am drawn to TikTok and other video forms of social media. 

Times change. We have to evolve. It's time for Romancing The Genres to retire.  I will miss writing these posts. Miss having something force me to put pen to paper and be creative every month. (Yes, I do write longhand and in cursive. I find it almost impossible to be creative with a keyboard and an empty screen. It has always helped me to think that there was at least one person out there who read what I wrote and gave a chuckle and maybe a moment's thought.

 Finally, me use this last post as an opportunity to share a little news.  I have decided to retire from writing.

I've written and taught writing workshops for adults and kids, mentored and critiqued, edited and reviewed stories for other writers. Now I get to relax.  I still belong to a critique group, I won't give that up until everyone else in the group stops. And I have a creative nonfiction manuscript I am currently editing. I intend to finish that. After I'm done with it, I will begin a search for a different creative outlet. For now, goodbye readers. Keep having fun.