Old Bones and New Growth

A long time ago, I had a blog. It was popular. And a bit notorious. I enjoyed writing it, and people enjoyed reading it. And after some time, it became the genesis of a number of truly great things.

Time passed, and things grew in other directions, and suddenly life got a whole lot more stressful. Pandemic. Business collapse. Extraordinary personal crises and changes. And in the midst of all of that, the old blog got hacked. I cleaned up the mess left behind, but the remnants left just kinda sat there, staring at me. When I tried to pick them up and get it all going again, I discovered I had nothing left.

The heart had gone out of me. In addition to all the other stressors, there were several painful personal attacks going on against me and Valkyrie. We responded the best we could, but in the end? For me, the hurt was too much. I couldn't find it in me to do all the work needed to recover everything. Too much in me was broken. We rebuilt the school website from scratch on a new platform, and I tried to start all over again with a new blog. That was also a dismal failure, as was pretty much everything that followed.

I kept the domain, and I started up my new life and career as a writer. I repurposed everything to try to support that.

But the bones were still there.

Calling to me.

Haunting me.

The thing about trauma? You only really get past it by accepting that you've changed. Doesn't matter the cause or the severity, you are a different person, after. That doesn't mean you abandon all that you were. It just means that the trajectory of life you were aiming at has been changed.

And you have all the power in the world to keep changing that trajectory into something that's not only better for you, but also stronger and more powerful than any life you could have dreamed of before.

You gotta respect those bones, though. Real growth comes when you take a good hard look at what you were before. See your own bones in a new light. They can tell you more about your new path than you might expect.

When I wrote the BoxWrestleFence blog posts, I often did so without thinking. Each post had a genesis in something I perceived, and I wrote as pure reaction. Once I was out of that space, and dealing with all kinds of life stress, I tried to force myself to get back into, and it didn't feel...right.

Now, I've got six novels behind me, and another 4 being written, and I'm understanding what stories I want to tell. I'm learning what drives me, what motivates me, what themes are going to show up in my upcoming writing. And that's echoed in my old blog posts.

So, yeah. I've finally gotten around to doing all the work to restore the old blog. It took some shenanigans, and some accepting of changes, but as of now? All the old posts are back up. They can all be found here. You'll need to be logged in to see them, but there is no fee associated with that. You'll get added to my mailing list, but not to the newsletter, so you'll only get the occasional announcements and nothing else.

Re-reading them has been a trip for me. Now that I'm more aware of where my anger and drive came from? I'm ready to start new posts on the same theme.

So here's what going to happen now. First, I'll be posting here more frequently, once or twice a week at least. I'm going to talk about martial arts as well as writing, with a focus on self-examination, on developing a process to shortcut our own bullshit, to look through the filters we apply to ourselves. Second, my Patreon is going to go truly active, and will be a place for those interested in my writing. Patreon supporters will get to read first drafts of my next books in the first draft stage. You'll get to see the novels come together in raw form. Once chapter a week, and I've already got over a year's worth of material queued up, and will add a new chapter to the queue every week. You can become a patron and support me here.

There is a still a lot of work to be done. Cosmetic changes, layout changes. I'm going to be reviewing every single one of the old posts and re-tagging them into new categories for easier reading. All kinds of fun stuff.

I'm looking forward to hearing from old readers and finding new ones as well.

Thank you all for all your attention and feedback. It truly changed my life for the better and I will always be grateful for it.