It’s time for a renaissance. This part of me has gone neglected far too long, but I have reasons. I burned out, a meteoric rise and fall to earth, and I have taken my sweet time in trying to find my way back to some space of ambition and idealism once more. Depression is no simple thing. But I am in love and I have found other people in my life who could love me, too, and I have concrete goals and plans for the first time in four years, and though this is something I have thought, many times, that I should do, I am finally somewhere where, yes, I think that I really can do it again.

But it won’t be quite the same.

I have spent the past six months loving, growing, learning, talking, making connections. I have been creating, writing, painting, and concocting plans for my (our) future. I have engaged in everyday action and activism and have been planning to do so much more. I have not left the feminist blogosphere at all, spending lazy Saturday mornings naked in my lover’s bed perusing my RSS feeds while he dozes beside me, and so often the women I have connected with through blogging and those I do not know personally but follow religiously, inspire me to outrage and elation…and yet, I have felt too burdened by life and all its complications to write. This will change.

I am going to approach this differently, though, than I have before. I am a creative writer. I am a poet. I am an artist. But I am not and have never had pretensions of being a journalist. This is a problem in a political community where readers expect facts and figures and objective truth. I am not objective. I have never pretended to be. I have never been interested in sparking debate or even stimulating discussion. All I have wanted to do was to make people think about things differently. Not to talk or argue with me. To think about what I have said and agree or disagree. I am not interested in proving anyone wrong or being proven wrong, because I think there is room enough in this world for disagreement and that it is perfectly all right for people to have different perspectives from their respective vantage points.

What I want is to let my writing and my art speak for itself. I am not interested in defending myself from personal attacks, in that they do not largely bother me enough for me to feel they are worth addressing. I am not interested so much in defending my ideas, not because I want to ignore criticism but because they are my ideas, not my identity, and they are fluid and often shift. I want to impact the shared discourse. I want to demolish frameworks and alter the world as we see it, but not to propose solutions because I don’t pretend to know better than anyone else what is best for anyone but myself.

I do not and have never worked in things which can be qualified, quantified, proven. Not everything has to be concrete. Not everything has to be objectively true. (And objectivity is an illusion, anyway.) I am an artist and I experiment in thought. The mind is my canvas. Ideas are my medium. But I am not a scientist, a sociologist, and economist, a journalist. I might be called a philosopher, if an examination of my own internal mechanisms can be termed “philosophy”. Because that is all that this blog is or ever has been.

I have been lost and disoriented, trying to make this personal exploration into something more. I have tried to be too many things for too many people. It is not that I dislike writing critical, persuasive essays. It is not that I do not want to engage with others. It is not that I do not want to have a space to post interesting articles. But it can’t be just that. That can’t be all. That can’t be what is at the heart of all this. I had abandoned this project in favor of more creative pursuits. This project must be and will be more creatively-driven from now on in order for me to maintain interest in its growth and evolution.

That does not mean I will post fiction. But what I write will be art. It will be true, it will be flawed, it will be subjective, it will be beautiful and sometimes terrifying, it will be nonfiction and autobiographical, and it will be poetry.

I don’t know if there is a place in the political blogosphere for these ambitions. I don’t know if there is a niche that I can fill. Obviously, I had found one before. But I am going to try, and I hope that you are all willing to join me in this experiment, to hold on tight and see where my musings take us… I have things in store I hope you will enjoy. Some things will be the same. But the focus will be radically different.

This is Definition version 2.0. Enjoy the ride.

I’ve been having trouble not being able to moderate comments. I’ve disabled Spam Karma which I think was causing the problem. (It’s worked until now. Weird.) Now everything seems to be okay but there were a few legitimate comments out of the torrent of abusive ones (I can always tell when someone’s linked this site — I get a lot of comments on certain posts calling me names!) which I actually wanted to approve…but alas, they have been lost forever.

If you posted something nice about me or a question or something and the comment isn’t on the site, it’s because my Wordpress install ate it, not because I didn’t approve it. Sorry. Try again?

A shout out to those of you on LiveJournal: I’m starting a new community for feminist writers. There are a several purposes to this community: to receive comments and criticism of your writing from fellow members, to dicuss writers and writing, to promote the published writing of community members, and to provide information about publishers seeking submissions of material which fits the scope of the community. So if you write fiction in your free time, or you just blog, please check it out. All genres and styles are welcome, including fiction, poetry, and nonfiction essays and articles!

Read the rules and decide if this is the community for you — it is not a exactly safe space, but there’s a lot of things I won’t put up with, either, because I truly believe there need to be some standards in order to maintain a “feminist” community and not a “debate with anti-feminists” community.

I just wanted to let everyone know that I’m going to be guest-blogging at Alas, a blog throughout the month of May. Of course, I’ll be cross-posting back here too.

I think I’ve got most of the even remotely interesting posts back up and in the right places (yanno, every post that isn’t just me posting about how I haven’t posted anything interesting and the like), so permalinks should work again. Uh…I just lost all the comments on them since I didn’t have any backups. Sorry, since there was some interesting discussion on some of them.

I’ll post something actually interesting maybe later.

For now, I guess the only things I have to say I’ve been putting into chapter 12 of Beauty. Are you all up for a rough-draft novel excerpt that might be thought-provoking, in which non-gender-normative characters of various species discuss love and polyamory, not-so-subtle racial/cultural allegories, and the patriarchy?

Yeah, it’s a big chunk of just dialogue and setting/backstory, and it’s totally all over the place. I swear stuff actually happens in the book besides the characters all sounding pompous and intellectual, but I can’t post any of that out of context, really, without lots of explanation.

Okay, I’m re-posting as much of my old content as possible…but I’m starting with the pages that have been linked elsewhere, especially my Open Letter. So I figured I could back-date the posts and the permalinks should work again, so no one has to go update their links.