Ah, yes—the bleak midwinter.  A time for eating frozen pizzas and warm soups, washed down with hot, black coffee.  A time for turning in early at night, indulging in the warmth and comfort of fleece sheets and heavy quilts.

I see why bears hibernate right now:  ’tis the season for coziness, to embrace the hygge.  I certainly eat like a grizzly preparing for a few months of hibernation, but I don’t sleep off the excess fat stores.  It just gets added on until another round of gastrointestinal self-denial kicks in after I gaze at my double chin too long.

It is with the spirit of the hibernating grizzly that I write this post.  I love writing, but like most writers, that love is sometimes coupled with hate—or, in my case, weary indifference.  It comes in waves, most of them brief, but I’m currently riding one at the moment—or flailing about frantically amid it, my head occasionally dipping below into the briny deep.

All overwrought and mixed metaphors aside, I’ll just note that it’s been a bit of a struggle to write lately.  I’ve been dragging most of 2023 so far, due to a combination of a lingering respiratory malady and a general sense of ennui.  I love life, work, and blogging, but right now it’s getting hard to get motivated about any of it.

It’s not that I’m unhappy or depressed or the like—far from it.  I’m tired.  My usually high tolerance for the drip-drip-dripping of duty and obligation is significantly diminished.

That said, I intend to keep the blog going strong.  I have had a great deal of help lately thanks to Audre Myers and Ponty/Always a Kid for Today, both of whom have kept the submissions flowing like sweet honey into the Promised Land that is The Portly Politico.

In a way, their submissions have been a blessing and a curse:  they’ve been doing so much of the work for me, my creativity gland has begun to atrophy.  Rather than needing to cook up five original posts a week (TBT and Lazy Sunday being reblogs), I’ve often just had to write just three some weeks.  I’d love to see even more contributions from new writers, as I think an unstated mission of this blog is to bring together like-minded, engaging authors who want their work to get out there, but I also need to muscle a larger share of the writing load myself.  I need to get back to churning out quality content on a regular basis.

One enduring frustration has been the lack of time to dedicate to fiction writing.  I haven’t tried my hand at it in years, but have been kicking around a number of short story ideas.  I’d love for 2023 to be the year that I finally release a collection of short stories.  I also would like to compile and edit a collection of blog posts from here, a task that shouldn’t be too terribly difficult, but will require some time.

Ah, well—we shall see.  In the meantime, thanks for your support, and for letting me phone another one in.

—TPP