Just a Note – January 3, 2016

Hello World!

So, yesterday this blog celebrated its third anniversary and I look back over the three years since I began blogging seriously reflecting on what I want to do when I grow up.

Since the day I opened this blog, I also opened four other blogs, two on WordPress and two on Blogger, well actually one of the blogs on Blogger opened in 2009 but I only began writing on it in 2014, so I consider it new.  I’ve been concentrating all my work here over the past months but I think that I will begin to transfer some of my work over to them and will put links on my widgets to get to them more easily.

Their names are: Through the Eye of Bastet : It is dedicated to my photographic experiments.  This year I will be buying myself a new camera and will begin to do photographic blogs again.  The second is Walking with Sekhmet, this will be the blog that I will use for short stories and other prose works, except for haibun.  My historical Blogger site is called Bastet’s Waka Library.  I Blogged there from June 2014 until February 2, 2015 writing only haiku and waka mostly in response to Carpe Diem Haiku Kai and Haiku Horizon prompts and am considering returning there in the future for these posts.  The last blog is called On the Empty Road, and it is empty, basically because I have to log into another account to write there.

Now diversifying means that I’ll have to do some planning and changing. Some might have noticed that last year I began to put up pages on the header of this blog.  That is because I’m slowly removing all the older posts, editing them and then archiving them as category pages.  This is Bastet and Sekhmet’s Library and therefore, all my blogging work will be available here (except haiku) even if one has to wade through it on pages.  This is a huge job though because I’ve been writing anywhere from two to six or seven posts a day for three years.  So it’ll be a slow go.  With every post I put to a page it will disappear from the main blog.

I will also be publishing this year.  Now this isn’t a resolution, it’s a necessity. The whole point of blogging in the beginning was to leave something behind to remember me by, mostly for my family, now for the friends who may wish to remember me once I’m gone.  Death struck very close to home, as many of you know and that event has pressed upon my mind that anything can happen at any moment.  I’ve been fearful of publishing, it’s not easy for me to learn all the programs and things I need to know to get the job done but as my friend Elena would say we have to overcome our fear to be the best person we can be (my liberal translation).  So, I’ll have to study up on how to get those programs to work best for me.  Already, thanks to Chèvrefeuille at Carpe Diem Haiku Kai, I published a thirty page book of waka (Japanese poetry)  the lay-out work was done by my son whom I sure will help out, but I know he has a lot on his plate and will need to go this more or less alone.

I discovered over the years that I’m a haiku/waka poet.  I can and do write other poetic forms and I can and do write prose.  One of the forms I love is haiga (haiku with a drawing or photograph) … so in February to celebrate my 64th birthday I will hold a month of haiga and invite those interested in joining me in this month-long celebration to do so.  I will hold it here but will also post on Through the Eye of Bastet since that is my photography blog.

Ok … this is my game plan for the next few months of 2016.  I’m actually a terrible organizer so this is enough to begin with and maybe actually too much, we’ll see.

I’d like to thank all you who follow this post for your enthusiastic support.  You’ve kept me going through thick and then, though you might not have realized it.  One of my most faithful readers is a man called Harbin 77 who has passed by every day for the last three years … a special thanks goes to him.

Bastet