I win!

30 blog posts in 30 days. I succeeded at the Artfully Wild Blog Along! 

I realize that this is not only the first time I've completed any 30-day challenge--not even one day skipped!--it may well be the first time I've completed any do-something-every-day-for-a-limited-duration challenge. On the one hand, keeping it low pressure with totally 0 expectations for quality definitely helped. On the other hand, I imagined if I did persist with this challenge and actually write something every day it might get me in the zone & energize some other projects that need to be written/completed, and on that front ... not so much. Sure, I accomplished (or made moderate forward progress on) some things this month, but there are plenty of other things that are still notably undone.

I finished Educated by Tara Westover last night (or early this morning, actually; those who said it would keep you up reading to find out what's next were right!). It's a very well crafted memoir of a woman who grew up in an abusive, fringey survivalist family, and what happens . There are parts, particularly talking about her early years on the mountain, that actually have a bit of a Laura Ingalls Wilder vibe -- and yet Westover is 5 years younger than me. 

Still reading & enjoying Trickster Makes This World. I'm definitely not finishing Best American Poetry 2020 this month, but I do still plan to finish it. For fiction, I started The Conductors by Nicole Glover, a historical fantasy set in Reconstruction-era Philadelphia. The main characters are magicians, but they're also former slaves and Underground Railroad conductors. (This is another really lovely cover, too.)

I probably won't keep trying to blog every day (there are things I'd rather do, and also things I ought to do), but I may post a bit more frequently. After all, in the last 30 days, I've almost doubled the output of this blog, which has been hypothetically "active" for 13 years. So, I'll close this post by saying:

Congratulations to me!

and

Happy (Early) Beltaine!