It was mid-February of 2017 when I published the last issue of The Centrifugal Eye, “A Celebration of Poets.” I went on to work on private projects, as well as continue freelance editing and writing, and began the weekly posting to the Hanninen Freelance Editing blog.
It hasn’t been as hard to come up with varying topics as I’d first thought it might, and I’ve had the occasional guest event to stir things up, too. The blog does take a lot more time to produce than I’d realized it would (never having produced a weekly blog prior), though it’s been a satisfying challenge after the steady deadlines of the previous 11+ years producing a quarterly-turned-triannual, literary magazine.
"Violettes de Cartes Postales" - Handpainted Trinket Box, E. A. Hanninen
As it is with most of my milestones, I’m reevaluating goals and agendas, and this year’s anniversary of achievements is a proper time to shift gears, again.
One of my goals for the 2-years (or more) hiatus I’d planned from TCE was to work on my own writing. While I have done so, I’ve also found that I wish to carve out even more writing time for myself; as freelancing, blogging, and art studio sessions take up most of the rest of my week, I’m not as satisfied with my personal progress as I would like.
After this week, onward, I’ll be scheduling Feature Fridays on alternate weeks. In between, I’m going to use those 4 newly free weekdays per month (formerly occupied with blog-writing, revising, and formatting) to accelerate the work I’m doing on another writing project. I don’t want to jinx it, so I won’t go into details, but I will say it’s been a long-term undertaking that needs to soon spring up into the air and fly.
And, of course, this will also open up my freelance schedule a little more, which is always a good thing.
Over a decade ago, a dear friend commented that I “dream big.” I wondered if he meant that I was overreaching. To that remark, though, I said then and now, “You have to dream big to make the dreams come true.” I haven’t always gotten the things I wanted out of life, but when I have there was always a big dream behind it that I followed through to its conclusion. For example, in the 1990s, I literally dreamed about opening a retail business that featured scale-model mansions and miniatures — in my sleep, I watched someone write out a check to “Tiny Violet,” in payment for a 4-inch bureau I’d crafted and handpainted. I had always wanted to open a gifts and stationery store, and adding miniatures to the mix made it all the more special. After dreaming up that clear scenario, how could I not go on to register the tradename of my shop and miniatures business as Tiny Violet?
When I was considering retiring from retail in the mid-2000s, I thought about a daydream I’d dallied with in the ’80s — what would it be like to publish a magazine? I decided to find out, and soon launched The Centrifugal Eye poetry journal. Publishing a periodical is a great deal of work, I confirmed, but the experience for me was both anticipated and well worth it.
Sometimes dreams require giving more effort than you’d plan for, and sometimes they require you to give less to some things you’d hoped to, in order to give more to others.
That’s where I’m at now in my current dream; I want to write more for myself, so I have to pull back a little in a few other places where I’m giving a little too much of myself away. But I can’t pull away completely. It’s all of you who help feed my dreams, who keep me reaching as far as I can go.
See you in 2 weeks.