The New-Old Thing!

I'm launching another publication, but don't worry, it's totally depressing!

Hey y’all, it’s KimBoo! I’m an author who is also librarian, text technology historian, and former I.T. project manager. I write about a lot of interesting things, I hope you agree! Please consider supporting me (and my dog!) so I can keep throwing errata & etcetera into the Scriptorium!

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Whenever one project wraps up, I cast about looking at all the other projects I have planned…because I always have other projects planned. Curse or blessing? Even at this vaunted age I can’t answer you that. Maybe both?

But one project that has been poking me in the brain more insistently lately is one that has failed repeated over the years to get traction. It was never meant to be a rain maker, but rather I wanted it to serve as support for people who have (or are going through) the trauma I went through in the mid-1990s. Sadly, for many reasons, I never found a way to make it relevant or find its audience.

It is there, though, nagging me every day to get back to it.

So next week, on August 15th, that is what I am going to do:

Patience & Fortitude
Tragedy changes us; Patience tempers us; Fortitude keeps us going.

Lessons in grief, crisis, and recovery from 30 years of life as an adult orphan from a GenX woman who has resentfully struggled every step of the way.

It’s going to be a separate publication here on Substack, a choice I made simply because grief and mourning and cPTSD are very heavy issues and I did not want to clutter up this feed with all of <waves hands around> that. It’s enough that I have to live with it, why subject my friends?

Why the 15th?

Very basic answer: August 15th, 1943 is my mother’s birthday. She would have been 80 years old, had she lived, but she died exactly one month after her 51st birthday (September 15th, 1994).

Not so basic answer: August 15th is also my birthday, a fact that has been the source of a lot of laughter and some small level of trauma for me, over the years. Many is the time I have wished I could shift it over to some other day on the calendar; but while you can legally change your name, there is absolutely no viable way to change your birthday. Alas.

I’ll be talking a lot more about that on, you guessed it, August 15th. I’ll be posting links to the new publication here and on Notes, so you won’t miss it entirely. You’ll just have to sign up separately if you want to follow it. Which I 100% don’t blame you if you don’t want to!

As for what it will actually be, the plan is to serially post my 2010 book about the aftermath of my parents’ deaths, Grieving Futures, along with commentary on it. I will also repost older essays I’ve written about grief and mourning (probably edited), as well as tentative forays into writing my next book about death and grief, The Empty Bowl.

I do not believe that “everything happens for a reason,” because I’ve known too much grief and seen too much tragedy to think that can be true. What I believe instead is that we create the reason out of everything that happens to us, which for me means trying to share the story of my traumas so that other people who have gone through similar things (or are currently going through them) knows they aren’t alone.

I felt terribly, horrifically, suicidally alone in 1996 when I lost everything I ever called “home” and “family.” If I can help someone else avoid the deepest depths of those dark waters, then I believe that is reason enough for me.

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