I've done a careful job, up to now, of keeping this byline (a nickname my sisters had for me in their youngest years) separate from all my other activities.

One of those activities started nearly two decades ago when a marriage / handfasting I'd hoped would last lifetimes crashed and burned. Seeing the lack of responsibility my now-ex was showing, I took over being the primary caregiver for my two infant/toddler sons.

The kids weren't the hard part, because doing for them what they needed was automatic. What was hard was dealing with the external forces -- family, social and official -- which were poised or moving to step in and impose their presumed authority because I was "single parenting while male", without venting my opinion of this imposition and giving them that excuse to swoop in and take us over. Some of my stranger interests and inclinations had to be put aside or buried deep, both because caring for my children took priority (there's no such thing as a winner in a divorce, there's only the walking wounded and the barely-living, and my kids did not come away undamaged just because I kept them in touch with their mother; they needed a lot of primary attention as proof-of-caring), and because, in the harsh sociopolitical climate foist on us all after 11sep01 where DHS looked steadily more like nascent Stasi, they might have been used as such excuses.

My youngest son recently turned 18. We're all legal adults here now, immune to state agencies poking their presumptions of authority in just-because. We made it. Now I can resume exploring the topic of 'the penultimate frontier', gender. (The ultimate frontier, for this Spiritualist-inclined Witch, is form and maya/matter itself and what lies beyond it and time, but we've got to learn to be fully-human, not just half-human, before we can hope to ascend to be more than that.)

I don't have any new stories ready to drag out of hiding. I have half-finished or barely-begun chunks written in left-over attention, some of which might be workable when I turn primary attention towards them. I'm not about to promise that any of them will have the same quality, whatever that was, as before, only that they'll get the attention they deserve.

What I'm doing here is explaining why I was always vague and elusive, why I felt it necessary to all-but-vanish, and what changed that I can now resume showing a presence.