Hello, readers! Actually, it feels a bit ambitious to address potential audience members when I feel like Julie at the beginning of Julie and Julia–my only visitor could well be my mother, if she can even find this blog. Just kidding, Mom! Great, now I’ve gone and alienated my one reader…

Anyway, I’m a writer, so I figured I should probably start a blog where I can record thoughts and sentiments that don’t make it into my novels or other works. I used to keep a journal, but I’ve been terribly inefficient in recent years mostly because my thousand or so words a day–the daily word count Ray Bradbury recommends in Zen in the Art of Writing–tend to be reserved for whatever fiction project I’m currently working on. Besides, I’ve been married for five years and don’t seem to have as much drama (i.e., prime journal material) in my life as I did when I was younger.

Though that’s not exactly true. I was lucky enough to sign on with Bella Books as a lesbian fiction writer in August 2009, and my first two novels, Solstice and Leaving L.A., have been released in the past year with the third, Beautiful Game, due out in July. Not only that, but my wife is currently eight months pregnant. Our daughter is due to release [her grip on my wife’s body] next month, February 2011. But even with these recent developments, I still find myself channeling my writing energy into fiction. Now that I have a publisher and encouraging readers (individuals, incidentally, I’m not related to), writing fiction has become even more rewarding than when my audience was made up solely of friends and family. Again–sorry, Mom!

My intent for this blog? To log in once a week at least and ruminate on writing and parenting, GLBT politics and the evils of heterosexism, love and death and other of my favorite fictional and real life topics. Some ideas I plan to blog on: an analysis of that oft-heard cliche, “writing a book is like having a baby” (a notion my wife Kris says she’d like to “discuss” right about now); various awkward depictions of how I put my foot in my mouth in assorted social situations–at work, family gatherings, dinner parties; thoughts on being our daughter’s non-biological mother; family history–my mom’s uncles Willy and Wally, twins who weren’t actually brothers; how my Scots-born grandfather nearly became a Chicago mobster; what happened the night I fell asleep on an overnight bus from London to Glasgow; and other stories I’ve found myself telling and retelling over the years.

Anyway, thanks for tuning in to my inaugural blog post. For my next post, I thought I’d talk about recent changes to birth certificates in Washington State for state-registered female domestic partners. In the meantime, to read a selection of my poetry and short fiction along with excerpts from my novels, please visit my author website at www.katejchristie.com. Hope to see you again here on WordPress soon!