April 9, 2026
When I started my author website and newsletter 6 years ago in March 2020, I was a newly published non-fiction author making my way in a post-retirement landscape (and during the first months of the pandemic!). Building a presence in that environment was a huge challenge, but a publisher believed in my work enough to publish the first of three books I’ve written since retiring from teaching, so I was determined to do my part in getting the word out about what I was doing.
Back then, I started using a free newsletter mailing service that was being used by the theatre I had been working with for a few years, even though it meant making two kinds of posts: first, the one on the website about my writing process, and a second email to send the website link to folks who had chosen to join my e-mail newsletter list. Recently, an upgrade to my author website started adding more names to my newsletter mailing list, and the previously free service was going to start charging me for those extra names and took away my sending privileges until I paid up.
So, my early April newsletter didn’t go out on schedule last week, though I did post the link on Facebook, and some of you may have seen it there. Lucky for me, my web designer knew that the service I had purchased and was using for my website upgrade had a newsletter service that I didn’t know about but was already paying for, so she was quickly able to convert my newsletter to connect more directly to the website itself.
That transition is the entire reason for this new post. If you are not a Facebook friend and haven’t yet read the April newsletter, you can easily scroll below this post to the April 3rd post entitled “Spring is Sprung, but the Grass is Just Getting Started” to get the full story. In the future, any time I post to the “Thoughts” section of my website (which might not be as regularly as before), folks on this list will get an immediate notification.)
In the spirit of a season of transition, I leave you with the image above. Only three mornings ago, we started the day with a new coating of snow on the ground and decorating the bare trees (though it was gone by midday). Today, I saw the Glory of the Snow (Scilla forbesii) that is always the first to appear every spring, part of the roller coaster ride that is April in New England. It’s a volunteer that started popping up in my back yard mulch pad some years ago, most likely thanks to a passing bird. The flowers are tiny, only 2-3” tall, but their cheery presence in a sunny corner of the brown expanse that sits between my fire pit and the back of my house tells me that spring is finally on its way for real.
Rebecca Daniels 