Beginnings are tough. How do you mark it? How do you give it the pomp that it deserves? How do you make it meaningful?
Some beginnings are easy to find. They're marked with a bottle smashing against the side of the ship, or with a first day of school photo and tearful hug.
Sometimes beginnings can be quiet. They can go with little fanfare, or entirely unnoticed, like a habit fully formed without your having realized it, or coming to the end of a journey and not remembering when or how it began.
And what about re-beginnings? Beginning again? That's what this website, this blog post is. A beginning-again.
After a many-months hiatus, I'm back online to give the Heather Hataley author brand a proper home.
If you've been with me for a while, whether on the blog, email list, or Instagram, you may remember a little website called See Heather Smile. It was my corner of the internet to share some goodness and a little light, offer advice for taking better care of yourself, and introduce author Heather Hataley.
See Heather Smile is no more. At least, not in the way it once was. Its webpages, its blog posts, its jumble of advertisements are gone from the internet landscape.
The spirit of SHS, of course, lives on here at heatherhataley.com. This is still my place after all. Who am I? Let me introduce (or re-introduce!) myself to you at my About Me page.
But this new website has more clarity than SHS did. It's built specifically to share my literary works with the world.
Which brings me back to this re-beginning. How do I mark it? Does it need pomp? How do I make it meaningful?
The meaning behind this re-beginning lies in my heart. I can happily carry that with me.
Does this re-beginning need pomp? Whatever excitement and pride I have for this new website (I'm not the best at tech, which is why this new re-design took forever!) will shine through as I share this blog post online and in person.
As for marking this re-beginning? This blog post took care of that. This is one of those quiet beginnings I mentioned earlier. There will be more momentous occasions celebrated here later on. For now, I'm happy to slip back onto the internet landscape without too big a brushstroke.