From a Distance - #compassion #suffering #revolution

By Lisabet Sarai

From a distance you look like my friend
Even though we are at war
From a distance I just cannot comprehend
What all this fighting’s for....

~ Bette Midler, “From a Distance”

Just before I entered my senior year in high school, humans walked on the moon for the first time. With my long-time love of both science and science fiction, I was jubilant. The stars beckoned. Anything was possible.

Only months later, the Ohio National Guard fatally shot four Kent State University students protesting the Vietnam war.

Looking back, I cannot recall how I reconciled the elation and the horror stemming from these two events, though I know both affected me deeply.

We believed, back then, in the inevitable revolution. Things would never be the same. “The time’s they are a-changing,” Dylan sang, and we believed. We looked to a new world of love and peace, freedom and justice and moral responsibility. The Age of Aquarius.

Things didn’t quite turn out that way.

Well, the times did change. They always do. We impeached a president. We waited in long lines for rationed gas. We danced to Saturday Night Fever. We watched the stock market crash, rise and crash again.

Hijacked planes toppled the twin towers and claimed three thousand lives. Nightmare waves scoured the coasts of the Indian Ocean, killing two hundred thousand. Having finally quit the jungles of Vietnam, U.S. soldiers occupied the deserts of Iraq and Afghanistan.

We elected a black man to the Oval Office—twice. We cloned sheep, transplanted hearts, sequenced our own DNA and that of our animal cousins. We haven’t walked on Mars yet, but our robots have. We know there’s certainly water on the Red Planet, and probably some form of life.

My siblings had kids, who grew up, graduated high school, went to college. My parents left the earth, after bountiful lives no one could call short. A dear friend succumbed to ovarian cancer at fifty two. Two of my former lovers committed suicide.

Technology followed the science fiction of my youth. Computers shrank to the size of match boxes. It became more and more difficult to distinguish fact from deliberate fabrication.

My spirituality is eclectic, but I do believe the Buddha’s teaching that everything is transient. Suffering derives from attachment, the attempt to resist changing circumstances.

Through the distance of six and a half decades, I find comfort in the constant cycles of change. No matter how horrible things appear right now, they’ll be different tomorrow, or next week, or next year. Of course this also means more hard times may be coming, but they will eventually fade away as well.

The only reality (again according to the Buddha), the key to breaking the chains of illusion, is compassion. That’s my focus now, in these latter days of my life. I am trying to release the hate and anger stirred up so effectively by today’s media. I don’t want to sweat the small stuff, but to do justice and love kindness and refrain from judgment if I can. I am trying, with mixed success, to be a center of peace, radiating to those around me.

Really, that seems to be the only option.

To quote Paul McCartney, another prophet from my youth:

And in the end

the love you take

is equal to the love

you make.

Friend at First Sight

by Annabeth Leong

I had recently separated from my husband, and a big thing I wanted, not just that night but with my life, was to go dancing.

The moment that led to my divorce happened at someone’s wedding. The DJ started playing Justin Timberlake and Bon Jovi and it made me want to join the party. My husband wanted to keep sitting at the table, and he wanted me to stay with him. I was bored and frustrated, and I guess something had slowly been breaking in our relationship, because I stood up and left him there. I kicked off my shoes at the edge of the dance floor and air guitared to “Livin’ On a Prayer,” jumping up and down until sweat soaked through the sides of my dress and I could hardly breathe.

It took a couple months after that for me to actually leave him, but when I did I started going out. I’d married young enough that I was perplexed by the scene I found. Who knew that shit doesn’t really get going at the club until midnight? How are you supposed to deal with that when the trains stop running at one? What do you do with your purse? How do you let someone know when you want to dance with them, or when you don’t? What do you do when you start dancing with someone and you get a feeling like a punch to the lower belly because there’s something so exciting about being close this way to a living person that it’s like your clit is trying to crawl out of you and jump them independently?

Christ, it was messy. It had been almost a decade since someone really hit on me, and suddenly I had people telling me they thought I might be the one, saying they wanted me to have their children. At what age did guys get so intense? The last time I’d been a free agent, the big question was whether I did anal.

And I wanted to go dancing, not just that night but in my life. I felt like I was having a second adolescence. Please, for the love of God, don’t tell me you think you’re falling in love with me. Tell me you know where there’s burlesque. Tell me you know where that good DJ is going to be, the one who knows the difference between goth-y noise and stuff that’s danceable. Tell me you want to try nipple clamps. I had spent so much time thinking about nipple clamps that just the words made me tremble.

I went out that night because Femme Bones had posted on Facebook that her new burlesque troop, the Slaughterhouse Sweethearts, would be performing at this club downtown. I wanted to support a maybe-friend, and I wanted to see breasts, and I liked the way the Sweethearts could turn you on and make you uncomfortable at the same time.

Much as I wanted to have fun in my new life, I still felt like I was missing a manual. The club was right next to Fenway, where the Red Sox play. Before my divorce I would never have dared to drive there, but now there I was in wild gridlock on Yawkee Way, dressed like a schoolgirl, shirt way unbuttoned, lipstick a shade of plum that made the whole thing look obscene, trying to figure out how the fuck anybody parks while there’s a baseball game, and wondering if I ought to just give up and go home.

I circled the club several times, shaking, clock ticking. Finally, I found street parking and went in. I discovered this wasn’t just a burlesque show—there was also dancing. I hadn’t known, but I went with it, purse tucked awkwardly against my body while I tried to move (where the hell are you supposed to put that thing?).

Gradually, the building filled. The challenge of dancing with too much floor and too many lights focused on me gave way to the challenge of dancing without accidentally clocking anyone with my elbow.

Then I looked up and smiled and waved, chest warm with recognition. My body reacted the way I do when a dear friend walks in while I’m having a sad day. I was flooded with relief, the sense of finally being able to let go of things I’d been holding in. Refuge. Sanctuary. The pleasure of being yourself with someone who can do the same with you.

It took a few seconds for me to realize I didn’t actually know that guy I’d just waved to. He was coming toward me, though, invited by my smile and my gesture.

We danced until his friends made him leave. I kept thinking maybe I shouldn’t do this, maybe I wanted to just dance tonight and not get into any romantic messes. I really wasn’t looking for a relationship, or even a hookup. On the other hand, I couldn’t shake that feeling of goodwill I’d had when I first saw him. I liked him so much. We were doing sexy things, sure, and that was working for me, but there was that powerful sense of friendship underneath it all, like we’d known each other forever.

He asked for my number before he left, and I sort of wanted to refuse him, but I was afraid that if I did he would think I didn’t like him, and I couldn’t bear that, because I did.

It was that way for months after that. I kept thinking I didn’t really want to be dating someone. I probably shouldn’t see him again, I’d decide. But I liked him so much I’d tell myself I’d just do it one more time.

I don’t want anything serious, I told him. I’m getting divorced. I want us to have fun together, not plan for the future.

That sounds great, he said, and he was the only person I’d met who knew how to be with me without applying pressure.

I did think he was hot, don’t get me wrong. But things didn’t click when we went to bed. The blow job technique that was at that time driving other people wild made this guy lose his erection. On the other hand, he had a way of thrusting that kept me from feeling him any of the places I wanted to. We struggled to settle on a brand of condom we both liked.

The thing was, though, we figured all that stuff out. Then we started checking out the nipple clamps. Then he caught me one day with the porn I’d always been ashamed of, and his nonreaction to it healed me more than I’d thought possible. And I think what was going on through all this was that the liking was good. It made us able to talk about anything, and the thing about sex is it works best if you can talk about it.

A few years later, I married him. I’ve never liked living with anyone, but I like living with him. People say marriage should be based on friendship, but this is a friendship I felt right away. It was so instant, it had the sense of something resumed. In my spookier moments, I’ve wondered if past lives are real and he was some sort of dear friend before.

After we got married, I realized, partially thanks to the way he encouraged me to really be myself, exactly how serious my attractions to women are, how my sexuality seemed to be changing. Fuck, I thought. Don’t people always have to ruin something? Here’s a person who accepts me like I didn’t dare to dream of, and now I can’t be with him because I think I might be gay.

And I did think about leaving, because I really felt I might not be interested in men anymore. I wanted to be fair to him, and to me, and I cried every morning because I couldn’t imagine living my life while suppressing my attractions and I also couldn’t imagine living my life without him.

We’ll figure this out, he said. This is what marriage means.

Christ, I thought. Is it? That sure as hell wasn’t what marriage meant before.

We’re polyamorous now, and our sexual connection has changed but it’s still there, and I still like him just as powerfully as I did that first moment, at first sight. All that stuff I felt was true. He is my refuge, my sanctuary, that place where I get the pleasure of truly being myself. I hope all the time that I’m something similar for him.

And if the music starts playing, literally anywhere, he is the first on the dance floor.

Searching for Answers

by Annabeth Leong

When I first started masturbating, I thought I was supposed to simulate sex. I remember setting my alarm clock for a time early, early in the morning when I thought I wouldn't be discovered, and then going through a long, narrative process that often involved whispering lines of dialogue to my imaginary lover. (Perhaps this was a precursor to what I do now). In the books I'd read, sex was penetration, so that was what I did. This method worked, but it was long and inefficient. It took literally hours.

Then, as I've written before, I discovered The Hite Report and learned the role of the clitoris and how to find it. It's sort of weird to me that I didn't figure this out on my own, but I remember the amazing revelation of touching myself there, no penetration required, and discovering that orgasm had suddenly become effortless. This was an important early lesson for me about the difference between what I thought sex was and what actually felt good to me.

Once I discovered masturbation in earnest, I couldn't stop. I thought everyone masturbated all the time the way I did, and refused to believe people who told me otherwise. I thought girls who claimed they never masturbated were full of shit, just trying to look like "nice girls." I'd given up that image before I ever even had it, so my contempt knew no bounds.

I don't know where I got the idea that masturbation was wrong—my mother tells me she never wanted me to feel that way—but get it I did. I remember resolving to quit as a teenager, but being unable to cut down to less than five times a day. It was too easy to start, and once I started, I felt too compelled to finish.

Then there were the fantasies. For as long as I can remember, what worked best for me to think about was violent, disturbing stuff that sometimes made me feel awful afterward. To be clear, I am not talking about "nice" rape fantasies (like the one described by Sarah in the show Transparent, about a rapist who's going to force you but isn't going to hurt you too much and wants to make you come). I'm talking about blood and torture. This may be part of where I got the idea that doing this was wrong. It was always a disorienting feeling to disturb myself in the process of orgasm.

I never masturbated about specific people. That always seemed wrong to me, violating. Maybe part of it was that I didn't want to taint anyone I knew with the violence I imagined. It also felt wrong to me to use people that way without their consent.

I was always troubled by my fantasies and tried to find ways to think about other things. I remember a therapist telling me to picture people being kind to me instead. Unsurprisingly, whatever that might have done for my self-esteem, it didn't get anywhere close to making me come. It seems obvious to me now that this was a ridiculous suggestion.

Masturbating for hours was always a shameful secret. During my first marriage, I looked forward to the times when my ex-husband worked on days I didn't. That meant I could spend the day on the couch, masturbating over and over, without fear of discovery.

I sometimes masturbated in places I shouldn't have, such as the student lounge for my grad school program or the bathroom at work.

I once masturbated in a motel in Spartanburg, South Carolina, and got caught by some people peering in the window. I heard them crowing about it outside, stopped what I was doing, and hid in the bathroom for the rest of the day and night, sleepless and afraid. When four a.m. came, I snuck into the parking lot, afraid they might still be out there, and checked out hurriedly. I have probably never driven as fast as I did leaving that town.

The revelation of my adult life was meeting a partner to whom masturbation was not shameful. When I told him that story about Spartanburg, South Carolina, he got an erection. I got used to being able to say, "I'm going to go masturbate. Care to join me, or would you just like to overhear it?" I can't overstate how much that affected me. When he asks, "What did you do yesterday?" and I say, "I masturbated for six hours," and that's a good answer to him, it heals so many things I have carried in my soul for so many years.

I have long felt that masturbation is the cornerstone of my sex life, the most important part because it's where I learn everything I know about myself. A few years ago, I started having lots of trouble with what I call "the oil-slick fantasies," the things that leave me sick to my stomach after I've come. I started looking for other things I could think about—aware that a simple reversal of the script was not going to work for me.

I'm not going to lie. Those things have always made me come. And when I do find a really sick, violent piece of porn, it's hard to resist it. But I can't always deal with the fallout afterwards.

Somewhere around then was when I really started having issues with my sexual orientation. Without thinking of the violence, I couldn't feel anything. I didn't know how to keep having a sex life without it. To some degree I could accept it, but to some degree I couldn't. And in the deafening silence left in its wake, I started to notice how much I felt for women, how I could be aroused by them without that darkness.

For a while, I thought I was kinky and twisted in such a way that a sweet kiss would do nothing for me. But then I watched a lesbian movie (I Can't Think Straight) and found myself breathless and wet during the (hot but very vanilla) sex scene.

I started to experiment with masturbating about women. But this was not easy, not even in the privacy of my own mind. No matter what I started out thinking about, my mind would drift to my first girlfriend, to things we said and did together in secret in the small Florida town where we lived, and it would turn me on but it would also make me cry. I still cry when I look at her picture, unable to bear having lost what we found together.

For the first time in my life, I went weeks and months without orgasm. I just couldn't find a place where my mind could land.

I want to conclude this post neatly, with a well-packaged resolution, but the truth is, I don't have it.

There are things I've found. Over recent years, I have nursed a foot and shoe fetish. That is lovely for me. It turns me on, and it's also (at least the way I do it) playful and sweet and fun. It has been a refuge when I feel caught between violence and unresolved feelings. So sometimes I can turn to that. I can summon the memory of the taste of shoe leather, of the feeling of my stomach on the floor, of the moans of the woman above me.

I have also healed a bit from the feelings I have about my first girlfriend. But when I think about women, I find that my emotions affect my masturbation more. If I don't feel good about something in real life, my thoughts drift to my relationship situation rather than the orgasm I'm trying to have.

I have toyed with masturbation that isn't about coming. I obtained a couple of vibrators that definitely won't make me come, and it's fun sometimes to play with them with that expectation removed.

But this is all a work in progress. A while back, I changed my bio to say, "Annabeth Leong is frequently confused about her sexuality, but enjoys looking for answers." That's one of the truest things I know to say about myself.

Change by Giselle Renarde

One quarter, three nickels, three dimes

See all that money? I found it on the street last week. Okay, that's a lie. Two of those nickels were on the floor of the bus. I am not above picking up bus floor change. I will pick up any change. It's free money.

Two years ago I set up the Street Change Challenge. Sounds like a charitable initiative, but it's not (except inasmuch as I am a charity case).

Can't make this shit up.

Here's what happened: in November 2012 I received a royalty cheque in the amount of $1.90.  Yes, one dollar and ninety cents. That covered three months' earnings from one of the publishers I was working with at the time. They recently returned my rights on the three short stories they had under contract.

I wonder why.

Haha, no I don't. They told me why and they weren't douchey about it: I hadn't sent them a new manuscript in years and old stuff stops selling after a while. Returning my rights made good business sense for me and for them. No hard feelings on my side, and I hope none on theirs.

A royalty cheque for $1.90 was nothing unusual for me, unfortunately, but that particular cheque got the cogs cogitating. You can't get a coffee at Starbucks for $1.90.

Writing isn't a hobby, over here. This is my career.  Pretty dismal.

But it inspired my tongue-in-cheek Street Change Challenge.

In 2012, I proclaimed that if I found more than $1.90 on the sidewalk in three months, I would quit writing and turn to picking up coins as a profession.

In 2012, we still had pennies in Canada.

I never did report my findings, so I'll do it now. Actually, it was a close call that came down to the question of whether or not Canadian Tire Money should count toward my total. It's not true currency, but that red loyalty program bill was the tie-breaker. Without the 10 cents in Canadian Tire Money, my total came in just under $1.90.

The Street Change Challenge was kind of an exercise in ridiculousness. It doesn't take any special skill to pick up change off the sidewalk. Does it not take skill to write a book?  Shouldn't a person who writes books for a living earn more than someone casually picking up nickels off the floor of a bus?

I love a good deal. I love getting something for nothing. I'm happy to go out of my way to buy stuff on sale. I regularly walk when a subway ride would be faster because the $3 fare is too high. Hey, if it's more than $1.90 I can't afford it!

My girlfriend often asks me, "Why don't you pay the subway fare and spend that saved hour working? Isn't one hour of your time worth more than $3?"

My initial reaction is NO, but I don't tell her that because she'll say I'm devaluing my time and thus denigrating myself... which is probably true. Sometimes when I'm chasing the lowest price on milk (keeping my eyes peeled for loose change on the sidewalk), I ask myself, "Would my time be better spent writing?"

I've decided there is no measurable answer to that question. When you're a writer, you can't calculate what your time is worth the way people with hourly earnings can.

Writing is a crapshoot. You can quote me on that, and I hope you do. Writing is not a job--it's a gamble.

It happens that I'm not a gambler (I don't even buy lottery tickets), so it's kind of weird that I do this for a living. There's no way to predict whether a book will hit it big or sell ONE copy (the one you bought yourself). I like certainties. I like math. I want to be able to calculate the value of my time, but it's constantly in flux because this industry changes so damn fast.

When I started writing erotica in 2006, I was a short story writer answering calls for submissions for print anthologies. If you're an erotic fiction writer, you know what that world looks like these days.

*crickets*

You probably signed contracts two years ago for anthologies that are stuck in the queue of a halted production schedule. Generally speaking, contributors don't get paid until after the book is published. That's a long time to wait for $50.

Math is my friend. I can't help calculating what I might earn self-publishing a short story in the time it takes a print book (that my work may or may not be selected for) to make it to market.

But, like I said, it's a crapshoot.  In order to do the math, you need to be able to count on something, anything... and you just can't, in this industry.

Two years ago, my goal was to find $1.90 in change on the sidewalk. Nowadays I'm concerned with paying the rent and putting food on the table. I'm working with fewer publishers. I only send work to houses that make me money, otherwise I self-publish--something I thought I'd never do back in 2012.

I realize now I spent too many years sending manuscripts to publishers that earned me next to nothing. I didn't listen to the math. I felt a sense of loyalty because they'd taken a chance on me early in my career, or because they were nice people.

I don't do that anymore. I know I sound like a total dirtbag, and maybe I am a total dirtbag, but who benefits if a book doesn't sell?

Change is Good

by Kristina Wright

"And the time came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom." ~ Anaïs Nin

I'm not a big fan of change, especially change that is beyond my control. When I was 21, I disliked change so much that I was, in fact, labeled "resistant to change" on an employee evaluation. I liked consistency, predictability, routine. That sounds boring, and I suppose it is, but that was my comfort zone. Still is, really. And yet, my life has over the past few years has been a runaway train picking up speed and heading for inevitable change. Some of those changes have been beyond my control-- physical changes of age, changes in relationships I once held dear to me-- lives change and evolve and sometimes all we can do is mourn what is lost and embrace the change. That isn't always easy.

I found myself in the emergency room over the weekend, helpless and in pain, and then happily drugged out on morphine. I hadn't been in a hospital in eleven months, when I delivered by second baby, and the change was profound. Being 44 years old and giving birth to an almost eleven pound baby made me (and my big baby) something of a maternity ward celebrity. It was a joyous occasion, one full of light and love (and a steady morphine drip, too). This time, I was just another middle aged woman having a gallbladder attack, warehoused in a hospital room (ironically, on the same floor as the maternity ward) awaiting a too-busy doctor. Instead of feeling empowered by my body's abilities as I had last year, I felt sick and helpless and scared.

My way of thinking has changed over the years. I used to believe in letting nature, time and circumstance take its course and bring about change-- or not. I was willing to sit back and let life happen to me rather than make deliberate changes. Good things happened as a result and I called it luck. Bad things also happened and I cursed the universe and my own stupid resistance to change. I no longer believe in letting things happen-- not in most cases. I can now see my own mortality on the horizon and I know that if I hope to accomplish everything I want to in this life, I'm going to have to make those changes happen.

Change is scary for me no matter what the circumstances, but it is especially frightening making deliberate changes in a happy life. It seems to be tempting fate-- saying that what I have isn't enough. Life was good before I had kids. Then the big Four-Oh came and went and I realized that I might want to get serious about deciding whether I wanted to be a mother before time decided that for me. There have been so many changes with the addition of first one kid (a deliberate and planned change) and then the second (a "let's see what happens" happy surprise change), you'd think that would be enough change to last me for the next decade or so, right? But no, I find myself contemplating other life changes (and, sometimes, contemplating another baby) and getting excited about what the future might hold.

Watching babies turn into toddlers is its own lesson in accepting change. Children grow so quickly-- going from helpless bundles to whirlwinds of energy-- that I am constantly in mourning for a certain stage (the first smile! that first tooth! the first step!) while I'm rejoicing in a new stage. Some changes, like children growing up, you just can't fight. Change flows through my house like a river-- and it's better to go with the flow than fight the current and exhaust myself. My way of coping with the changes is to take hundreds of pictures of my babies growing up before my eyes. Pictures to remind myself-- and them-- of all the changes that make them who they are. I am not changing at the same rate as these little people who have invaded my life, but I am changing. And learning. Sometimes the hard way.

My weekend visit to the ER was a slap in the face (or a punch in the gallbladder)-- a reminder that though my amazing super-fertile body can produce babies via Cesarean section and bounce back quickly, my body is still very much middle aged and has not been well-cared for except during pregnancy. And so it's time for some new changes. I know I need to eat better and exercise more, not for the vanity of physical appearance (one of the best changes of the past two decades has been to accept and love my body just the way it is), but for my long term health. Perhaps making changes that will be good for my body will avoid the change that I have no control over-- agonizing pain that ends with me in the hospital, being told I need surgery.

I have another change coming up soon: I'll be short an organ. The gallbladder is coming out. It's not a change I planned for and I'm not looking forward to surgery, but despite my own belief in not sitting back and letting life happen to me, I've done just that with regard to my overall health this past year (and in the year between my first and second pregnancies, truth be told). So now I'll suck it up and deal with this unwanted change while making changes that will-- hopefully-- improve my health. Who knows where those changes will lead me? But in this case, it's an easy enough change to embrace.

Along with my personal changes, Oh Get A Grip! is undergoing some new changes as well. Unfortunately, my unpredictable health scare made me blow my first run at this new Grip schedule and for that I apologize. I'm already seeing how making simple changes in how I treat my body will have ripple effects over other areas of my life. Just like that... change happens. And it's going to be good. I can feel it.

Taking Steps

By Lisabet Sarai

God give me the serenity

To accept the things I cannot change,

The courage

To change the things I can,

And the wisdom to know the difference.

I haven't been to a Twelve Step meeting in decades, but the simple prayer above is still a tool I use regularly in dealing with my life. It captures a great deal of wisdom in just a single sentence, suggesting a strategy for overcoming frustration, worry and despair.

The crux of that technique? Maybe some people focus on the acceptance aspect, the notion that fighting against something that's inevitable and immutable simply wastes precious emotional energy without solving any problems. I definitely believe that's true. I resonate strongly with the Buddhist notion that attachment is the source of suffering.

For me, however, the most important function of the so-called Serenity Prayer is to remind me that I have the power to choose, to change aspects of my existence that don't seem to be working well. When I'm unhappy, I've learned to examine the situation in order to determine whether I in fact have any control over the ostensible causes.

Over the past six months, I've been feeling that Oh Get a Grip was floundering. We've had last minute topics, missed posts, Saturdays without guests. Even more distressing was the fact that I wasn't enjoying the process of blogging much anymore. I viewed my Sunday post as one more task I had to get done, a not-necessarily-pleasant responsibility with an inconvenient deadline. That attitude has probably been reflected in the quality of my posts, too (although I'd like to believe that isn't true).

I was aware of my negative emotions swirling around the Grip, but for quite a while I felt powerless to do much about them. I didn't want to shut the blog down – I know we have loyal readers, and anyway I personally love reading the contributions of my fellow blog members. And yet I felt as though I couldn't honestly keep doing it, week after week after week. The blog was draining me, stealing time from my writing, making me feel guilty... I felt trapped.

When I raised the issue with the other blog members, I discovered they had similar feelings – both positive and negative. Together we realized that we didn't have to accept things the way they were, that we could engineer changes to the blog schedule and content without throwing in the towel completely.

So starting this week, you'll see several changes here at Oh Get a Grip. Instead of having daily posts, we'll offer new content three times weekly, on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. And each of us will post on alternate weeks. We'll still moot topics to stimulate our creativity and encourage dialogue, but each topic will span two weeks, so every Gripper will have the opportunity to weigh in. We've also modified our procedures for choosing topics, so everyone will know the subject under discussion well in advance - but that's an internal issue. Finally, we won't have regular Saturday guests anymore. However, since we'll have Tuesdays and Thursdays free, we're very open if any other authors want to come and play with us on a temporary basis. (If you'd like to be a guest blogger at the Grip, just email me at the address you'll find here: http://www.lisabetsarai.com/links.html.)

We hope that our loyal readers feel as positively about these changes as we do. I'm excited by the prospect of having more time to think about my posts and to pen essays or fiction snippets that really sparkle. And I'm proud that we have had the courage to take the steps necessary to keep the Grip alive and growing – as opposed to just giving up.