Dear Blog Family,
With conflicted feelings whirling around us, we have come to
the difficult decision to stop our regular blogging on The Middle Ages. We need
you all to know that we did not in any way, shape, or form come to this lightly.
In fact, we spent many hours talking back and forth, considering our options.
This is not a sad day for us, except that we will miss your
voices, your stories, your support. We in no way regret one single second of
this 3-year journey; it has quite literally changed our lives. It has changed
us as people, and as writers. And it is as writers that we leave you today and
move to other writing projects that have been in our hearts, waiting for their
day.
As you can imagine, we have poured so much time into The
Middle Ages, and with our personal commitments—especially of late—also taking
much time, it has left little for each of us to write our … Great Canadian
Novel (or fill in the blank). We find ourselves curious as to what will happen
if all the energy that has been directed here over these years now gets
directed elsewhere. As we said in the blog the other day, “What. Is. Next?” And
we just know the same will be true for you when all the kind and loving energy
you amazing readers have directed here goes to the next wonderful thing.
We are very happy to have learned so much from each and
every one of you. We have shared joy and deep sorrows, compassion and strength.
We have together supported each other in grief, and held each other high on
shoulders of celebration. We have joined each other for holidays, and we have
gotten to know your serious sides and your silly sides in Five Crazy Things.
The one thing that kept blocking us from making this choice was … you. But we
know we are all the better for knowing each other, and that each of us has
taught and learned at least one great life lesson.
We would love the next week to be about you, if you want to
say goodbye, if you want to connect with each other, and if there are any
questions you always wanted to ask, now’s your chance. Tuesday, Wednesday and
Thursday, we won’t post anything new, but will answer your comments here. Then
we’ll finish up this week with a Blogging Out Loud on Friday. After that, the
blog will stay up. We’re leaving it up because, down the line, if we have any
big announcements to make or things we want to share with you in a new post, we
can (if you want, you can subscribe on the left-hand bar to get any updates).
But we also feel the community that has grown here and the stuff we’ve talked
about deserves to be here for any of us who might want to revisit conversations
(you can easily search in the left-hand bar for key words, and Blogger will
find the pertinent stories for you). Colin can also keep you posted of any of
our news through Twitter, and we will keep our Twitter feed live (although
probably won’t be there a lot for the next while). Just so you know, after two
weeks, Blogger won’t take comments without moderation, but since we won’t be
moderating, we hate to have you think we’re ignoring you. You can comment if
you want, but just so you know, we might not see it (we don’t get updates) or
be able to post it for a while.
Please know, beyond everything we’ve said, that we are
excited about the future and about moving forward. And we look forward to this
next week with all of you.
Thank you so much and with so much love, Deb and Barbara
