Dean Dean – Two Years & A Look Back

Dear Dean will be two years old in July, 2019.

Thank you readers for visiting, liking, sharing, and commenting on the stories and essays I have written over the past two years here on Dear Dean.

Dear Dean – the website, logo, and social media platforms (Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Dear Dean Publishing) were gifted to me after I shared a sample story with Katya J. Lerner (of Buzzword Consulting and Shop, KatyaJuliet.com) and we decided that I needed to write for a living.

We decided that I would write a story for publication every Wednesday – #writerwednesday is the hashtag we (and others) use. And for two years we have published something every Wednesday – 104 straight Wednesdays. Whew!

It is one thing to verbally share stories and an entirely different endeavor to turn those verbalized stories into the written word and placed out in the world for anyone to read and share their opinion.

It can be frightening, debilitating, and downright horrifying to write while knowing known and unknown readers will judge what they read. But as the author Brene Brown writes,  “There is strength in vulnerability” and I will continue to push myself to dive into stories that warm the mind and tickle the emotions in my own unique viewpoint and voice.

My first blog post “The Bus Ride” is still one of the most popular, and it led the way to a style and voice that is still developing. There are now more than thirty essays that cover stories of my mother and my observations of her when I was a boy, teen, and young adult.

The highlights of the first two years include:

• Twenty-two essays exploring childhood and motherhood as seen through a child’s eyes. These are everyday stories of life at its most simple and complex with love at its center and grief its fuel.
• My first published (for sale) book: Her Legend Lives in You: The Untold Creation Story Honoring The Goddess and our Daughters. A re-telling of the creation story re-imagined to center the historical Divine Feminine. The book continues to sell via Amazon and Kindle, and its audience are those who love fantasy, are feminists, love spirituality, and who recall that the Feminine Divine is a way of thinking that predates all organized religions. It’s not without controversy, though, as our society is exclusively male-centered in terms of religion and anything different is seen as a threat and/or heretical.
• Coffee Tales, a recurring series where I deep dive and review the coffee/tea drinks of friends exploring the unique connection between people and the drinks they consume.
• Church Stories, a two-part serialized story following a teenager as he navigates the conservative church world of his family and city. The stories are true and show a side of church, in this case the Black church, that are often unknown outside the tight confines of the church world. The stories are universal though, and involve love, loss, hypocrisy, cheating, and scandals that illuminate why church church attendance continues to decline.

Through the blog I’ve found and grown an audience of readers who regularly visit my blog, engage with me on social media, purchased my book, and who share their opinions with me as I engage them on various social media platforms. With a tough and wonderful developmental editor, Robin Martin at Two Song Birds Press, I continue to create content while working on larger projects via books and new endeavors coming this year.

I am working on a few writing projects that I will share more of next week. And in the following week I will share how, as a creator, I will be expanding my reach and adding new social platforms that include paid content where supporters and patrons will have access to additional content.

Thank you for being on the important end of my blog, my words, and my ideas for writing. And thank you to everyone who has liked, shared, commented, told your own friends and families about this Dear Dean fellow.

More words coming soon! Stay tuned…

© 2019 by Myron J. Clifton and Dear Dean Publishing. All Rights Reserved.