Happy Birthday, Butchtastic!

Yes, it’s true.  We’ve completed another year here at Butchtastic enterprises and my staff and I would like to thank you all for helping us survive it.  This blog is 4 years old and, thank goodness, finally potty trained and able to dress itself.

It’s been a hard year, a year of unforeseen changes and challenges in my personal life.  But today, I’m looking forward, concentrating on my blogging hopes and dreams for the future.

What I want for Butchtastic year 5 and beyond:

1. to be more regular (yes, I could eat more prunes, but I’m gonna try writing and posting more instead)
2. to update and freshen up my list of GQ/Trans/Butch blogs.. maybe rethink the whole thing and decide what the mission of that particular feature needs to be
3. do weekly shout-outs … something a little more meaty than just posting links, maybe some analysis as well.  I especially want to promote people/organizations/groups by and for genderqueer, gender non-conforming, trans and butch folks and our particular issues.
4. get more regular about posting short format smut (again, not with prunes)
5. consider a new blog format, though I’m definitely going to keep the masthead image created for me by Roxy, who is magical with photos. Especially photos of me.
6. Oh, and a new idea, inspired by an Autostraddle post on the various “Butches *doing something*” tumblrs that exist (and, as you can read in the comments, lots of ideas for more of that kind of tumblr).  My idea is to post a weekly photo, something from my life, something posed, something I’m doing, that sort of thing.  I haven’t posted pics here for a while and I’m hoping y’all will enjoy the weekly visual.   I do want to come up with a name for the series… any ideas? “Kyle Does Stuff” is a little flat…

Something I really, really want is more community.  I have some ideas about how to reach out in my meat space community, and I need to sit down with my committee of one and figure out how to make that happen.  I also want more online community around my passions:  gender identity, activism and writing.  One idea that’s starting to form in my brain is to pull some gender non-conforming folks into an online writing group.  I remember how much fun I used to have as part of the Microfantasy Monday group and I’m wondering if I could find enough like-minded bloggers to participate in a writing exercise with a regularly scheduled prompt and some group feedback and encouragement.  I’d like to work with topics around gender, the various layers of identity and things like that.  Which means, you don’t have to be gender non-conforming to participate, but you do have to be interested in the topics.  If you are a writer/blogger who would like to participate in something like that, please let me know and help me figure out how to do it.  I’m really missing ButchLab right now and wish I’d had more time when it was a happening thing to contribute and help Sinclair out more with it.

There’s a lot about my life that’s in flux right now, lots of questions that are awaiting answers.  There’s a lot I don’t know, but I know one thing:  I renewed my hosting for another year, so I have this blog.  And I have the readers who keep coming back to see what the heck I’m up to.  And I have a lot of ideas for new stories and plenty of things to learn and explore and share in that ridiculously transparent way I have.

Thank you, wonderful readers for supporting this blog.  I really, really appreciate your readership and your comments.  As always, if you have a suggestion, question, brainstorm or want to send me a link or information about an organization I haven’t discovered yet, please leave a comment here or email me at kyle at butchtastic dot net.

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