Goodbye, Farewell, and Amen

The last ever quality post brought to you by Steve!

Hey, everybody!

That's the last time I'm going to say, "Hey, everybody!" on this blog.

In case you've missed it over the past month plus, Across the Blog is retiring...at the end of this post.  I could make some empty promises about us getting the band back together here and there, or maybe hosting a special event or a special guest in the future, but they would be just that: empty.  Probably after today this blog will just sit and rust, unused, unthought of, and unread, until Google shuts down Blogger or the internet implodes.

And that's sad.  

But it's not the end of the world.

We'll all still be here.  I have my own personal blog, which will probably become the new ground zero for my thoughts, as it was before there ever was an Across the Board.  For the last few years, as I've found I have less I wish to say publicly and blogging has become harder and harder, I've held everything back until it was my turn to come on here.  Now, when thoughts arise that demand to be shared, I'll just go straight to Manuscripts Burn.

Christian, Victor, Jess, Kayleigh, Mary, Sam, and Karissa will all return to their corners of social media and the internet, as so many of our contributors have before.  And the friendships will remain.  

So why does it feel so damn hard to say goodbye?

I haven't been involved with a lot of creative endeavors that ended.  Usually, if anything, they just peter out.  And when something just peters out you don't "miss" it in the way you would that something with a hard start and stop does, because you never really thought about it ending, until you look back at it and realize that it just did at some point.  Certainly, I've never been involved in a creative endeavor that lasted ten years and then ended.  That's...my God, a quarter of my life.  It sounds stupid to say, but it's true.  Almost the entirety of my writing career, put another way.

For the past two months, in anticipation of this day, I've been looking back at our earliest posts, mostly to get a feel for when we actually started and how and what that looked like.  My first appearance on this blog was being interviewed by Kimberly Garnick Giarratano, who invited me to be a contributor here in the first place, and has gone on to have an astonishing career.  Then my first post was interviewing Mary Fan, who a few years later would become a contributor here, and has also gone on to have enormous success.  

I hate to name any more names, for fear of making anyone feel left out, but I've followed the careers of each of the contributors to this blog since departing, and everyone's gone on to do great work.  In a funny way, a lot of people had to say goodbye to ATB in the first place because their careers were taking off.  Maybe someday looking at the ATB archives will be like looking at that photograph of the West Point Class of 1915.

Or maybe not.  Maybe it's just a thing some people did for a while, and then will have fond memories of for a little while, and then be completely forgotten.

I probably need to stop writing now or I'll start crying.  Or, worse, get schmaltzy like the last episode of MASH, and perhaps even name this final blogpost after it.

So...thank you.  Thank you for reading.  Thank you for being here.  Thank you for spending the last ten years with all of us here at Across the Board.  And we'll see you all on down the road.

Goodbye, everybody!