Things began to bubble earlier this year, in the spring.  One of those times that you start leaning forward when you walk and ideas wake you up out of a dead sleep.

By then I had been writing here for almost two years under a nom and had told only a tiny handful of people in my real life about it. So then I told a couple more, changed my name here on OS from femme forte to Candace Mann, thinking that would calm things down and ... more bubbles.  Things that had been changing at Open Salon began to change faster too, and not for the better. I’m a fixer, so I made lists, tried to figure it out. A few things slowly became clear.

I need to write more. I need to post something almost every day. I need the discipline and the rigor of knowing I have a commitment to do that – or I won’t do it; I’ll come up with some excuse for blowing it off.

I need to stretch myself and do things I’m afraid of, uncomfortable with; I need risk.

I need to see if what I write and what I hope to make can hold an audience of regular people, not just an audience of other writers, other artists. 

I can’t do that here.

There are a lot of reasons why that is true. And if you're a good writer and have been here a while, you already know them.  

Open Salon calls itself a collection of blogs, and we who write here say that too, but it really isn’t. The best of OS is more like a collection of art studios. Only other artists are allowed to comment, and the comment strings on good OS essays are often works of art themselves. Back when there was a much higher  percentage of good writers here, a fairly civilized dance evolved. Posting every day was selfish, boorish. An occasional meme post was tolerated (with an eye roll) but not encouraged. Tit-for-tat rating and commenting was, ahem, noticed; so was the arrogance of any writer who rarely bothered to read others’ posts but expected attendance at his or her own. If what you wrote was interesting or funny or charming or smart or touched readers in a real emotional way, you earned recognition and followers. If you aspired to write better, it was an exceptional place to learn by example.

It was and sometimes still is a community, a place I’m very fond of, and there are still people here I’m grateful to, many of whom are my friends in the real world and in this and other invisible worlds, people I would miss, whose work I would really miss, if I were leaving. So I’m not.

I’m adding, not subtracting.

My shiny new website is live today at www.adobesoup.com with the "Ta-Da!" piece. I plan to post new material every day – sometimes just an image or a few words, a longer piece a couple times a week, maybe more. I will be cross-posting some of the pieces back to my blog here on Open, things that I think are appropriate for this setting. 

I hope you will all come and see everything I post at the new place, but you will still be able to read some of what I write back here. Most important, I’ll still be reading (and rating and commenting on) your blogs on Open, same as always, according to my usual idiosyncratic criteria ["Pearls of Water on my Hips"].

It wasn’t planned this way, but life this year at Casa de Swell has been anything but planned. Adobe Soup had only been in the works for a month or so when the news came that my brother Craig’s throat cancer was back. A few days later, the news that surgery had been unsuccessful. Last week he declined further treatment. 

We don’t know how many weeks or months he will live, but I do know that I have to write about him, about this time and the people who love him. That’s another thing that I can’t do here, not the way I need to. Maybe it wasn't happenstance that the two things coincided. All I know is it feels right to have that cozy adobe room where I can pin up pictures of him and write things that will make him come alive in words while he dies.

Here is the straight scoop. I hope my site is a success, maybe even someday a commercial success, and I’m going to write and draw and gather material as best I can so people will want to come to Adobe Soup. I will promote it (as anyone who has owned a business knows must be done) tastefully and ethically and in as entertaining a way as I can devise. It will stand or fall on merit and through only my effort, whatever talent I have. When I wrote that last sentence, I felt a soft thump in my chest. I want a place I’m proud of.  So if Adobe Soup is like a closet full of surprises – boxes wrapped in beautiful blue paper and toys that play music when you push the right buttons, old coats with sad fur cuffs, silver Slinkies, a jumble of tumbling ribbons and boots that need polishing – but it never makes a dollar, I’m fine with that.