Today is the day! Ustream chat at 6 PM, be there! Interact through Ustream itself or by tweeting me on twitter @thisblackwitch. Ask questions, chat, whatever.

Alright, Black Witch is three years old, starting on its fourth year. This is niiiiiice. Very spiffy. I’m very happy. It can be occasionally tough running BW because it’s just one person doing everything and of course, life can get in the way.

Coverage on BW has be mildly quiet but I think that’s kinda a good thing. I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned this but the most notable instance I remember for this year was when VH1 contacted me for their “documentary” series and I quickly turned that down because I don’t like the themes that VH1 portray annnnnnnnnnd link Black Witch with VH1? No way, they’ve never created a positive anything that had anything to do with intellect and especially regarding people of alternative faiths. And did I mention the series was based on “weird love”? Oh, I should. Apparently dating a Pagan (the person spelled it “Pagen”, can’t even spell my religion right but want to do business, sure) is weird so being that I could hear the phoniness of the potential show ringing out from the lines of the email, I couldn’t reject fast enough. If it were PBS, I would give it some thought since although PBS suffers from Whitewash mania, they are comparatively (although not always objectively, refer back to Whitewash mania) better at promoting intellectual discourses. I rather pair Black Witch with media that is actually smart and useful. I don’t need shine from others that bad that I’m willing to pair up with people who clearly drop the ball on that. The only part that surprised me: It wasn’t BET. I thought they would be the first major channel/anything of crap caliber that would contact me, not VH1.

Plus life has been hectic so I couldn’t really do much any ol’ ways. I’m not really gonna get into much detail with that. However, it is nice to learn and grow and to have BW be such a source of diverse info for readers. From stuff about gender issues, Black issues to Pagan issues. This is really good but also because it seems there aren’t a whole lot of Black Pagan blogs out there.  It really does seem like there were more Black Pagan blogs when I originally started and now it’s dwindled down to less than what you can count on one hand. I find that mildly problematic. Representation matters.

I think this was the first year I’ve gotten any piece of serious hate mail. Like some random dude was upset from a recent Ask Black Witch where some dude was asking about getting a demon to control his dick (yep, that happened. Five bucks, if I were a dude, I would have never gotten that question) and thus decided to abandon all literacy skills and logic in haste to write me a letter I pretty much skimmed, lol’ed about to friends and then deleted. It was pretty long so I take it the dude was hammering away at the keyboard for a while but eh, I’m pretty sure there was nothing of value, intellect or worth in there. It was some butthurt rando writing to me, not Cornel West. Trolololo.

I think I really like the most about BW is the BW Tumblr. It is very interesting the culture of Tumblr and being exposed to new things, new ideas and most importantly, art that actually reflects me as a person and the discussions people have. It’s really nice! Tumblr isn’t perfect but it is nice to have and great to make friends and have creative discourse with and in between cat .gifs, cyber punk pics and lolita dresses.

My goals for BW in the future are still to get a book of some form out, I still get pissed at myself that the first go did not go as well as I planned. I don’t like failure. I’ll be having discussions with a couple publishers about this because I simply can’t do it myself.

I also may want to do more public, real world stuff. Speaking gigs, basically. I would like to do speaking gigs on race discourse, gender discourse, class discourse (preferably the intersections of them) and Pagan discourse. I don’t want to be a talking head, oh no, but I would like to talk to audiences, preferably small audiences for now, and mainly relegated for the Baltimore-DC area (yay, the limitations of lacking a car) unless someone can afford to ship me further, ha! I would like (but won’t limit myself to) small audiences because I don’t always really like that lecture setting, there’s too much of a visual power imbalance where I talk at people and not with people. I want to expand BW into the real world. If folks been thinking about inviting me to talk to folks, now would be the opportune time to get at me via email, in the comments, on Twitter, through Tumblr, whatever.

So this is how I feel about the third anniversary of Black Witch and I’ll see you in three hours on Ustream!