Rachael Dickzen

/shuffles into sight/

So. Uh. Hi website followers! If I have any, anyway, after abandoning my website for over a year. I have actually been posting regular updates on the Namely/By Any Other Name Facebook page , and I write all the time on my personal Facebook. I’ve been pretty busy! Just bad about updating.

So here’s what’s been going on since I last posted on this website.

I got married last June. My name is still Rachael Dickson and I have no intention of changing it. We had signs at our wedding joking about the founding of “Dickson Lorenzen LLP,” since we’re both lawyers, and now we have that sign up in our house! Oh yeah, we bought a house too, in Springfield, Virginia. We are very happy, me with all my writing and craft projects and theater shenanigans, and john with all his tool and fire related projects. The cats (Schrodinger and Ziggy Stardust) are happy too. We currently have a guest cat (Martok) living with us while his owners search for a place to live.

I have continued to work at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office as an Examining Attorney and now have passed my two year anniversary there. That means I have full signatory authority and can perform all actions as an examiner without getting approval from a mentor first. It’s pretty awesome and makes my life easier.

In August, after having major trouble with my clinical depression (which I’ve had since high school, at least) for most of the summer, I tried an alternative treatment in desperation, and it worked! I’ve been on the Fisher-Wallace Stimulator since then and it has literally changed my life. That, combined with my previous depression and ADD meds, have made me more consistently happy, emotionally stable, and productive in the past 6 months than I can ever remember being before.

Partially as a result of depression treatment, I read Miracle Morning by Hal Elrod in September and have kept to a regular morning routine since then, which has actually been daily since the beginning of the year. Regular meditation, reading of helpful books, and journaling has brought a huge amount of peace and happiness to my life. In addition, the process of making and regularly reading affirmations and visualizations have really helped me focus on my goals for the future.

As a result of both the depression treatment and the miracle morning routine, I’ve been really focusing on my writing since October. I joined a local writers group that meets twice weekly at various coffee shops. We basically write and chat and have a grand old time (my flexible work schedule and ability to telework has really helped me with this!). I wrote a one-act play based on an idea I’d had for a long time. That play, Most Horrible (which is a prologue to Hamlet set in Purgatory), was produced for the Britches and Hose New Works Festival in January! I directed. I turned that play into a novel, writing it mostly in one month long sprint during National Novel Writing Month in November and finishing it up by the end of January.

I have now established a daily writing habit (usually accompanied with hot cocoa or coffee, often at the library if not with my writing group) and monthly writing goals, as NaNoWriMo helped me figure out that I do really well with ambitious but immediate goals to work toward. My January goal was to finish my novel. My February goal is to write a nonfiction proposal for a book on marital surname decisions. As part of that, I’ve also been working on my social media branding and revamping this website!

I’ve revamped this website in several ways - I switched the overall name from By Any Other Name (I actually let the URL lapse quite a while ago) to just Rachael Dickzen. As I’ve explained in my new “About Rachael,” page, I changed my name to Dickzen on Facebook just as a joke (my husband’s last name is Lorenzen, so I took the last three letters), but I enjoyed it so much that I’ve decided to use it as a pen name for writing from now on. It’s also got the practical effect of making me much easier to find, as there are tons of Dicksons out there and no other Dickzens, as far as I know.

I also changed “By Any Other Name” to “Namely” because almost every news article I’ve ever read about marital surname changes uses that line from Romeo and Juliet and I’m super sick of it now.

I also added a discussion of all the projects I’m working on under the About section. I keep busy! I plan to add a CV with a list of publications and such on here soon, so that I can use this website more as a marketing tool for the future. I’ve already been compiling such a list and bio for my book proposal, so I might as well keep using it! I’m also figuring out how to directly connect my social media to this website as well.

Anyway, that’s what’s going on. I’m doing really great and am very excited for the present and the future!

(Oh, P.S. my hair is green now. :D)