Undeserved Rest

The holidays are always exhausting, and this year has been no different.  I took a nice 5 day weekend to enjoy Christmas with my family, and the extra excitement has left all of us completely wiped out.  I’ve made efforts to return to my normal writing schedule, only to sleep completely through my alarm not once, but twice.  Ben went without an afternoon nap 2 days running, and yesterday developed an ear infection.  A mild one, thankfully; we caught it in time to start nuking it with antibiotics before it was able to do more than make him mildly uncomfortable.  But that has meant some stressful, sometimes sleep-shallow nights.  All of us are ready for another break.

So that’s it.  I’m done for the year.  After the dust settles next week, I’ll suit up again, and descend once more into the ink-stained trenches.  I will be trying out my newly-purchased license of Scrivener for Windows, and making some headway once again.

Until then, I can’t promise that I’ll be updating this site with any regularity.  But then, I’ve never really managed regularity to begin with, so this rest may be a bit undeserved.   But 2011 was a bit of a wild ride – Achron was released, I got a new work-at-home position, and I started really started to put some muscle into writing for myself again.  As for 2012:  I’ve got three short stories in pipeline, and after that, a novel.  I aim to finish all four of those by the end of the year.

May the new year be better than the last.

Merry Happy!

Christmas came and went, and now Ben has a Pacman sweat shirt.  It’s his favorite piece of clothing ever, except if you show him the new hockey jersey he got, or the Blackhawks hat.  Or, you know, any of his older clothes that he still loves.  My sister found it somewhere in the Windy City (at a swap meet, or something).  (I am 1000% jealous, and wear the sweatshirt around my leg at night after he’s gone to bed.  I draw a little face on my knee with a Sharpie, and we run around the house making Pacman noises until I run into a wall.  Then I do the Pacman dying sound, and my wife throws pillows at me until I stop.)

I hope you’ve had a great Christmas, and that what remains of the year treats you even better.

Occupy DogCrate

Last Thursday, my dog caught a possum. She did the sensible thing and brought it into the house while I yawned, holding the door open in a droopy-eyed zombie state. Then she stashed it in her crate, and followed me around the rest of the morning, moping because she couldn’t get into her crate.

Catching the possum is the most dog-like thing she’s ever done.  This is a dog that doesn’t like to go outside if the stars aren’t aligned properly.

But once she got the possum inside, she moped around the house because someone was in her crate.

Even stranger, the possum found my missing USB thumb drive.  It’s been missing for three months.  If you look closely, there is a red jingly ball to the left of the possum’s muzzle.  Right in front of it is the red thumb drive.  Thanks, possum!  (Now go with the nice Animal Control guy.  He came in a nice white van, and has possum candy.)

POST-SCRIPT: This should have gone up last Thursday or Friday, but I wasn’t paying attention, and it sat in my drafts folder, unnoticed and alone.  Sorry about that.

Going Down the Rabbit Hole

The Internet is 55% porn, and 45% writers.  Meister Wendig speaks the truth.  There are a lot of writers out there, and many of them eager for a scrap of advice or direction; even just a hint that they’re not alone in the hard slog across a blasted word-desert.  Flying razor blades dive at them from the clouds, killer dingoes gnaw at their ankles.  Someone has to have already come this way, they shriek.  And someone has.  (Their skeleton lies, forgotten, on the other side of that stack of discarded e-book readers.)

Consequentially, there’s also a lot of writing advice and analysis out there.  Digesting  properly is a tricky business in its own right.  If you suck down every last drop, there’s a good chance you’ll choke on it, maybe even decide to go at it on your own.  Screw those guys, you think, I  can come up with my own advice.  I read good books.  Why not disassemble those, figure out how those guys did it, and move on from there?

The Other View

This is the other view from my office, staring right into the maw of the 5am writing word-grinder. It’s not the best workspace in the world, but it gets the job done. A bowl of oatmeal rests to the left of the keyboard, and a mug of coffee lurks in the periphery. I eat, I write, and I get to watch the sun come up.

(My office is right across the hall from my son’s bedroom. I don’t get to close the door because my cats will cause a fuss until the door is opened. So the lights stay off, and the door stays open. It’s an odd arrangement, but peaceful.)