Like Frosty says, I’ll be back again someday.

Not blogging has its advantages.  I don’t have to wonder whether the people who send me their blog-related press releases and promotion requests actually read my site. When someone emails me suggesting that I plug their $20 PDF book (!) in my next post, I know right away that they’ve never laid eyes on this page because surely they would have noticed the tumbleweeds and packs of feral dogs roaming around, yes?  If my blog was a mall, nothing would be open except a Hallmark store and a Chinese buffet.  It won’t always be like that, but until this draft of the new book is done I can only offer you egg rolls and Precious Moments.

The disadvantage to not blogging, of course, is that I miss it. I miss putting words out here in the internet world (which is all bright and colorful and blinky) instead of being stuck inside a long messy MS Word document (which is lots of monochrome sadness). Don’t get me wrong, I also love the book work, making paragraphs stick together, or whatever it is I have been doing nearly every day for nearly a year.  After a while it doesn’t feel like writing.  My chapters tend to start with all these scattered bits—notes, and quotes transcribed from books, and scraps left over from other chapters, and putting them all together and tidying up the page feels more like playing some kind of really texty Tetris. Except slower. A lot slower.

Somehow amidst all this, the apartment got clean (OK, I paid someone to clean it) and we put up our little tree and hauled out the Christmas records (our new favorite this year is this one, because I mean, LOOK AT IT, but also it’s really a jam), and got ready for the end of the year (almost, we’re almost there), and the writing will continue to happen somewhere in between (I swear), until sometime around the end of the week when I’ll get to relax, and everything will stand still. And that will be good.

I wish my methodical Tetris-brain was quick enough tonight to tell you more about the past year, which was amazing and strange and both incredibly trying and deeply satisfying.  All I’ll say is that it’s a good thing I took notes. Anyway, Merry Christmas!