The holidays loom…

…and to me, lately they do indeed “loom.” One big one — the American Thanksgiving — is over. Whew. We did have a nice time visiting my husband’s parents, and now the hard part comes. Christmas. Ack!

Well, really, I love Christmas and the Christmas season, but the whole thing can be stressful. (Which I addressed, hopefully in a fun form, with my story Christmas Creep last year.) There are so many decisions: who to buy for, how much to spend, who to visit, when and for how long, and if you decide gift cards are the way to go, you often feel (well, I do) guilty for taking the easy way out. You end up in a vicious circle of sorts: with a gift card (or cash), you can be sure the recipient will get what they want or need; on the other hand, if everyone just trades gift cards, maybe we should just skip it all and keep our money. Because it does indeed feel like trading money around. But take it a little further, and because the money came from someone else, you’ll feel okay about spending it on something fun or frivolous.

Gah, it makes my head hurt.

Hmmm. Just had lunch and lost my train of thought.  The perils of blogging.

I suppose I was going to get to the idea that I think any new stories, or new versions of old stories, will have to wait until the New Year. That’s a bit disappointing, but also a bit of a relief — the pressure’s off from one more thing during the holiday season.

But that doesn’t mean there’s not stuff to read. Literotica is running their annual Winter Holidays Contest. I think there may be fewer entries at this point than in years past, but check it out. Also, I’ve been having a great time reading these old Playboy interviews via Slate.com and Longform.org. (Nifty feature: they can be sent to your Kindle if you set up an account with readability.com and make the appropriate changes to your Kindle information. Very handy.)

So best of luck with your end-of-year shopping and other chores, and remember to take some time out to read. 😉

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Storm’s over

At long last, I think we have recovered from Hurricane Sandy and all the stuff afterwards. Actually we were quite lucky. We lost power for a few hours, at night, but no longer. We had two other problems — first, our cable/internet/phones were out for two days, but honestly, that’s not so bad. Weird, but not bad. Haven’t been so disconnected in a while. All we had was my Kindle for internet access, which is fine if a bit clunky, but access was spotty.

Second problem was our boiler died on Nov 1, leaving us with no heat and hot water. Which again wasn’t so bad  until about Nov 5-6, when it started to get really cold. (And yesterday it was 70 — go figure.) However, our oil company responded quickly and we had a new boiler in a week. Our neighbors were great and let us shower over there. Naturally this had to happen with company coming. But I guess otherwise it’s no fun, right?

So, did this lead to any time to write? Sadly, no (on top of everything else, schools were closed for three days re: Sandy, and then two more scheduled days on Nov 5-6). In fact I recently received an (anonymous of course) email taking me to task for just that. If I wasn’t going to write, they grumbled, I should at least put it on my profile, blog, whatever. Actually I figured it wasn’t a bad idea, but I didn’t like being yelled at like that. I mean, it’s free, right? So I don’t post for a while — surely they know I have a life, right? Or perhaps am going through a bit of writer’s block or whatever?

I guess not. I’ll take it as a positive that someone cared enough to keep looking for my stories. And I do hope to have more out there, but well, writing takes time. I think that may be on thing that surprises writers when they start out. Looks easy enough if you have your basic story — just put the words in your head on screen or paper. But then you realize it’s not so easy. Even just the act of typing/writing out the words takes more time than you expect, because no one types as fast as you can think.

Like anything else, falling out of the habit of writing makes it more difficult to get back into it, which I’m trying to do. I do hope once I start, momentum will build. It often works that way.

And I have now been thrown totally off track as my daughter distracted me with wanting to get changed for the day. I didn’t quite mean to ramble like this anyway.

There are still a lot of people recovering from the hurricane and the damage it caused. If you’re so inclined, donate to the Red Cross to help them out, or just remember that there’s always someone who could use a hand.