Still trying to make up for lost time from the computer virus that ate my life. I want to whine here. Oh, how I long to whine and whinge and roll on the floor while pouring dust on my head.

But that sort of thing makes for really boring reading, doesn’t it?  So I’m going to refrain from it.  Actually, I’m going to try to refrain from whining for all of 2009.

Instead, I am counting my blessings.

1. The book is safe.
2. The computer is functional again.
3. I have great local tech help in Bryce and JD.
4. I continued to write on the kids’ beater computer while mine was side-lined.
5. I’m very impressed with the new Panda antivirus.  So far, no invasions.

And those are just in the writing area of my life. So, really, all is well.

Read a science article tonight.  It talks about the links between sleep deprivation and a craving for sugar and starches. 
Which also explains the link between sleep deprivation and obesity.  And diabetes. 

So maybe I’ll try a bold new experiment.  What if I slept for 8 hours a night for, hm, a week straight?

I was pretty certain last night that there would be no school today.  I got up at 6 anyway to check the school websites. By 6:30 it was clear; no school.  That means grandchildren here all day.  Not the best conditions for getting the writing done.

So, it was time to turn the house into a cookie factory.  We do this every Christmas.  Gingerbread, spritz, peanut butter cookies.  Joe Froggers, snickerdoodles, meringues and divinity.  Sugar cookies, stained glass cookies, marzipan.  Peanut clusters, mincemeat bars.

I have my mom’s old Betty Crocker cookie book.  She liked to write in her cookbooks.  So I can tell you that in 1969, she made peanut butter cookies at Christmas.  And that my brother Steve liked Joe Froggers.  All the little notations in her handwriting are there, sometimes just the year, other times little notes about cookies that didn’t turn out as nice as expected.  I’ve carried on her tradition.  This year, when my granddaughter asked for Snickerdoodles on her 8th birthday, we opened the book and found out that her Auntie Ruth had Snickerdoodles on her 8th birthday.  So we’re almost starting a tradition with that. Turn 8, get a Snickerdoodle.

We were and are a big family.  It calls for prodigious amounts of cookies.  I remember one year that my mom bought a brand new galvanized garbage can. Probably about a 25 gallon size.  And she filled it with cookies, layer upon layer upon layer of different kinds of cookies. 

And we ate them all, over the course of Christmas and the twelve days of Christmas. Some were sent off to Viet Nam that year. We had friends serving.  We also made them Christmas candles.  These consisted of taking the little individual serving sizes of liquor bottles, tying a bit of string to be the wick, and dipping them in wax until they looked like lumpy home made candles, and sending them off to Joey and Howie.

I won’t make a garbage can full of cookies.  We all know far too much these days about saturated fats and white sugar and cholesterol.  So I’ll only make about half a garbage can full.  That should do.

It’s supposed to snow again tonight, a heavier layer.  I suspect they’ll cancel school again.  No problem.

There’s a big double batch of gingerbread dough chilling in the refrigerator. It has about 3 times as much ginger as the recipe called for.  Tomorrow, we will roll them out and cut them out and put all sorts of sprinkles and decorations on them before we bake them.  And maybe we’ll do sugar cookies as well, and paint them with egg-yolk paint and hang some on the tree. 

Last night, I emptied the last of the rum over the fruit cakes and wrapped them up again.  They were made last Christmas.  After Christmas, I’ll make next  year’s fruit cakes and start mellowing them with — what?  How about Drambuie? That made really nice fruit cakes one year.  Or maybe I’ll use apricot brandy again.

And so this is Christmas
And what have you done?

I don’t know about you, but I’ve made a ton of cookies with my grandchildren.  And I’m loving Christmas just as much as I ever did.

It goes through Hell. 

But only on the deep dips.

On the high parts, it arcs over mountains, past fountains of stars. 

Wind in your face. 

It takes you places that ordinary people can’t get to.

Now, here’s the choice.

You are buckled in.  You can’t get off the roller coaster.

But you can flatten it out.

Would you give up the fountains of stars if I could promise you that you’d never dip down through Hell again?

That, my friend, is the real Deal With The Devil.

You may or may not have heard of Vera Nazarian.  She is the founder of Norilana books, a little publishing house that has given many new writers a hand up.  It would be worth helping Vera if the only thing we wanted to do was keep Norilana books afloat.  However, there is a lot more to the story.

http://community.livejournal.com/helpvera/751.html

That links takes you to a detailed retelling of all she has been through, and all she has accomplished despite those obstacles.  Here’s the basic summary from that site: 

 "Vera Nazarian of Norilana books is facing foreclosure due to a series of truly unfortunate events (a fradulent lawsuit, mother’s illness, father’s death and sub-prime mortgage.) We hope to raise $11,229.72 to help Vera save her house."

Now, you can just send a couple bucks straight there and that would help. But there are other easy ways to help, too.

Go to Norilana Books http://www.norilana.com/  and do some Christmas shopping. Or Winter shopping or any other holiday you celebrate. Just buy one for yourself!  You deseve a good book, don’t you?

But if nothing there seems quite right for the preschool child on your list, use the Amazon portal there to do your Amazon shopping.  Most of you probably know that Amazon’s gives a small fee back to the websites  that serve as entry portals. Costs you nothing, but helps Vera a bit.

Many hands make light work.  Help save a home, please.

Robin Hobb

I am the office assistant.
I’m an expeditor.
 I’m not perfect.

I am also not Robin Hobb or Megan Lindholm.

I am the OfficeKat, that’s my official title.

In the interest of full disclosure I wanted to let you know that the comments and friending notifications come to my email, the office email.  We have a small but fully functioning office and a very small staff.  Megan often travels and it wouldn’t be appropriate for me to check her personal correspondence and when she travels she cannot attend to her livejournal or myspace or … all of those because, well, she’s traveling.

Megan does read, answer, and run this blog. But there are more of us here- someone commented recently that they saw someone from our area checked their blog and did not friend back.  That can happen.  Why?  Because sometimes I start one project and something immediate, like the fax exploding and messing up the payroll faxes – and as much as I love you all as part of the human race I am horribly flawed and selfishly put my paycheck before all things because I’m I am so attached to this funny little habit of eating.  I know Megan checks this as much as she can- but she’s under deadline.  

We have a lot of interruptions, er, not to mention three to four kids under the age of ten just upstairs who cannot seem to resist the office.  Back when the ferret was still alive – they let him out all the time and I was constantly unplugging the shredder as he wanted to nest in it. But I digress.

Suffice to say, we’re nothing but just as crazy as the rest of you.  Not perfect.  You see someone checking out your journal?  It is me. I’ve been on my own here with stacks of paperwork and I check things out but I’m not authorized to friend.  I’m just reporting in.  Half the office is torn apart, we can’t use two of the doors because they’re being regrouted, payroll was messed up and  in the time I’ve started writing this I’ve had six interruptions. 

And if you don’t know- there are teenagers in this house, who have livejournals, who check their mother’s friends list because, wow, mom has a livejournal how WEIRD, I hope she doesn’t find MINE (Okay but if you are using the office computer, guys, I’m going to find it) and go look at who has friended her.  

Don’t be so quick to judge, that’s all.  You never know what is happening behind a screen.  Megan dreams of a room of her own.  I mean hell someday I bet she’ll buy an island and disappear but for now?  It is all chaos, all the time.  

Now I have to go assemble some effing Ikea chairs. You wish you were me.  I know you do.  :)  

*Megan maintains that Sam has not urinated in the printer since he was a baby.  Clearly, another cat is breaking into the house at night and using the printer as a toilet.  Not her cat.  Clearly.  

I miss my swamp.

I love the useless lands, the lands too wet to plow.
The lands that only bear what they feel like bearing, no potatoes or corn or lumpy squash.
They grew berries and birds’ nests and tussocks of grasses. Hard packed mud in the summer heat, a smooth field of snow in the cold of winter.
And in the seasons between, a sheet of water.

I want to run in the night, the big dogs beside me, two strung out in front of me and one trailing.
I want to get wet to the knees in the tall grass and miss the trail in the dark and get one sneaker soaking wet in the cold water and run on.
I want the Alaskan stars above me and the danger of a moose snorting in his wallowy bed when I race by and disturb him from his rest.
I want autumn leaves and bits of twigs stuck in my messy braids, and torn denim at my knees. 
I want to emerge suddenly from the dark tree-and-night sheltered trail onto the open bank  of the big slough with the moon pointing down at me with silver fingers.
I want to see the wide flat water before me, barely moving, stuck as full of reeds as a porcupine’s back is full of quills. 
And out there, one open patch of water, mirroring the moon.
My dogs go out there, wading belly deep, getting stinking wet, lapping the water and breaking its smoothness.
They’ll come back to me and shake on me and I won’t care, my old gray sweatshirt soaking up the secondhand spray. 

I wasn’t responsible or useful or sensible.
I would stay out late in a place where clocks didn’t dare to go.
I did my Latin homework at three in the morning and my mother didn’t care because she always knew what was really important.
She never even asked, ‘where have you been?’
I left my wet jeans and soaked sneakers and splats of socks to dry dirty and stiff on my bedroom floor. 

For the next night’s running.

My lawn is covered in leaves.  Copper beech tree leaves, to be specific.  I have filled both of my giant recycling container, and there are still leaves all over the lawn. And the sidewalk. And the street gutters.

Personally, I don’t care much about leaves on my lawn, as long as they don’t get so thick that they kill my lawn.  I just wish I could teach the tree to drop them only on MY lawn.  Or train the leaves to stay directly under the tree until I can get round to them.  But they don’t. The wind blows and they go skittering and flipping over onto my neighbor’s lawn.

My neighbor has a perfect lawn.  No clover in it (I love clover).  No fairy ring mushrooms. (I have several circles of those.)  He has this very fine bladed grass, all the same, even the same color.  It is always all the same height.  My lawn is an interesting patchwork of greens because I often reseed bald spots with whatever grass seed is on sale or still in the garage. 

For all its faults, I do like my lawn.  I also like my huge copper beech tree that drops leaves everywhere.  I like the roots that hummock up a bit and make spots that are hard to mow. I like the pigeons that nest in the tree and make hoos all summer long.  I like the psycho squirrel that likes to bait my cat.

But sad to say, some of my neighbors do not share my opinion.  My one neighbor rakes his lawn every single day to exactly the property line, so that everyone can see where his perfection leaves off (ha! a pun!) and my mess begins.  And because I am sometimes very puerile about these things, it makes me not want to rake my lawn.  I make huge piles of leaves, and I think he peers out his window and becomes hopeful that I will actually confine them. And instead my grandchildren race and roll and throw handfuls of them up into the air. And beg me not to make the leaves go away, not just yet. 

But, really, it is time to tidy them away and get ready for the next season.

Ah, well.  I need to let Robin get another 1000 words today, and then I’ll take the hands and go out and wrap them around a rake and clean up at least part of the lawn.  Maybe I can fit a few more leaves into my recycling containers. Or maybe I’ll use icky big plastic bags.

You know what I really miss?  I miss making huge piles of leaves and then setting them on fire.  We used to do that when I was a kid. Burn big piles of autumn leaves.  Everyone did. The smoke combined with the fall fogs and it smelled restless and dangerous and magical. I liked to make my fires at the very edge of evening right before night.  My dogs would come and help me. They would have been running through the tall grass and they’d come to me in the darkness with their fur beaded all with tiny silver droplets of water.  Sometimes my brothers and I would wrap potatoes in tinfoil and throw them in the fire.  And later, we’d rake out the blackened tinfoil packets and open them with cautious fingers.  Inside would be the leaf baked potatoes, and we’d eat them out of the foil, burning our fingers and mouths. Potatoes and smoke and columns of sparks flying up whenever we tossed more fuel on the fire.

I miss that.

Life traded me a neighbor who doesn’t allow fallen beech leaves on his lawn for dogs wearing jeweled coats and potatoes eaten from blackened foil.

What kind of a deal is that?

M

Back in the middle of the fifties, when I was first introduced to printing, it seemed to me that all pencils were yellow.  They had erasers on one end, they were made of wood, and the class had a pencil sharpener that we were allowed to use at certain times of the day.

I took great pleasure in taking a handful of yellow pencils and putting a very sharp tip on each with just a few cranks of the handle.  Once I had, I was good for at least a day’s work.  We used those pencils up, down to the nubs that wouldn’t comfortably fit in a hand. 
I long for those pencils.  They moved well over paper. I know that a lot of folks now enjoy writing with gel pens or fountain pens, but I’ve always enjoyed the feeling of pushing a pencil over paper.

But it has been years now since I’ve been able to buy decent pencils.

I don’t like mechanicals, neither the ‘disposable’ sort that put hundreds of hunks of plastic into the earth every year, nor the ones that are reloadable. (I’m under a curse. I never have the right size of lead for any mechanical pencil in my possession.)  I like wooden pencils with erasers on the end that I can sharpen with a wall sharpener, a little pocket sharpener or a pocket knife. 

(Not that I own a pocket knife!  No.  No, it wasn’t me with a pocket knife in my pocket in a public place. Please don’t call Homeland Security!)

Lately, I’ve tried all sorts of pencils. Ticonderoga, which used to be very good pencils, don’t seem any better than flourescent ones bought at the dollar store.  Without exception, they will not sharpen to a fine point.  The leads inside them seem to be broken into fractions of an inch.  The bodies of the pencils are often pretend-wood that gum up the blade in any sharpener.  I won’t even discuss the ‘erasers’ which are paper smudgers or tearers, but don’t erase anything. 

Seems sad to me to see such a useful piece of technology fall to the wayside. Does any manufacturer care to make a decent wooden pencil anymore?

Perhaps I shall have to travel to Russia to find them.  I like thier attitude toward writing implements.  During the early days of our space program, so I’ve been told, astronauts needed a way to write that didn’t rely on gravity to bring the ink to the tip of the pen.  Thus the ball point pen was invented.

The Russians simply used pencils. 

M

What if I die before I write all my books?

What happens to unwritten books when the author dies?  Is there a character heaven? Or a limbo?

Are the characters and storylines suddenly released, to fly out into the world and find a new writer’s brain to settle in?

There are books in my head that are waiting to be written.  Some have been waiting for several years.  I know the characters well.  I talk to them.  I know their quirks and foibles.  I know how their magic works. I know who their friends are, and what their favorite restaurants are.

I really don’t want to fail them.

People say, "So many books, so little time."

I think it means something entirely different to me.

So, get this.

I’m down here on the keyboard, trying to get a few words onto thescreen, because I don’t actually get all that much time to myself on the keyboard anymore.  In fact, I don’t get any time on the keyboard until Robin Hobb has cranked out her 1000 or 2000 or whatever it is words for the day.  Anyway, I’m down here, typing away, and Robin’s assistant comes in and starts on that landslide of file folders in the corner.  She’s pulling them out and opening them and saying, "What IS this stuff?" and "Everything in here is totally unrelated to each other," and little mutters like that.

So, to be nice, you know, I say, "Hey, I had a little extra time yesterday, so I filed some of that stuff for you."

Does she say thank you?

No.

She goes, "What?  Let me see!"  And she jerks open the filing drawer and says, "OMG!  You used the wrong color of file folders, and you didn’t put the labels on the file tabs before you wrote on them, and you used green sharpie instead of black!"  And she starts pulling them back out of the filing cabinet and putting them on the floor and then she gets out her stickers and her black sharpie and starts ‘fixing’ all of them.  Showing me just how super efficient she is.

And when she puts them back, she goes, "You file things backwards. Real people put the file labels at the front of the file, like this.  So when you open the drawer, you can just run your fingers over them and when you come to the right one, you can just open it."

‘Real people.’  Great.  Like, does she think I do not know that I’m a pseudonym?  Hello!!!  I’ve been a pseudonym since the first day I put words on papers, and it wasn’t yesterday!  ‘Real people’.  What kind of a slam is that?  What sort of exclusionist attitude is she masking here, that’s what I’d like to know. Does she think that I do not know about her pseudonyms? 

I just don’t know where she gets off, copping that attitude with me.  It would be very interesting to know if Robin knows how she talks!