The silly season, and 2011 as a whole, is finally nearing its end. I have severely neglected this blog over the last few months. Actually, I’ve severely neglected my writing, my TBR pile and interactions with other humans as well. The house and my Detroit adventure have been a time suck of epic proportions.

Not that I mind all that much. Well, the writing part is a bit irritating. I tend to go a little batshit when I don’t write for long periods of time.

Work on the house has progressed well, though. About half the house is wired. Friends of my son gave me a refrigerator, a stove, a washer/dryer, a table, a couch and a chair for which I am eternally grateful. After a great deal of cursing, I have hot and cold running water upstairs in a temporary sink in the kitchen. Oh, and a flushable toilet. What a joy!. Despite the cold weather and my lack of a furnace, I’ve been keeping fairly warm, hunkered down in a small back bedroom.

All in all it’s been fun. Many an idea surfaced over these last few months. Ideas for stories, ideas for a non-fiction book, thoughts about the next novel. I did manage to finish the update to Secrets of the Golden Gate Bridge and get it uploaded to Amazon. Hit a hangup with the upload to Smashwords. They want me to dumb-down the look of the book to fit their silly restrictions for distribution. More on that, and many other things, later.

Happy 2012, everyone. And, if the Mayans are right, we won’t have to worry about a 2013.

It’s been a hectic week between trying to crawl my exhausted self to the finish line of Meter Maids Eat Their Young and jumping back onto the promo wagon for Stealing The Marbles.

Jayne, my editor over at Rebel, who has had to doff a PR hat to go with her Editors hat, got me a nice plug over at Pontos World, a Greek ex-pat site in Australia.

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It occurred to me the other day that we rarely know what influence we might have on those fellow humans who cross our path in one way or another. I know that whenever I find myself in a foul mood, or a mood I simply do not want to be in at that moment, a line from a guy named Lars, who I met briefly in 2000, always comes back to me. He would always say: “If you don’t like the tape playing in your head, change the tape”. That line has helped me more than I imagine Lars could ever know.

I’m thinking of this because of a recently read post on Twitter, or maybe it was Facebook. The poster said that they had to go take their dogs on a p-mail run. I have no idea if this person actually read Stealing The Marbles but there is a scene in there that describes the whole p-mail thing. Did they get it from there, or was this a like idea occurring in another at the same time? I doubt I’ll ever know.

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My friend Bonnie Turner’s Drum Dance is now available at the Amazon Kindle store. The Tree Book version should be available soon. I read Bonnie’s Face the Winter Naked and really enjoyed it. Both are a great gift idea for christmas and, at $2.99 USD, it won’t break the bank.

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And, speaking of christmas gift ideas, copies of Stealing The Marbles isn’t a bad one. Or, if you want an amusing, non-fiction read, Secrets of the Golden Gate Bridge is available for download. Barring that, Amy Sue Nathan has some great gift ideas for writers over at the Backspace blog STET! I have several of the T-shirts from Cafe Press she mentions and they never fail to elicit a comment. Check it out.

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Lest we forget, tomorrow is the 47th anniversary of the assignation of John F. Kennedy. For those readers of this blog who were alive at the time, and old enough to be aware, it’s one of those days where you never forget where you were at the moment it happened. I was 15 at the time. That day found me at home, watching Soupy Sales on the TV and preparing for my move from Detroit to Florida to live with my mom. Looking back, I have always seen it as a dark omen to what turned out to be, for me, a comedy of errors, frustration, fear and the start of a long held prejudice for anything south of the Mason/Dixon line.