Tryptophan Brain and Other Mysteries

Thanksgiving snuck up behind me and coshed me on the back of the head. That's my excuse for my not blogging lately - and I'm sticking to it. I mean HOW did we get to the end of November so quickly? My kids keep asking me to buy candy canes and I REFUSE. I am not ready for the holidays. It may have to do with a certain hurricane, or it may have to do with a doubling of clients in the last month or it may even have to do with the crit/beta reading I'm doing. And I have a rather large writerly question to wrestle with. I'm just to busy to have holidays right now. Maybe we could move them to February? I mean, nothing is happening in February. It would be so much more convenient.

So Happy Thanksgiving.

After the turkey lethargy has left me, but before I let my kids drag me to the Christmas Tree farm, I will be blogging on Giving and Getting Crits. Both activities are an art form, I'm finding. And sometimes damn tricky to accomplish.

In the meantime, I leave you with a few books supah agent Barbara Poelle recommended to me. I'm  excited to dig in to alternate realities that do not include Black Friday. What are you reading during the holidays?

Hiatus OR The First Cut Won't Hurt At All

Three things are happening in the next week that are cause for hiatus.

All three are painful and involve knives.

1) I'm having surgery
2) Thanksgiving
3) I'm (still) revising like crazy. (What, you don't use a cleaver to revise? Hmm, Maybe that's what I'm doing wrong.)

Guess which one is going to hurt the most?

Yes, Thanksgiving.
For some families, turkey day is a huge orgy of football, eating and running around in the leaves. I know this because I've seen many Hallmark commercials and Lifetime movies. For me, Thanksgiving is just the first salvo in the family vs. family war that gets staged every year. It's not pretty and no one really wins, we just survive.

Makes the minor surgery I have to have a cake walk in comparison.

The revisions however, will likely be a close second to Thanksgiving in the painful-olympics. I'm still struggling, struggling. I haven't given up, which is the only positive thing I can say about it.

So what I want to know, as I take some time off to play with knives, is what do the holidays do for your writing? Inspire it? Derail it? Slow it down, speed it up?

See you in December and Happy Thanksgiving.