Christmas is finally over and the next holiday—Erin's Birthday Month—will soon begin. Most of you know I have not always been a fan of my birthday. This year I am going to try to be positive and enjoy gaining another year of wisdom (and many more gray hairs). 

Jon is off in sunny California helping our friends Tony and Beth move with their mother to Colorado. He said it was 66 degrees there yesterday. It was 29 degrees here. I am a bit jealous. I can't seem to get warm. I am grateful for the bit of sun we have had recently though. It breaks up the dreary days a bit. 

I do feel a bit lazy lately. I honestly had every intention of being productive during my winter vacation, but those plans have gone the way of the warm weather. I read a whole book yesterday and am partway through a second. Funny how exhilarating it is to come to the last page of a novel. I hadn't realized how little time I have spent reading these past few months. Reading also makes me want to write. I found myself sitting up in the middle of the night last night to write down a sentence I had dreamt. In the morning it was a little hard to decipher, but it wasn't bad. If I keep doing this I could have a whole notebook of single lines, but very little sleep.

Maybe that's what I will write next—a book entirely out of first lines. I'm good at opening lines, it's the middle and ending ones I get hung up on.  :)

I am a deadline hugger. I look at the deadline, I mull it over, I look at it some more, I pull it close to me, I think about it again and then it is there, hovering over my head like a black and stormy rain cloud. After hours, days and even weeks of thinking about it, it is there and I begin to panic. Two days before deadline I  have usually finished half of what I need to have done. So I plod along, sometimes not writing, but just building the story in my head, working it over, tasting it like a fine wine. Just when I have gotten sick of thinking about it I put pen to paper, or usually fingers to computer. I write and I write until I am so near the end I can taste it — then it hits me — writer's block.

There is a reason they call it writer's block and not writer's sidewalk, or writer's street. Because it is worthy of a whole block. It sits there, staring at you as you pace and pull your hair and scream and finally cry. It shows up to make procrastinators and deadline huggers like myself, sorry they didn't begin sooner. It is supposed to be a tool to teach the writer that they should never operate in this manner again, but either it is ineffective or the writer is just too darn stubborn to learn any kind of lesson at all.

I just want to say, dang you writer's block. Dang you deadlines. I need to go pull my hair some more.