The astute will see this Christmas-drenched trickery as a transparent act of trying to make up for lost ground after not posting for more than a month by backdating this missive. Maybe I’ll be called out for dating this post December 9th, when it wasn’t published until January 8th, as though I hoped that no one would notice that my posting frequency had fallen off a cliff. Well, as my then-teenage daughter once told me once, “You can suck it!”

It’s not that I’ve had nothing to say; it’s just that I’ve been busy. Let me rephrase that: I’ve been beyond busy. I’ve been absolutely consumed since November 4th working (toiling is more apt), writing this thing I want to believe is an evolving novel. Writing is all I do while I’m living in a zone, neglecting everything else and focusing exclusively on finding my way into the story, which is unfolding into an ever-expanding document that now contains so many words that it likely exceeds most humans’ ability to express such a number. Santa promised that if I wrote like the wind, he’d not fill my notebook with coal, and so, like one of his slavish elves, I work every day for others’ future enjoyment…