Christmas Eve

It’s Christmas Eve, and we’re up to cooking a decently big meal here tonight.

When I was growing up, the big meal was at Christmas Eve, because it was a potluck at Grandma’s house. I got to see all my cousins and open up packages from relatives and Santa. It was a near-perfect late 60’s/early 70’s Christmas. I felt pretty spoiled, and we would leave late in the evening so that the stars were bright in the crystalline cold.

Christmas day was my celebration with my immediate family, and we ate more relaxed food — in fact I remember cheese, crackers, and summer sausage for brunch.

Things changed as I got older, as all of us children in our own particular baby boom got too old for Santa, and Grandma got too old to host Christmas at her house.

This year, in isolation, we’re reverting to my family’s schedule. The big meal is tonight: Rib roast with horseradish and my orange/golden raisin/cranberry relish; rice and broccoli casserole, homemade bread, oil and vinegar slaw, and mini mincemeat pies for dessert.

Tomorrow we have a veggie/relish tray, crackers, cheeses, herring nibble over Christmas presents. I already know everything I’m getting except for what Richard managed to smuggle in my stocking.

We don’t have children, and sometimes I think that’s because we both had traumatic childhoods. But we still have a childlike wonder for the holiday season.

A Time for Nothing

I’m done putting together my classes for Spring, which was my task for the winter break. Now what? My mind is all for relaxing and hiding from my work in progress, but I’ll probably do something with that during break.

I feel like I could sleep forever. I just got up and I’m already wanting to go back to bed. I don’t know if this is latent depression or I’m just so relieved to be done with the semester that I’m catching up on time without thinking.

The semester must have been far worse than I’m registering. I tend to be stoic and plow through the semester with blinders on, not stopping to lament much (other than my lamenting about lack of writers’ retreats in these pages).

And now, because of COVID, I have no choice but to relax. No visit to my dad and sister, no going out shopping, maybe a stop at the Board Game Cafe if it’s not crowded, but …

So I’m working on relaxing.

Exploring Christmas Music

So I’m listening to something from my childhood — the New Christy Minstrels, which was (is?) a large folk ensemble from the 60s that probably continues in some form to this day. They have a Christmas album, which we’re perusing in our great search for new Christmas music. It’s beginning to grow on me. Especially “Sing Along with Santa“, which brims with quaint snark. It’s very early 60’s — folky and earnest.

Then there’s the Apple Music playlist Hard and Heavy, which includes the AC/DC hit “Mistress for Christmas”, which I can’t quite reconcile with Christmas. I’m holding off on Bummer Holiday, another Apple Music playlist, until I am drinking some Christmas cheer and can laugh it off.

Everyone with a microphone has recorded at least one Christmas song, it seems, and compilations don’t capture all of them. I haven’t seen one with “Dominick the Christmas Donkey” (for which I’m grateful) or “Christmas at Ground Zero” (maybe it’s on “Bummer Holiday”?)

My happiest Christmas album discovery is Annie Lennox’s Christmas Cornucopia, which has been remastered and re-released this year. I could listen to it all day, as it’s the anti-Last Christmas.

Now we’re listening to Kids’ Christmas, and I should be hearing “I want a Hippopotamus for Christmas” any minute now.

Happy Christmas!

Sigh.

It’s almost Christmas.

I’m done putting together my classes (except for minor touches).

I haven’t gotten anywhere on my story.

It just figures, doesn’t it? That story (Gaia’s Hands) will be the death of me.

I think I’ll do those final touches on class today.

Gaia’s Hands is certainly not doing well. Sigh.

Dear Santa, I need a breakthrough on this story for Christmas.

If the Fates allow

“Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” is still my favorite Christmas song.

The melancholy and longing in that song seems especially poignant this Christmas, when we find ourselves separated by COVID and the measures we must take to keep from getting or spreading it.

“Through the years we all will be together/if the Fates allow” seems extremely pertinent this year. The Fates did not allow, and we with short memories act as if this has never happened. Anyone with family in the military, in service professions, in estranged families will tell us that this happens all the time. Fate doesn’t allow everyone to get together for Christmas.

I have spent Christmas alone and with strangers, in a private psychiatric treatment center and cooking dinner for the poor. I have spent it with family, and this year I will spend it with my husband and my four cats.

If the Fates allow.

This story has no flow

I am really balking on Gaia’s Hands again. Enough that I would rather work putting together my spring semester classes today than write on it.

I think the real problem is that it’s not writing from scratch; it’s working in already written parts to the story. In other words, it’s not a flow activity. And flow activities are where it’s at, according to positive psychology.

As I’ve discussed in the pages previously, flow is a concept that’s related to happiness. Flow is the experience of satisfaction, challenge, and timelessness one feels when one is in the “zone”, which happens when performing a task where one can focus and where one has the optimal level of challenge and engagement. Too simple a task, and one gets bored; too difficult a task, and one gets frustrated.

When I was writing Kringle in the Dark, writing was a flow activity. I could write 2000 words at a sitting; it was even more of a flow activity when I went on word sprints (timed writing activities) — 20 minutes at a time of just writing.

Gaia’s Hands is just work right now — the old plot warring with what might be the new plot, old parts needing to be revised, etc. The story has been a problem child since I wrote it, and I hope that this iteration will be the winner. But it’s hard, which is the enemy of flow.

Maybe I’ll write on my class sites after all.

Christmas Music

The music playing in the house during the Christmas season is all Christmas, all the time. I’m not tired of it yet (except for “All I Want for Christmas is You”).

The Christmas album I grew up with was The Little Drummer Boy, the original 1958 version from The Harry Simeone Chorale. This is the one with the blue and white cover with a drummer boy playing on a red marching band-style drum. And how is drumming going to be good for a newborn baby? (Harry Simeone has a lot to answer for here.)

The album is very good. Choral pieces, many as medleys of Christmas music with a basso voice narrating pieces of the Christmas story. It’s a performance piece as much as anything, and if you get anything other than the 1956 version (or the reissue of the album in 1967 as a Texaco promotional item as I had growing up), you’ll miss the narration, which makes the whole album.

My most pleasant surprise is how much I like The Waitress’s 1982 hit “Christmas Wrappings”. I don’t know how I missed it all these years. It has a frenetic New Wave sensibility and a very 80’s happy ending.

And oh, I really like Pentatonix. Too bad they only have four Christmas albums.

Christmas music is one of our music rituals in the household. We also have classical followed by jazz on Sundays. (So right now, it’s classical Christmas followed by jazz Christmas on Sundays).

After Christmas we go back to the usual music, with me favoring the singer/songwriter playlists on Apple Music, and Richard favoring classical. By then, maybe I’ll be tired of Christmas music. Probably not.

Finding Josh

I’m finally making progress on Gaia’s Hands. I’m at the beginning where I’m supposed to show a glimpse of my protagonists’ lives, and I struggled to write the closeup on Josh, without which the book may well not exist.

I have a better feel of Josh now, finally. He’s quiet and serious with a droll sense of humor. He sees visions and keeps them to himself, because people would think he was crazy if he mentioned it. He’s very involved with his writing and his aikido, but there’s a loneliness about him. And then, in the next chapter he sees his former crush, a professor 20 years older than him, and has a vision about her. Everything turns upside down for him.

This is a romantic fantasy, and I need to be able to punch up the romance without losing the fantasy. This should be a challenge, and I hope I’m up to it.

I wish I had someone who could draw my characters for me. All the artistic people I know don’t do commissions. Oh, well, here’s hoping I learn how to visualize my characters.

P.S.: Chloe’s upstairs in my room recovering from her spay surgery; she’s moving a bit gingerly, but she seems to have forgiven me.

Chloe’s New Adventure (which she would rather avoid)

Chloe (AKA Little Girl) is going to the vet today to get spayed. Right now she’s in the cat carrier and very unhappy. I doubt the surgery is going to make her much happier.

Chloe is about 8 months old at this point, and just as much a devil as she was as a youngster. She still bites my toes to wake me up, and she crawls up on my clothes rack to hide. I can’t see her getting any calmer as a grownup cat.

I worry a little about putting any cat through surgery, but I also wholeheartedly believe in spaying and neutering cats. There are too many kittens and cats in shelters (as Chloe was an unwanted kitten at the Humane Society). There are too many feral cats out there having kittens.

So Chloe will go to the vet’s, and then she will come home groggy and disoriented and not very happy with us. And we will shower her with love.

Ask Myself

Do I feel like more of a writer since self-publishing The Kringle Conspiracy?

Yes, as a matter of fact, I do. I finally got a novel into the hands of readers (not many but) who liked it, I got to sign copies, I got to advertise it a bit, I got my hands on a paperback copy.

Will I self-publish another book?

Most certainly I will publish the sequel next Christmas time, I will.

What about all those other books I’m sitting on? The fantasies?

I’d love to get those traditionally published, but the shape of trad publishing and my inability to get traction does not encourage me. Alternately, I may put those into the self-publishing marketplace (aka Amazon) if I give up in frustration. There is one (Gaia’s Hands) that could go self-published, as it’s another romance novel.

Will I ever give up writing?

I don’t think so. It’s grown on me. I love creating, and I’m really bad at knitting.