For the holiday, I got three Moleskine notebooks (1 from Heather, 2 from Jenn), the large 13 x 21 cm size, 240 pages each, lined. I've never been able to find these in any of the stores around here -- the stationers hereabouts only have the smaller lined notebooks, or the larger unlined ones.

Looking at the stack of these three beautiful notebooks, I have the intense desire to write my Bridge novel. So that's what I'm going to do, starting January 1. That gives me a week to finish my Rangergirl spin-off and (possibly) another story, and some time to make more notes and scribbles and scratches toward an outline for the Bridge book. Though my outlines tend to be more like pages of enigmatic scribbles. I think the novel will be in four (possibly five) parts. 1,440 pages of Moleskine (I write on both sides of each page) should be sufficient to tell the tale. It's such a pleasure to write when one has good tools, and this novel feels ripe and ready. Sometimes I type my novels directly on the computer. Often I do some of the writing longhand, some on the computer. I think the first draft of this one will be all longhand. I feel closer to the language when I write with a pen on the page. And language is important in this book.

I received many excellent presents, including some art (a mask of a Swamp Man to hang by my desk); some marvelously enormous books (the complete cartoons of The New Yorker, and The Complete Far Side, which are both amazing and very heavy objects that make me want to write a novel about a cartoonist; I wanted to be a cartoonist when I was young, until my inability to draw or conceive sequential art became apparent, but my love of cartoons lives on); some less enormous but still wonderful books, fictional and non-; clothes aplenty; coffee; CDs; candy; DVDs; audiobooks. We opened presents at Holly's house, and her living room was transformed into a paper-and-ribbon-littered wonderbox. We drank coffee with Bailey's, played with the nephew, ate much lovely food, listened to David Sedaris's "Santaland Diaries", dozed, read, languidly bickered. A good day.

Today? Perhaps some brunch out somewhere. Some reading, some writing, some mask-hanging. Welcome to Dead Week, the time between, the tunnel connecting 2004 and 2005, the restless days, the neutral zone between Xmas and New Year's. I should write a story about Dead Week zombies. A Xmas story that starts the day after Xmas. It's a thought.