Ha, wouldn’t you know it, my day off is the shortest day of the year!

But the winding-down into darkness has hit its midpoint, and now the days will start growing longer, which makes this a good day for new endeavors, I think. Alas, I have no new endeavors, only ongoing ones. I plan to work on the new Mr. Li story today, though I don't necessarily expect to finish it. It might be a novella, though I suspect there'd be too much meandering and an unnecessary subplot if I let it balloon out to that length. It might even be a short story, though that would probably require cutting a couple of secondary characters, which I'd rather not do for various reasons. So I'm thinking it'll probably land splat in the middle, and be a novelette, which is my favored length, anyway. I expect it'll be done before the end of the year, at any rate, and then it's back to the Bridge novel. (I still love the Bridge novel, but I haven't done any short stories in a long time, and the lack was eating at me.)

Y'all, it's warm here right now. Even after, what, five years? Winter in California is still full of cognitive dissonance for me.

I went to a toy store to get a last-minute gift this morning, and, y'know, the Wednesday before Xmas at 9:15 a.m. isn't that crazy, even at the big Toys R Us. This is, I think, the only time I've gone into a store to do any Xmas shopping this year. Everything else has been online, or acquired in some other way (shockingly, I got a lot of people signed copies of Rangergirl!). I usually go waaaay more overboard during the holidays, because I like giving gifts, but we're pretty broke after the wedding, so it's largely an imagination Xmas this year. We didn't even do a holiday chapbook (technically, we're saying our wedding haiku chapbook is the holiday chapbook, so we can keep telling ourselves we've done one every year!). Though I did take some windfall money (the first bit of my Night Shade advance came earlier than I'd expected) and got Heather a nice big present she's been wanting for quite a while. Whee!

Hmm. Not much of substance to report. The house is festive and full of presents and twinkling lights and reindeer antlers with bells on. Our car doesn't seem to be leaking anymore. I'm reading various books with various degrees of interest -- Hidden Camera, haiku by Basho, Vernon God Little. Apart from the Basho, none of it is really seizing me by the eyeballs and forcing me to read, though I find both the novels interesting enough to finish. We're still going to the gym, and I had a good workout last night, the first one where I've actually felt better afterward than I did when I started, which is a crucial turning point, I think. Having the ipod makes working out so much easier. (My new favorite podcast: Love & Radio. Episode 3 is awesome.)

Oh, forgot to mention, Jason Erik Lundberg kindly reviewed Rangergirl at his new podcast.