You all have the floor.

Short of it, Mom’s in the hospital on top of everything else that this year has dumped on me so far. She’ll probably live — but that’s not the point. Anything to do with the ticker malfunctioning is pretty scary.

(The latest news can be found on my Twitter and Facebook, and I’ll write a substantial blog post when things calm down, hopefully towards the end of the week.)

I wanted to write a bit more about looking back and looking forward, but I’m probably going to have to push things back a couple days into the weekend. The house is full of Jill’s brownies, with all the ruckus and noise implied by nine second and third grade girls who are somewhat hopped up on sugar and excitement. In other words, it’s not exactly conductive to reflective thought.

Anyway, this here is just to say I’m alive on the precipice, but where I’m going from here is anybody’s guess.

So I suppose the thing I could most use on this precipice is the acknowledgment that my friends are out there and that they’ve got my back.

Happy new year everybody.

I’ve been doing a lot of wheelspinning lately as I try to figure out something. I haven’t figured out much in the way of conclusions because I haven’t had the time to pursue threads all the way out, but there is one thing that comes to mind.

Ignore all that ‘must co-opt pagan holiday’ stuff that caused the birth of Jesus to be moved to the bleak midwinter as opposed to the more logical late spring that all the trappings of the story hint at, and look at it from a different perspective. As a storyteller, there is no better time of the year. The world is at its darkest in the days around the solstice, so much so that we light our homes with blazing electric lights to chase the darkness away. And metaphorically, isn’t that what the Christchild story is? Bringing light to a dark world?

The story demands the change.

Anyway, that’s one of the threads I’m still trying to follow to its conclusion; I may or may not continue to blog about it.

But for those who celebrate it, Merry Christmas! And if you don’t, may you have a good day today as well.

Linky here.

I’ll leave the commentary to the peanut gallery.

Ebony has the right idea of what to do on this cold morning. Wish I could have crawled under the covers and went back to sleep myself.

The first topic is ‘Beginnings’; I’ll need things by New Year’s for assembly and layout in early January. I’ll take anything folks want to throw at me, but my most pressing need would be a cover. I’ll probably end up having to whip something up using photographs since I don’t know how to ask for help (read: too nervous to ask), but I wanted to lay that out there as a thought.

The second right now seems to want to be called ‘Dreaming of Rockets’; my thought on that is Hugos, not the space race. I’m sure it’ll come up soon. That, I’m going to say, let’s shoot for a deadline of the Ides of March. This is a little more fluid, talk to me in January about it. I just wanted to throw the idea out there.

My email is katster AT retstak DOT org, or you can poke me via all the usual places (including the comments of this blog entry.)

Bookshelf cat laughs at your puny attempts to understand.

(Now it’s your turn. You caption the shot.)