Blogs Between the Snowflakes

I am issuing an apology, even if one is not needed. This is a very busy time of year for all of us. Conceeding the constraints of a 24 hour day, with the Holiday season upon us, I am apologizing in advance for the probable infrequency of my blogs during the coming weeks. It has not been a consistent year for me as a blogger to begin with, and as the year draws to its inevitable close, that trend -- or lack of a trend -- will continue. But that's okay, because the main reason for it is the fact that I am a busy man. I constantly wonder how in the world I had time for work when I was working full time, there is so much else to do! At least boredom is not an issue I ever face. All that being said, I also have to declare here, as much for my own inner deadline as for your entertainment, that I have begun what I hope to be the final reworking of my latest project before publication. I expect to have it ready by Spring and hope to pitch it to "legitimate" publishing houses or agents as the first of three interrealted books centered on one German's experiences during World War Two, It will not be like anything else out there on the subject, But,then, I have a twisted way of looking at things that sometimes takes me on directions that no one else seems to find. At least, that's what I think. The fact probably is that a hundred people come up with the same or similar ideas at about the same time, but only one can be the first to do it. I am trying to be the first here, and the only enemy I have to achieving that goal is my own procrastination. Procrastination is something I am very good at doing. I am so good, in fact, that once I was asked to join a procrastinator's club, but I never got around to it. That's okay, they have yet to hold their first meeting. I need to push forward. It is hard to follow the discipline I know I must. It is hard to work past all the distractions that come my way on a daily, sometimes hourly basis, from my wonderful grandson's afternoon tea after we pick him up from school to Brian Cox the scientist traipsing over the Scablands to talk about what water can do to a landscape, on the Science Channel. Cox explained that at the end of the last ice age a monstrous lake rested behind a massive glacier. When the glacier gave way it was like a thousand Hoover Dams releasing a thousand Lake Meads -- scouring the land into a gigantic coulee (dry ravine formed by rushing water) in a matter of two to seven days, an instant of geologic time. The Scablands, he said, were somewhere in the northwest. Curious, I looked them up to find that they are less than a day's drive from my home, right on Highway 2 west of Spokane, Washington, on the way to Leavenworth where the Nutcracker Museum resides. The more common name for the Scablands is the Grand Coulee. So another distraction is planning a couple of days to go to Washington, visit the Grand Coulee region, stay in this Solvang-of-the-Northwest town, and marvel at what human hands can carve out of wood, and nature out of the earth. And yet I am supposed to squeeze out snippets of time for my writing, with all this wonderment to see, appreciate, understand. Even the weather is baffling -- the arctic cold snap is gone and with it, the meager snow that fell, and we look to be in for a winter of miniscule snowfalls. So think of my blogs as coolees in words, gushing through the internet. If they make a mark, terrific. If not, the novel I'm polishing or the one after that just might push into existence an entire mountain with my name on it. I can only hope.