Cold Winter

From Storm Videos, 2009

For those of you who don't know what winter is like -- there you go. A look at the snow storm back on January 12th.

Now we are trying not to freeze our little toes off in this miserable weather. It is -13f with a wind chill of -34f (That's -25C with a wind chill of -37C). This house, as I've pointed out before, is not the best house in the winter. There is virtually no insullation. There are no storm windows on several of the windows, which means only a single pane of glass between me and the cold.

Cold being the important word. Ice (not frost) has formed on the inside of some of the windows, but I manage to keep my office warm enough. We're managing to survive. Even more than that, I'm actually getting quit a bit of writing done. I've taken back the 'Writing Comes First' Campaign, and I write 500 words each day before I even look at email. So far, that's been work on the new book, Draw the Line. I haven't written anything else on it, which means it's moving forward at a very slow rate for me... but it's been interesting to work that way. I have a lot of notes and worldbuilding and a very light outline for it. I work out more depth in the outline in notes I write out during the day, and stay a day or two ahead of the actual work.

The rest of the writing day is taken up by several other projects. I've been doing a rewrite of Glory, a final edit of Such Gifts as These, and daily notes on a new worldbuilding project that is so far not named. I've also written a new article for Vision.

Obviously, the writing part of my world has managed to swing back in. I don't expect it to last, but so far it's put me in a much better mood, despite it being very cold, and despite that Russ hasn't been home for two and a half months.

I am also back to reading The Great Books of the Western World. I'm working my way through the plays of Sophocles now, and once I got the feel for the wording, I started breezing right through them - if you can call about five pages a day breezing. In fact, I've found it difficult to put Antigone down. I am amazed at how well I have come to like this stuff.

It's an odd life.

But I seem to be surviving it.