For those of you blog-surfing during Xmas week, I thought I’d pop in and say hello.

Hello!

We’re having an extremely low-key Christmas around here. My bro, who generally works all holidays that fall during his work week (and most of the ones that don’t), is randomly off on Christmas day. This would have been perhaps more helpful when my niece was younger (at fourteen, she’s not exactly waiting up for Santa), but it will be nice to not rush in the morning, or wait until the afternoon.

In other notes, I’ve just posted the beginning of my 2015 production schedule (which you can locate at the top of the right sidebar because I’m too freaking lazy to type out the hyperlink for it), and I’m pondering how much I want to commit to “on paper”, so to speak. Last year I didn’t have a production schedule until summer, and I still managed to write Going Home basically by the seat of my pants. (And I love that book, but I think it shows that it was–ahem–not as directly meditated upon as some of my other books.)

Speaking of–I’ve got missing scenes coming soon. What’s that? You want to know which missing scenes? I owe the Control the Smutwriter crew four scenes, and they are these: Rory and Geo’s honeymoon, D and Teddy’s wedding (perhaps not quite what you expect), Will going in search of Hugh’s Special Blend, and Will and the lads figging. I’ve got a sort of post-scene already written for the Nick and Bernie book, which also serves as a missing scene for The Boyfriends Tie the Knot. (Remember when Truman was all like, “I asked Nick to get me in shape, but he told me to put my energy in other places”? No? Guess it’s time to reread, suckers! [That’s a paraphrase. It’s probably close, but it’s not the exact line.]) So you can expect that scene when the Nick and Bernie book comes out in February.

The Nick and Bernie book. Oh my. That son of a gun just went out to early readers today. Cue nausea and grimaces and bracing for the hard hits.

My intention is to finish the final two missing scenes, coordinate the release of those bad boys (intrepid blog readers will probably see them first; new releases email folks will see them mid-January when the email goes out for the complete set of Little Red and the Big Bad), and return, at long last, to writing Fairy Tales, which is now officially scheduled for release in March.

God, I love deadlines. I tried to take a few weeks off after the insanity that was October and November, but I suck at time off. I need to have constant pressing deadlines. It makes me happy. I need to have deadlines running on three separate projects, which mostly keeps me in love with something at all times.

Right now I’m in love with the serial I’m thinking about putting out as a fundraising effort in April, May, early June. (AIDS/LifeCycle anyone?) But I’m anticipating with guarded hope the completion of Fairy Tales. But god. Sometimes there are a few tough days getting back into something you haven’t touched since August, and I haven’t touched this damn thing. Like at all. Until I tapped a few lines of it into my phone while my kid played with toys at Grocery Outlet yesterday. (What? You don’t write fiction on your phone at the grocery store? That’s so bizarre of you. To not. Do that.)

Anyway, I was blogging the writing process for that, which I will also endeavor to continue, because it was fun. And sometimes I run out of stuff to blog about, which is funny, because sometimes I come here to “pop in” and end up yammering on for hundreds of words.

So there you have it. I shall have a brief moment of enjoying the fact that the Nick and Bernie book (stubbornly resisting all attempts to name it) feels like a book, complete, before early readers come back and it becomes nothing but a chunk of Swiss cheese. (Or a shredded up pile of injera…see, that’ll make more sense in the future, when you read this after having read the book–speaking of the future, could someone please travel to the past and tell me what the damn title is? Thanks.)

All that to say this: I hope you’re well, wherever you are, whatever you’re doing, whoever you’re with. Or whoever you’re doing. You know. Depending on how you roll.