Roman a cliff.

My effort to take some vacation time and write two hours a day did not crystallize my ambitions and drive them forward the way I hoped, but from the very start, the whole exercise was one of self-deception: If you give yourself only one week, at the holidays no less, to achieve some sort of major life turning point, you're probably going to fail, unless you commit a crime.

I did not commit a crime (legally speaking, that is; in terms of YouTube viewing choices and Target purchases, I probably needed to be scared straight).  I did, more or less, write for two hours a day that week. When progress or inspiration on fiction items waned, I turned to this blog, and at one point managed to create an UncMo for myself, which is really going over the top because life provides plenty of them for me already.

I woke up at 4 a.m. one morning recently, came over to my laptop, and took down the most recent post that I had written about Thanksgiving and some of the people who were and were not there. The thought that propelled me was: "Do I really want that just hanging out there?" By "that" I mean snarky, negative feelings that served no one, including me. The only time it's a good idea to put feelings like that out there, in my opinion, is because they are either super funny or super touching and will turn crap into joy because you are speaking to some common crummy experience that we all share.

Or, you can do it because you're kind of bored with yourself and procrastinating on writing something that might be worthwhile, so you decide to dive into some stuff that's just kind of beside the point and not even that entertaining and doesn't even really have to do with you. I'm not doing that kind of b.s. on this blog anymore. For at least the rest of this year, maybe more.

So I deleted the post and realized what like every other author on the planet has already realized, which is that if you are going to get real personal and petty, it's far better to mask it as fiction and sell it for money.

However, I restore here from that deleted post the one bright spot, Tree 2.0, which is twice the size and joy as last year's tree, especially because Sir UncMo and I picked it out together (or perhaps he patiently waited for me to pick the one I really wanted and pretended to agree—hard to say).

Music: "I Don't Remember"