It's been so long surely you have forgotten me. You aren't likely to stop by anymore since I don't open the door and my curtains are always shut. Even my computer has forgotten me. It has stopped remembering all my convenient passwords, stopped lovingly autofilling all my online forms. Have I betrayed it, or has it just decided that I am not worthy of its extra attention?

The truth is that I have been working like a bandit, or like a wild horseman, or like a woodcutter on crystal meth who is trying to forget his broken heart. No. The truth is, I have been avoiding my fiction. Or has it, like my computer, being avoiding me?

Terrible things are happening all around me and I feel flatlined. Thousands of people have died because of that Tsunami/Earthquake combination. I live in the land of earthquakes but I do not fear them. I have felt so few of them. I was in New York for the last big one to hit the bay area, and what, asleep? when the Irvine quake hit. Now a Tsunami...whoo baby...this is the stuff of my nightmares. Literally. Whenever I am scared or overwhelmed I dream of that big crest of wave rising up like a schoolyard bully with a bigger fist than I realize. But you know what? If you were to die in a Tsunami, you wouldn't have the luxury of watching it rise over you, making you piss your pants with primal fear. You would be watching television or snipping something out of your garden, opening your car door to usher out your squawling child...and then WHAMMO, you would realize that the rumbling sound behind you was not traffic or the local bazaar, or your neighbor's chopping wood. You would be twisted and whipped so fast up into its water wall, and then slammed down again against earth, against its own body--it would make no difference, each surface equally hard--it would be death by daze, your head and your ass bent to touch one another.

This is one of those nights where just because it is raining and my husband is ten minutes late and not answering his cell phone I am suddenly fearing the worst. Highways are slippery. It has been raining here since Christmas night, hard. God how these words, despite their content, feel good emerging from my fingertips.

God how I miss my fiction.

What a weird month it has been. The kind where, though I am writing and paid for it, none of it is fiction, and I have been struck with that feeling that perhaps this lifelong trip down a writer's road has been some kind of long phase and that, when it comes right down to it, I should perhaps pick a REAL career... find a skill, go to a technical skill. Those thoughts don't last long but they recur.

I am meditating though, and that is amazing.

I hope you're all going to have a lovely New Year full of resolutions you can and want to keep.