Hello good people, friendly blog-surfers, (and you blog-stalkers too)...

Once upon a time I was a great phone chatter. In my teens, when I finally cajoled my parents into giving me my OWN line (which was as much a benefit to them as it was to me since they could now actually use the damn thing). In those days I could talk all day, into the night, until my jaw ached and my body was wracked with hunger pains. But somewhere in the strange twilight between the advent of the Internet--and thus email--and my acquisition of my first cell phone, the idea of talking on the phone took on the pleasure of a dental visit. Suddenly friends were chastising me for not returning phone calls, purposely avoiding them, and possibly even that most egregious of phone sins--screening my calls. I can't explain why, but it was as if I had reached maximum capacity with the phone. Perhaps I had a version of that syndrome that happens when you visit too many museums, a kind of spinning overwhelm, of the phone variety. And so, over the years, I've found that I spend as little time on the phone as necessary.

Well now, dear friends, the same thing is happening with email. I am shameless in that I love to receive them, and feel sure that I will respond to emails in kind, but my energy for responding wanes. Thus I sometimes go days to respond to an email that normally I would have dropped even the most pressing deadline to reply to. Part of it is that with all the typing I do my poor neck and shoulders are always in crisis, and it HURTS to type too much. I must do triage between writing fiction, writing for work, and sending emails. So instead I'm trying to blog a bit more, though it doesn't have anything personal for each of you, my friends in it, and most people can't be bothered to read all the blogs they'd like to, it makes me feel better, like I've got a beacon on if anyone should stumble through the dark to find it.

I'm really hoping this whole wave of telepathy-based products get developed soon.

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The good news is that I'm writing like a fiend, and reading like a whore, and editing to beat the band and mixing metaphors and creating new cliches. No, really, I am doing those things but I'm striving once again to do these things in a kind of balance. No matter how heavy my plate, I want to be able to manage what I am doing without those little stress hormones kikcing through my gray matter and my soft tissue to knock me around. And I think the key to this is to return to meditation practice. I see no other way. A little exercise and a lot of meditation go a long way to keeping me sane.

Ah so...

JPR