Get Ready.

Missed deadlines, dead telephones, low skies, empty bird feeders, threat of rain. This is a lament, a prayer for judgement. The bloom has been put on hold here in 2740X, though the yard, I saw this morning, is greening over anyway. This is the March I remember, that set-in thing hulking off in the corner. Yesterday, I hear, was beautiful, if cold, but it was only once the sun had gone down again that I realized I'd never gone outside. Not once. I missed it. The day came and went without me. The only things on the correct side of the ledger: fire in the stove this morning, and the first day I've had my ass in the chair since Friday, since I sent the book off to Oz. Maybe I'll rewrite that one scene at the go-carts, after the flying machines and the fetal doppler and the message from beyond. Or maybe I'll just sit out here and worry through the weather, bank the coals high enough to take a green log. There is this near-perfect piece of information about the stove: if it's above freezing, it takes less than an hour to warm this space, and needs no help from the through-wall. A week like this one and I'll take good easy news where it can be found.

The best cup of coffee is always the next one.

The problem with the novel: no warlocks, no werewolves, no portals in time, it's not set in pre- or post-war Armenia, it is not a retelling of a Carpathian myth, it does not bounce between multiple and competing points of view, it is not a commentary on race relations, it does not unearth some long-buried historical oddity, it does not imagine an alternative dystopian present or future, there are no covered wagons, there is/are only one or perhaps two quasibreathless scenes of sexual longing, its structure does not fold in upon itself like an origami soothsaying whooping crane, there is not a single mention of New York City, it eschews wizardry, it eschews still further vampirism. It is a story, semiplain and semisimple. Soon, mother, I will become famous. Somebody fit me for a proper suit. I gotta look fancy when I go on the T and V.

The darkness surrounds us, what can we do against it, or else.

If I am losing it, friends and fans of weather, which I may well be, then let's turn ourselves back to what we might can know, or try to know: that sky says rain. So does the humidity, which had my firestarting paper—the previous draft of the novel—a little pliable this morning, a little damp. I've cut enough wood for a cold afternoon, a cold night, a chilly weekend. We have just enough food in the house to where nobody has to go to the store today. The Toad knows nothing of crisis, shrieks and grins right through it. We have coffee. We're a little light on mead. It is Wednesday. It is March. That is a damn heavy sky out there.