So, of course, I’m loving it. Unlike other writers, I don’t flee the frost — then again, I don’t have to walk a dog or carry it up and down stairs, either. Neither have I won the Newberry Medal. Perhaps there’s a correlation?

This might just be the case. My writing time over the past month or so has been disrupted by a frustrating bundle of interruptions and accidents, too numerous to mention here. It hasn’t helped that much of my time has been spent preparing and revising submission materials — easily my most hated task by far, as it feels exactly like the opposite of writing. But it is also Playing By The Rules in order to make a connection with the right sort of agent to represent my work. And with two books done and a third one on the way, I’m not quite ready to give that up just yet. Not quite.

Speaking of books and weather… I should also mention that The Winter Chap is still available. Originally, I’d planned to limit the Chaps and retire each preceding season once the new one was available. However, people are still discovering it and buying a copy (you could be one of them) so I’ve decided to leave them out there. Which means Winter is going to remain available for purchase once The Spring Chap is released in early February.

A few people have asked me why I’m doing the Chaps (a question I much prefer to be asked in writing rather than having it spoke in, say, a crowded shop) and it really comes down to vanity. I’ve got a lot of odd little bits and pieces which might never see the light of day otherwise. There’s short stories and poems and other oddments that don’t quite fit anywhere else, so this is a way for people to discover them on their own. And the price isn’t so bad for fifty or so pages of unpublished stories and poems, really. I myself have spent far more on much less.

It’s perhaps worth noting that, at the end of the day, only a dollar of that lands in my threadbare pockets. The rest of the asking price goes to feed the little children whom, I imagine, Ms. Lulu has enslaved to do her bidding. See their tiny hands laced with paper cuts banging away on staplers and saddle-stich machines? Is six bucks and some change too much to ask that their efforts not be in vain? I think not.

I’ve got about forty-seven tabs open in Firefox right now, all sorts of little interesting things that caught my attention over the past few weeks. Here’s a few to help to while away the long, dark hours of winter…

…Alan Moore’s writing another volume of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and this time it’s a musical — which is either baffling or genius, possibly both…

…we have a new president and someone took a picture of the event, creating a real-life Where’s Waldo…

…that nice Mr. Doctorow has some pretty good advice for writers…

…there’s this photographer named Michael Kenna that, somehow, has found a window into my dreams…

…people are starting to notice this Andrew Bird fellow and I say it’s long overdue…

…I’ve discovered that reading agent and publisher blogs like this one is akin to looking up your medical symptoms online. It’s always fatal…

…and, yes, I have heard that Batman is dead. I’m not buying it. This kind of foolishness is one of the reasons why I typically avoid mainstream comics these days.

…some poems you probably don’t want to read on Valentine’s Day…

…curdled, hurtful memories of heroin and voodoo…

…brief snapshots stolen from a Greek hotel…

…a long ride down the Tunnel of Love, and then back again…

…warnings about the inherent dangers of dating succubi and incubi…

…and some friendly advice for poets in love.

As with last season’s chap (buy now), people who buy The Spring Chap will also get a free audiobook download read by the author.

I’m just now starting to come out of the foggy haze that washed over me last week — a low fever, chills, and not much else to show for it all. I felt bad enough to notice but not enough to take off of work. My coworkers kept offering me various cold medicines, despite my insistence that it does very,very bad things to my personality. It took me a few days to realize they want to see how bad “very, very bad” actually is.

I’m feeling much better now, thanks.

It’s November which means it’s National Novel Writing Month. Regrettably, I haven’t been participating in NaNoWriMo as it didn’t really line up with my work on Pantheon. Maybe next year I can take the time to get to one of the other stories from the Matters of Mortology cycle. There’s certainly more from that world I want to explore and a month should be the perfect amount of time for a little side trip through one of them.

So, no NaNoWriMo for me this year. I am writing but it’s not going to be done in a month. Optimistically, it will likely take another four months before I’ve got the current project to a point where it feels like a solid first draft. Realistically, it could be six months or more. As I learned on Assam & Darjeeling, real life has a tendency to get in the way of real writing.

I’ve enjoyed cheering on everyone else at Plurk and Twitter who are battling their way through NaNoWriMo, though.

It’s a really terrific idea, setting aside a month to push through something towards completion. Too often, writers (myself included) get a little discouraged or distracted by what we’re working on, going back over the same passages again and again without actually moving through to the end. A commitment to NaNoWriMo is a great antidote for that tendency.

(And that’s the last time I’ll use the acronym NaNoWriMo on this site until December — no, wait…)

I’ve written about it before, I know, but I’ve found that writing out a first draft in longhand — and sometimes the second as well — is a perfect way to protect myself from going back and trying to edit and re-edit what I’m writing. I’m not anti-technology at all, of course. But I’ve found that (for me) there’s something very gratifying about having the pages pile up in real time, line by line. And you end up with a very interesting artifact that has heft and weight beyond the amount of space it takes up on the hard drive. The four notebooks in which I wrote the first draft of Assam & Darjeeling are some of my most treasured possessions. If the house ever goes up in flames, I’m diving out the window with them and the family photos.

Another reason that NaNoWriMo (sorry) works is that it forces a writer to stay connected to their own continuity. The past few weeks have been a rough time for me, thanks to unforeseen wrinkles in my schedule and fighting off being sick. And so, when I (for instance) left a dapper little prick named Trip heading down Swift’s Row to teach “Saint” Stephen Murphy a lesson… well, unfortunately I’d forgotten what exactly Trip’s lesson was to be, once I got back to him.

And thus we build our little palaces along the shores of our mind… and then we can only stand and watch as the waves roll in.

I’m sure I’ll think of something sooner or later. If not, I can always count on Trip to come up with it. He is shaping up to be a bright fellow. He’s going to have to be, if this story is still headed where I think it’s headed.

It was just November, and now it’s nearly gone. Thanksgiving next week but there’s already snow falling around the state. I work out near Lake Michigan and we got 2-4 inches earlier in the week. Back in town though, it was sunny. People kept asking where I’d come from, with all that ice and snow on my car. No one got my Niflheimr joke, which was a disappointment.

But I have bigger problems to contend with. Winter is here and the gods apparently decided I don’t really need a functioning heater or defroster in my car. Which is… problematic when the temperature is dropping daily. We’re averaging in the 30′s right now, with 20′s and below overnight. It’s only going to go lower as the world tilts and that long cold shadow slides across us. And ice should not form on the inside of the windshield. So let’s get that fixed this week, yes?

The Winter Chap has sold a handful of copies, which is nice to see. You could even get one for yourself. And it’s seasonal; there’s a Christmas story in there that I’m particularly proud of. Consider it your donation to my personal battle against the Frost Giants.

And next comes Christmas. I don’t have a lot of good ideas for gifts this year, so I’m considering just buying myself some of these to replace the family and friends I’m sure to lose.

I’ve received a fair amount of mail from listeners over the past few months who, much like Oliver Twist, are politely asking for more. In many cases, they want to stop being listeners and start being readers. Really, as a writer, there’s nothing better to hear.

And I’d love it if I could point you all to Amazon or your local bookstore where copies of Assam & Darjeeling and Matters of Mortology are waiting on the shelves. But there’s a few things that need to happen before that comes to pass. There’s still the matter of needing an agent, for instance. And finding a publisher. Little details like that.

So until that happy day, it occurs to me that I’ve written quite a lot over the years — much of which has never seen the light of day.

And so, leading up to Samhain — which marks the end of the harvest and the beginning of winter, of course — I’m pleased to announce that The Winter Chap is now available for purchase through the print-on-demand service Lulu.com.

It’s a little thing, really, just a chapbook of selected poems and short stories that I’ve written over the years. Most of which haven’t been collected or published anywhere else, except perhaps here on this site.

The Winter Chap is 50 pages worth of stories and poems, including:

• Two Ghosts
• Hooves
• Witch Girl
• The Pink Lady
• The Queen of Middle Night
• Witchglass
• Baba Yaga
• The Whispering Boy

Much of this is new or never before released material, but some of it will be familiar to regular and longtime followers of this blog. And in addition, if you’re kind enough to buy it, you’ll find that it comes with a link to download a free, exclusive audiobook of the text (read by the author, of course).

And, yes, as you may surmise from the title and contents, there will be other Chaps — three more, in fact. One for each of the seasons. Here’s hoping we get Assam & Darjeeling and Matters of Mortology on their way to the bookstore shelves before Winter rolls around again next year.

Click here to order a copy The Winter Chap.