Cold times here in the Midwest — single digit temperatures and below, arctic winds, and lots of grumpy people. And when the sun does shine, it’s a brittle, cheerless light.

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 And the price isn’t so bad for fifty or so pages of unpublished stories and poems, really.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.