It's a busy, guilty time of year. In addition to procrastinating about your writing, or whatever you have to do, you have to start thinking about all the people you must greet seasonally. I think we send season's greetings for several reasons. One, you have to assure everyone that you are still here, and hope they are the same. The older you get, the more necessary this is. Gradually over the years your recipient list shrinks and you have to keep it up to date. Two, you must write people you've been meaning to get in touch with for at least a year and you make wild promises like "next year, for sure". There is a sub-category in this item, that being the person or persons you met on a trip/vacation in the past year with whom you expressed undying friendship and another promise to keep in touch. (I'll have to go into a tangential description of what happens in these cases at another time.) Three, it's a good time to sum up your achievements, if any, and those of your children, if any, every one of them a genius, if any. Four, if you do that, you can expunge your guilt for another year, especially if you get in first. SOW, that's when I start wondering why other people don't feel guilty about me, why they don't try to keep in touch with me, why they don't make the first move. Maybe they don't feel as guilty as I do but they should feel guiltier, shouldn't they? Oh dear. The fact is that greeting card lists are fraught with emotion, and you can never start dealing with therm, too soon. (That's why I write generic letters now, every month or so.) Also, there's Canada Post to worry about. Last year, for the first time in several years, I didn't go to Boston for Christmas to spend it with my daughter and her family. I send them a large (for me, pretty large) amount of money. I sent it in US dollars in a money order, Express Post, early , before the Christmas rush. It didn't get there. I was assured it would, not to worry. After a few weeks I cashed in the money order and put it back in the bank, costing me the US exchange and a service fee, but the substantial amount returned to me. In the meantime, I kept on tracking, nagging, in fact, trying to find out what had happened and where that Express Post was. Just before Easter, I had an acknowledgement that the letter was, indeed, lost, and I was given reimbursement for the cost of the postage - about $15. So I went to Boston for Easter and delivered the money in person. Good excuse for a trip?

Not only is it tomorrow but it's almost over. Again, no blog before I swam and then busy, busy, busy. Does anyone remember Dorothea Brande? Well, me neither, I mean not in person. She was born in 1893, died in 1948, and John Gardner, the novelist, drew her to my attention. I haven't read his novels.There aren't many of them because he died prematurely - car accident, I think. Anyway, I have his excellent books on writing: THE ART OF FICTION; ON BECOMING A NOVELIST; ON MORAL FICTION. Actually, I see she's not in the index of his books, but he wrote the foreword to a new edition of her book, BECOMING A WRITER (J.P. Tarcher, Inc. Los Angeles, 1981), so I must have heard of it elsewhere. I checked Amazon and she's still in print, the 1981 edition, plus a paperback published in 2002. Oh, she was ahead of her time. She was into meditation, never used the initials TM, but that's what it was, and a strong devotee of "harnessing the unconscious", as she called it in one chapter (5), and of writing on demand, which I do because of her, but haven't yet applied it to my blogs, not enough. Simply, she tells you to get up a little earlier in the morning (much earlier and I wouldn't go to bed), and go to paper/computer as fast as you can. Don't do anything else. Just do it. Catch the alpha waves before they subside. Just do it. I'm going to re-read the book right now. It's mine, it's all marked up. I'll be back tomorrow.