Well, hello there. If you're reading this entry, it means you, too, have survived the hell that is the holidays, and I congratulate you. No, there is no prize behind Door Number One, but pat yourself on the back because you're halfway through the madness and January 1 is but six days away, more or less.

Soldier on, me dearies. The end is in sight.

For those that enjoy the holidays, I hope you had a fabulous one and it was everything you hoped and wished it would be.

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Over at the Memory Project, Laura Lippman put out a New Year's Resolution in one word challenge -- and I'm putting my answer here because this is where I freewrite, and I didn't want to clog her comments up with a 500 word piece. Which is actually funny, to take 500 words to explain one, but singular words are tricky like that. It makes you think about the power of one word, placed in the right spot at the right time. Take a word like "serendipity", for instance. You know what it means, I know what it means, and what we know what it means may end up in the same, exact place, but we will take very different ways to get there.

One word often demands more attention than just the utterance (in print or in audio form) of the syllables involved.

I don't suppose any of that made sense, right?

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The publisher of The Biking Life Magazine (who kindly published My Letter To The Motorcyle Dude , and has asked I do other work for him now and then. I'm real happy about that.

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Other work remains steady. Steady is good, I like steady, but if I'm going to choose a word for 2010, I suppose it would be "change". Not that there hasn't been enough external change in the past sixteen months or so, but I believe my internal workings need a tweak or two, physically AND emotionally. There's been a lot to process, and I often tell the GC if I wrote it all down in a book, nobody would believe it. The last year and half has been a real bitch-kitty, with sharp nails and needle teeth.

So, yeah. A little change is in order, I do believe. Some big, some little. And at my age, change is getting to be one pain in the ass, I don't mind saying. I just don't have the stamina to sustain that kind of effort. I view change very differently than I used to when I was younger. Then, change was an adventure, something new around the corner. Now, it's like swimming in cement or something. I'm just worn and thin in places that are too sheer to take the stress. You might end up better off, you might end up worse off, but getting there is gonna kick your ass.

Change. Gah.

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So endeth the introspective and much too personal look at some of the hamsters currently inhabiting the strange planet. Don't worry, I won't let it happen again.