The post I had intended for tonight is not finished. It’ll go up tomorrow. But because I do not want to let the day slip away without anything here to show for it, I’m posting a couple of videos I find myself returning to throughout the year. They’re both spooky and extraordinarily beautiful.

This first is a dramatization of Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Conqueror Worm”, set to Saint-Saens’s “Danse Macabre”.

This second is the video for “I Say Fever” by Ramona Falls. Whenever I feel inspiration flag I can watch this and feel something inside me start to smolder.

I currently have three active projects. One is due at the end of January, one at the end of March. The third has no strict deadline, but as soon as I finish it I can start submitting my short story collection to publishers. So I’d like to finish it yesterday if possible. Getting back into the daily writing groove, though, is tough. I knew it would be.

Theodora Goss wrote on the subject of writing every day on her own blog yesterday, comparing it to keeping the body in dancing shape. It’s a terrific analogy, because it illuminates the fact that what we’re training ourselves to do is more than just stay in shape, whether as writers or dancers or what have you. I’m a good enough writer that I can not write for several months and still sit down and compose a solid and well-written draft. What we’re training to do, though, is to be better than in shape. We want to be remarkable. We want to be like nothing else anyone has yet seen.

I’m getting an object lesson in the consequences of neglecting that exercise. Language moves around in unexpected, disorienting ways. There are days on which it seems that I’ve forgotten how to make sentences work. Words are strange and unwieldy. English is a sluggish, petulant beast.

But I just keep hacking at it, like you’re supposed to do, like you’re told to do, and rust begins to flake off and suddenly a paragraph will hum with energy. And I start hacking some more. Those little moments remind me of who I am. They remind me of what I can do.

This morning I went over the proofs for “The Way Station”, a short story that will be appearing soon in Ellen Datlow’s anthology Naked City. It was a good exercise, thinking not about the larger story but just the simple machinery of prose. Unlike before, when I would ache for the finished product and just try to endure the work required in getting there, I’m finding satisfaction in the actual work. The lifting and the moving and the shaping.

There’s purpose here. There’s a joy in the labor.

Before I committed to this new blogging venture, I asked myself why I wanted to do it. I’ve done it twice before, on different platforms, and found that my interest flagged after a short while. Posts became less frequent and were finally limited to simple announcements of new publications. They were uninteresting to write and undoubtedly uninteresting to read, so I stopped.

I refer to 2010 as The Lost Year. A lot happened last year, some of it fantastic, but most of it pretty rough. I wrote almost nothing. It was a hinge moment in my life: I questioned everything. I doubted everything.

But that year clarified a few things for me. Perhaps the most important is the realization that, aside from my daughter, there is one thing that consistently makes me happy, that always fulfills me. And that’s writing. When I finish a good day of it, I feel euphoric. It is quite literally like a drug.

I turned 40 a few days ago, and that was a clarifying event as well. Time feels finite in a way that it never has before. My daughter is 10, and is preparing to leave her childhood behind her. My hair (what there is of it) is filled with gray. There is still so much to do. I have at least three stories seeing the light of day this year, and more to write. A novel proposal is due in a matter of weeks. And there is this site to maintain.

So here I am, beginning again. Bloodied but invigorated.