Eek!

I have not posted for three weeks. No reason, except maybe my need to hibernate this time of year. My third novel is titled Daughter of the Bear King. The heroine is a south Minneapolis housewife who discovers that she is actually a were-bear. At the time, I owned a house in south Minneapolis.

I do feel a kinship to bears, as does my brother and Patrick. Patrick does not slow down in the winter. He likes cold and doesn't mind dark. But my brother and I definitely feel the need to hibernate, which is not easy when holding a regular job.

I've been doing a lot of reading: economics, physics, biology, all written by people who know how to write for readers outside their field of specialty, though Lee Smolin on what is wrong with contemporary physics was a stretch.

The physics was -- in part -- because I'm working on a time travel story, and I am looking for something to make it more interesting than the usual time travel story.

And I'm reading the stories written by my writing group. It's amazing how prolific they are. I've been in the group several years and submitted only half a dozen stories at most. Three members of the group are tearing through one novel after another.

I remember LeGuin talking at Wiscon about having to save energy for writing. I tend to think of my problem as procrastination or laziness, rather than age. But there is no question that working a day job, belonging to a couple of writing groups, maintaining a modest home and reading all take time and energy; and maybe I don't have the energy I had at 20.