The holidays are speeding towards us! So much last-minute holiday shopping, packing up, and shipping to do…But I love the lights, and the tree, and making egg-nog french toast and pumpkin bread and other weird foods we only make at this time of the year.

I owe you some little mini-book reviews, which will be coming soon.

My review of Kim Addonizio’s Lucifer at the Starlite is up at the Rattle blog. They are one of the few places that want you to personalize your reviews a little bit, so it’s a different experience writing for them; you don’t have to be so stuffy.

Finally wrote a new poem! It’s all about the trope of mad scientists and their daughters in fifties sci-fi movies. Even when I try to stay away from pop culture in my poems, as I have for this latest manuscript, which is based on growing up in Oak Ridge – it sneaks back in!

And I applied for one job and sent in two book queries. Fairly productive for a gloomy December day! We’ve had a cold front that has freaked out the Californians – high of fifty during the day, freezes at night, how crazy! – and I’ve heard a lot of people say “This isn’t what I moved to California for!” I want to point out to them that it is still twenty to thirty degrees colder everywhere else. I admit to breaking out my special-used-to-be-reserved-for-snow-shearling boots, though, at the first sign of forty-degree-weather. I used to wear shorts when it hit fifty – now I’m all shivery. The West Coast had made this former midwesterner weak, I tell you!