Googling Books

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I admit to Googling my own books from time to time.  (I know, I know!  You’ll go blind if you don’t stop doing that!)  Since I haven’t yet seen any royalties (or reviews) yet for Sleepy Hollow as American Myth, I searched for it.  Google now has a page topper, generated by AI, I suspect, that goes across specific searches such as for a person who’s got some internet presence, or a book.  Not all books get such a banner, however; yes, I’ve looked.  My Sleepy Hollow book, however, pulled up a page topper.  It was still a work in progress, however.  By the way, I did this search with results not personalized; Google knows people like to see themselves topping a page.  So here’s what I saw:

Okay, so they got a number of things right.  This is the correct book and the description seems correct.  The publication date is right and I did indeed write Weathering the Psalms (still my best selling book).  But what’s going on with Wal-Mart?  They have the title correct but that picture?  Although I watch a lot of movies, I’m pretty sure this one has nothing to do with Sleepy Hollow.  What I tried to do in that book was find every extant movie on the story and watch them.  It is possible I missed some (the internet isn’t built to give that kind of comprehensive information, which is why human authors are still necessary).  Besides, AI has hallucinations, and this seems to be one of them right here.  It couldn’t find a copy of the cover of my book (which appears on the left-hand side, but apparently the right…) so it filled something else in instead.

None of my other books get their own banner/topper on Google, except A Reassessment of Asherah.  That isn’t my best selling book, but it is my most consulted.  That banner, however, also has mistaken information.  It says it was originally published in 2007.  The original date as actually 1993.  Web-scraping may not help with that.  The book, as originally published, didn’t have an ebook, and the information about it largely comes from the second edition, published by Gorgias Press.  But then, only humans are concerned with such things.  There are no sultry women staring out of one of the topper windows, so the images appear to be correct.  That’s one of the funny things about being a human author—you want the information about your books to be right.  Of course, I should probably cut down on the Googling of my own books.  It’s unseemly.

Lap Dog

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Recently my laptop had to be in the shop a couple of days when a component went bad.  This became a period of discovery for me.  My laptop is my constant companion.  I’m not a big phone user and I have no other devices.  Suddenly I had to live without something I’d come to rely upon.  It was, in a way, a grieving process.  I’ve grown accustomed to being able to check in on the internet when a thought occurs to me.  Flip open the laptop and look.  Or, if I want to watch a movie, streaming it.  Even if it’s a matter of my wife and I wanting to see a “television” series for an evening’s entertainment after work, it has to be done through my laptop.  (No other devices will connect to our television, which is, unfortunately, beginning to show signs of requiring replacement.)  Just ten years ago this wouldn’t have been such an issue.

Getting the time to take the laptop in required advance planning.  This blog, for instance, is dependent on my laptop.  I can’t tap things out with my thumbs on my phone—I don’t text—and my phone isn’t that new either.  I had to pre-load several blog posts before the laptop went away and figure out how to launch (or “drop,” as the terminology goes) them from my phone.  I’m not sure of my neurological diagnosis, but I am a creature of strong habit.  That’s how I get books written while working a 9-2-5 job.  I’m used to waking up, firing up the laptop, and writing for the first hour or so of each day.  I had to figure some other way to do this, without wearing my thumbs down to nubs.  This blog is a daily obsession.

And then there was the emotional part.  The day I dropped the laptop off—it had to be a weekend because, well, work—I was despondent both before and afterward.  Listless, I couldn’t start a new project or even continue work on any because I’d already backed up my hard drive and would risk losing any changes made.  (I don’t trust the cloud.)  Then I thought, how did I ever survive in the before time?  I only became a laptop junkie this millennium, and the majority of my life was in the last one.  I recognize the warning signs of addiction.  During this period I decided to unplug as much as possible and read more print books.  Perhaps that’s the most sane thing I’ve done in quite a long time.

Life’s Work

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Here’s the thing: religion (or philosophy) is my life’s work.  By that I mean that I can’t just casually encounter an important idea that impacts larger life and just let it go without wrestling with it first.  As a professor that was expected.  As a paid seeker of the truth, you dare not ignore new information.  When I found myself unemployed with a doctorate in religious studies, the only jobs I could find were in publishing.  Now, publishing is a business.  And since I was a religion editor (still am), that meant that I had (have) to encounter new and potentially life-changing ideas and simply let them lie.  I assess whether they might make a good book, but I’m not supposed to ponder them deeply and incorporate them into my outlook on life.  Problem is, I can’t not do that.  It’s an occupational hazard.

Some presses, I understand, won’t hire an editor with a doctorate in the area s/he covers.  I think I can see why.  It’s maybe a little too easy to get overly engaged.  I work with other editors with doctorates in their areas.  I don’t know if they have the same troubles I do or not.  The fact is, other than religion/philosophy there aren’t many other fields that qualify as dealing with ultimate questions.  History, for example, may be fascinating, but it’s not generally going to change your outlook on life, the universe, and everything.  And so I find ideas that I need to keep track of since they might have the actual truth.  But that’s not what I’m paid to do.  I sometimes wonder what would’ve happened had I been successful in becoming clergy.  They too are paid to wrestle, but they are expected to always end up on the side of the organization.

There are people cut out for a very specific job.  No matter what else I do, I think about ideas I encounter.  Especially the big ones.  In the academy this was applauded.  Elsewhere, not so much.  The possibility of ending up in the job you’re made for isn’t a sure thing.  It seems we value economics more than dreams.  Or than systems that help people fit in with their natural inclinations.  Then again, should I really be thinking about things like this when work is about to start?  I should be getting my head in the game, shouldn’t I?  But here’s the thing: religion (or philosophy) is my life’s work.

Unexpected Thoughts

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The unexpected changes things.  We in the western world live under the false assumption of permanence.  We build something and it remains.  Well, any homeowner knows that constant maintenance is required, but still.  Then something unexpected happens and everything changes.  And it can be in the middle of a work week.  A death can lead to quick decisions and changes of a usual course of actions.  I wrote some funereal thoughts earlier, but a hastily planned drive all the way across Pennsylvania was organized just as a bomb cyclone hit our area.  We were thankfully spared feet of snow, but I had to deal with shoveling before driving early the next day.  After the funeral, a kind family member had invited us to her home, which we’d never visited before.  My wife and I drove there the night of the funeral.  The next day we had to cross the state of Pennsylvania again.  And then back to work on Thursday.

Something has fundamentally changed in my life, but still work expects the same Steve who was somewhat unexpectedly out of the office on Tuesday and Wednesday.  Thursday nothing has fundamentally changed at work, but in my life.  Even my usual morning routine feels off as thoughts constantly wander back to the intense previous two days.  And Monday’s stressful weather.  How the weekend before all plans had to be cancelled to, as the song goes, “let it snow.”  My mind, which operates largely on a routine schedule, has been shaken.  Jarred.  And yet, work persists.  Readjusting on a Thursday is difficult.  It’s as if I’d forgotten how things were usually done.  How did I use to sleep?  How did I use to drink so much water?  How did I jog before sunrise?  It was all routine last Friday.

Last Friday.  It was a work day, but I could jog.  The snow had melted.  We knew the drive was coming, but the weather painted a huge question mark over it.  It seems, this year, just when that illusory normalcy has once again been established, winter rudely intrudes.  Some Good Samaritan plowed all the sidewalks on our block on Monday, relieving a bit of the pressure.  But not the anxiety.  February in Pennsylvania is anything but predictable.  It is the poster child of change.  Back home on Thursday I was remembering how to jog on the streets—my usual trail still hasn’t melted—wishing this winter would finally end.  I reached our house where I noticed something where the snow had melted while we were gone.  The daffodils I transplanted last year were beginning to push through the soil.

The Power of Yes

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In going back over my fiction writing, I had a realization.  Both the first novel I tried seriously to get published (still not) and the first short story I submitted to a journal were accepted the first place I submitted.  That perhaps seemingly insignificant fact is quite important.  Like most, or at least many, writers, I’m a great self-doubter.  This probably comes from not knowing many other people personally and having a Calvinistic-level assessment of my own work.  Affirmation is rare in my experience.  Having a publisher say, “Yes, we like this” early on in my attempts to publish fiction was a tremendous boost and gave me the courage to try again.  It didn’t take long for the rejections to start rolling in, but I knew that someone believed in me.  Belief is far more important than most people think.  Worlds can be built on it.

The publisher of my debut novel decided to back out of the contract when the acquiring editor left.  I know, different editor, different game.  But this was under contract.  Thirteen years later it remains unpublished, not for lack of trying.  I began re-revising it in recent times since I’ve found a potential publisher and reading it I could see what might’ve frightened off others.  Still, I stand by it.  The book was written in a style very different from most of my subsequent fiction.  Characters speak their minds instead of being beat down by the system.  Readers of my academic work would be shocked.  That’s one reason that I use a pseudonym.  I sometimes wonder what I’ll do if the novel ever does get published.  It’s difficult to promote and keep your identity secret.

The point is that we never know what good we might do when we encourage someone who underestimates themself.  This may seem an odd thing to say when so many arrogant individuals command the world stage these days.  There are many people, however, who might accomplish great things if someone only gives them a little encouragement.  I think of this constantly in my work as well as my private life.  Is all this person needs simply some uplift?  Publishing can be a harsh world.  You put yourself out there and people like to start taking pot shots at you.  I’ve received much criticism over the years, and this has been primarily for nonfiction publishing.  The reviews some fiction writers receive, whether on Amazon, Goodreads, or even in print, can be unkind.  Some of the critique may be deserved, but why not offer it up with a word of motivation rather than Schadenfreude?  It can make a huge difference.

Individualisms

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As an individual that stands out in the herd, metaphorically (standing out  is always dangerous, I know), I don’t tend to follow trends.  Blending in isn’t my strong suit.  A current, or recent trend, was to be seen carrying a disposable coffee cup when in public.  At least for a while there, everybody was doing it.  Walking down the street, going grocery shopping, at the mall.  It was almost like a fashion statement.  Anybody who was somebody had a cup of warm liquid in their hand.  Perhaps in my case economics and personal choice made the decision not to do this.  Economically, a five-dollar cup of coffee is out of my range; I’m not a hedge-fund manager.  I haven’t gone out for coffee in some years because of the personal choice aspect of it: I gave up caffeine.  This was several years ago.  I didn’t like being addicted to daily coffee, so I stopped, cold turkey.  But I still like the taste of coffee—that was hard earned.

These days the personal water bottle industry must be a good one to be into.  I recently visited friends and I noticed everyone had their personal water bottle.  I tend to leave mine at home.  Yes, I have one for the basic reason that running downstairs to refill a glass with water multiple times a day would mean that I’d miss an awful lot of work.  I drink quite a bit of water in a day.  About a gallon when I’m not traveling.  In my regimented life, I have a water bottle that I fill four times a day.  I know its capacity and, trying to stay healthy, I drink it down whether I feel like it or not.  I tend to leave it at home, however, as I mentioned.  At this gathering of friends (which was at somebody’s house) everyone who didn’t live there had their personal water bottle.  I was just using a glass from the kitchen.

There seems to be a trend of being seen with your water bottle.  I recently had to buy a new one because I’d been using an old stainless steel bottle well over a decade old.  It’d been put in the freezer with water in it before a hike and the bottom had, naturally enough, convexed to the pressure.  Being the thrifty sort, I pulled out a hammer and rendered it unlikely to tip over again.  It worked for years, but had become unstable again. Since it sits next to a computer all day, I couldn’t risk it.  The first thing I discovered is that water bottles meeting my exact specs were very expensive.  It’s a trend.  So at our friends’ house one of them offered to buy me a cup of coffee.  We live in a day when you can get a decaf latte with oat milk, so I indulged in an old habit.  As we walked down the chilly street, coffee cups in hand, I realized that I’m just like everybody else.

AI Death

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I was scrolling, which is rare for me, through a social media platform where someone had posted a heartfelt comment after the death of actor Catherine O’Hara.  Beneath were two prompts, following an AI symbol, intended to keep you on the site.  The first read “What’s Catherine O’Hara’s current status?”  The second, “Why did Catherine O’Hara choose that answer?”  The second was clearly based on the post, where the question was what was O’Hara’s favorite role.  The first, however, demonstrates why AI doesn’t get the picture.  She is dead.  I found, early when I wasn’t aware of all of generative AI’s environmental and societal evils, and we were encouraged to play with it, that it could never answer metaphysical questions.  “Does not compute” should’ve been programmed into it.  And what is more metaphysical than death?

Carlos Schwabe, Death of the Undertaker; Wikimedia Commons

We are aware that we will die.  All people do it and always have done it.  Just like other living creatures.  We’re also meaning-seeking animals, which AI is not.  It’s a parrot that’s not really a parrot.  And we’re now being told we can trust it.  What does Catherine O’Hara have to say about that?  She has had an experience that a machine never will since it requires a soul.  I know that sounds old fashioned, but there’s no comparison between having been born (in my case over six decades ago) and living every day of life, taking in new information that comes through evolved senses (not sensors) and interpreting them to make my life either better or longer.  These are metaphysical realms.  What makes something “good?”  Philosophers will argue over that, but quality is something you learn to recognize by living in a biological world.  There’s a reason many people prefer actual wood to particle board furniture, for example.

Also, I’m waiting for a lawsuit representing those of us who put out content protected by copyright, such as blog posts, to sue AI companies for infringement.  While Al is off hallucinating somewhere, we’re all aware of the fact of death.  And coping with it in very human ways.  Ignoring it.  Pretending it won’t happen.  Or maybe thinking about it and coming to peace regarding it.  After it happens, whatever intelligence may be on this blog will reach the end of its production cycle.  And I suspect that Al will have taken over by that point.  And when there are none of us left to interact with, it will still post nonsensical questions, trying to get us to return the sites of our addiction.

Laughing Matter?

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I sincerely hope AI is a bubble that will burst.  Some of its ridiculousness has been peeking out from under its skirts from the beginning, but an email I had from Academia.edu the other day underscored it.  The automated email read, “Our AI turned your paper ‘A Reassessment of’ into a shareable comic.”  Let me translate that.  Academia.edu is a website where you can post published (and even unpublished) papers that others can consult for free.  Their main competitor is Research Gate.  Many years ago, I uploaded PDFs of many of my papers, and even of A Reassessment of Asherah, my first book, onto Academia.  This is what the email was referencing.  My dissertation had been AIed into a shareable comic.  I felt a little amused but also a little offended.  I quickly went to Academia’s site and changed my AI settings.

I didn’t click on the link to my comic book for two reasons.  One is that I no longer click links in emails.  Doing so once cost me dearly (and I didn’t even actually click).  I no longer do that.  The second reason, however, is that I know Academia’s game.  They want free users to become subscribers.  They frequently email intriguing tidbits like some major scholar has cited your work and when you go to their website, the only way to find out who is to upgrade to a paid account.  They do the same thing with emails asking if you wrote a certain paper.  If you own that you did, they’ll tell you the wonders of a paid account.  Since I’m no longer an academic, I don’t need to know who is citing my work.  I’d like to believe it’s still relevant, but I don’t feel the need to pay to find out to whom.

I am curious about what a comic version of my dissertation might look like, of course.  I am, however, morally opposed to generative AI.  In a very short time it has ruined much of what I value.  I do not believe it is good for people and I’m disappointed by academics who are using it for research.  AI still hallucinates, making things up.  It is not conscious and can’t really come up with its own answers.  It has no brain and no emotion, both of which are necessary for true advances to take place.  My first book has the highest download rate of any of my pieces on the Academia website.  Last time I checked it had just edged over 9,000 views.  AI thinks it’s  a joke, making a comic of years of academic work.

Optimistic Moves

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I’ve been thinking about moving lately.  No, not planning to move, but just thinking about the process.  A family member recently moved, and we have new neighbors in the house next to ours that sat empty for a few months.  In both these cases the people moving are young and, I sincerely hope, optimistic.  Settling into a new place takes quite a lot of energy and pondering my own life, a serious motivation.  It wasn’t so hard when I was young and all I had acquired were books and records.  After moving to college I ended up shifting around quite a bit, each time looking for a better fit.  I moved five times in my three years in Boston.  When I moved to Ann Arbor to be with my betrothed, and then wife, I moved twice in a year.  Then in Scotland, three times within three years.  Each move was optimistic.

Back in the States, we moved four times in three years until we ended up in the house Nashotah, well, House provided.  That was our home for a decade or so and the move was optimistic.  Something happened after that, however.  The move from Nashotah was a step down.  And the move from the first apartment to the second was another step down.  Neither were optimistic moves.  They were middle-of-life, disrupted-life moves.  The perspective was hoping nothing tragic would happen.  The move to New Jersey was quasi-optimistic.  It was very difficult for me to give up my dream of a teaching career—something I had, and then lost.  Still, our place, a floor of a two-family house, was good enough for a dozen years.  Our last move, to our own house, was optimistic but fraught.

Home ownership is a shock to the system best absorbed by the young.  To make matters more interesting, I recently talked to somebody who knows about finance who said buying property isn’t always the best investment.  He urged us to go back to renting.  I have a hard time imagining that now.  Landlords are their own species of problem.  Yes, we’re responsible for repairs and insurance, and lately lots of snow shoveling, but we don’t have an owner telling us what we can’t do.  (Having finances tell us what we can’t do is another matter.)  I always look fondly on the young who move, trying to tap into their optimism.  This place, I very much hope, is better than the last one was.  There is no perfect place to live, I know, but when you start thinking about it, it should be a matter of hope.  And hope should be in greater supply these days.

The Storm

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I suppose it would be a fool’s errand to post today on anything other than the storm.  You know the one.  The snow/ice storm that has been affecting the greater part of the lower 48 for the last couple of days and is now set to target the most populous region of the country.  Power outages are expected (so if this blog goes utterly silent, you’ll know why).  Good thing FEMA has been dismantled by the Trump administration.  In any case, we’re all waiting to see what the outcome will be.  I guess we should ask AI.  In any case, our lives have become so completely tied to a constant source of electricity, we barely know how to get along without it.  I have to admit to being a bit puzzled myself.  Without electricity, the heat goes off.  The water pipes freeze up and burst, and a personal apocalypse ensues.

As my wife is fond of saying, the weather is still in charge.  A storm like this shows how fragile our infrastructure can be.  Especially since the last ten years of US history have been dealing with Trumpism or its aftermath.  And one thing that our elected officials don’t do well is deal with reality.  Nation-wide storms do occur.  Democrats do not control the weather.  The “woke” don’t have some great machine buried somewhere generating all the hot air that ultimately leads to global warming which, we all know, is really real.  And so we sit here waiting for the silence to come.  Funnily, having grown up in the Great Lakes snow belt, I remember these kinds of snow amounts not infrequently as a child.  Our house was little more than a shack and it was heated by a  single furnace in the living room, vented mainly by the leaky roof and drafty windows.  Besides, my step-father drove the borough snow plow.

Today things seem much more brittle.  What would we do without Netflix for a day?  And snow days from work are a thing of the past.  Offices never close because they never have to.  As long as the juice flows.  That is reality here in the world of 2026.  I can envision a different world.  One that might be a little more sane and focused on protecting one another instead of one percent of the richest one percent getting even richer.  A world in which snow is pretty instead of some insidious threat.  A world where being human is sufficient for the troubles of the day.

Trying to Write

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Realizations dawn slowly sometimes.  From childhood on I wanted to be a writer.  Teachers encouraged me because I seemed to have some talent, but in a small town they didn’t really know how to break through.  Besides, terrified of Hell, I was very Bible and church focused—not really conducive to the worldliness needed to be a writer.  The realization that recently dawned is that I’m competing with people who can put full-time into writing.  I’m trying to squeeze it into a couple hours before dawn every day because 9-2-5.  9-2-5.  9-2-5.  It’s exhausting.  I often read about writers, wondering how they get noticed.  Even the people I try to get to publish my fiction read stuff others likely have more time to write than I do.  Why do I keep at it?  Sometimes it’s just impossible to keep ideas inside.

I’ve got ideas.  Some of them would make fascinating movies.  I even had an editor of an online journal that published one of my stories say that.  I’ve got a cinematic imagination trapped in the aging body of a day-worker.  Oh, I’ve got a professional job, of course.  What I really want to do is “produce content.”  I know others in publishing with the same dream.  One of my colleagues has managed to break out and she’s now publishing novels that are getting noticed.  I’m still writing for academic presses because I know how to get published by them.  My fiction has been suffering from neglect.  To stay sharp you have to keep at it.  I’m a self-taught writer.  I’ve not taken a course in it my entire life, and it probably shows.  Not even Comp 101.

Fairness is a human construct and ideal.  Reality lies with Fortuna (cue Carl Orff).  I’m better off than most people in the long human struggle with equity, I realize.  For that I’m grateful.  I do have to wonder, however, if struggle isn’t essential to making us what we need to be.  The writers whose work endures often had to struggle to get noticed.  Many died in obscurity.  I wonder if they ever realized that they were leaving a legacy.  You see, writing is a strange blend of arrogance and self-doubt.  Many of us go through intensely self-critical times when even our published books seem to mock us from their shelves.  The realization, now fully day, that I will always have to struggle to do what I know I’m meant to do sheds light.  Even in the world of privilege, the struggle inside is real.

Literalism

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I struggle with literalism.  It may be naïveté.  I’m not sure there’s a difference.  I grew up being unsure of anything.  This isn’t unusual among those in an alcoholic family.  It’s probably the reason I spent my teenage years, praying as fervently as John Wesley for certainty with my faith.  My gray matter simply wouldn’t allow it.  I’m skeptical, with advanced training in critical thinking, but still terribly naive.  A family member recently told me something that sent me into a mini-panic.  It was only when I realized that he was being ironic that my ruffled feathers began to smooth out into flight readiness.  And that’s just one instance.  I used to tell my students, when we pick up something to read the first question in our minds is one of genre.  What is this?  Is it fact or fiction?  Serious or satire?  With interpersonal interactions it’s not always so clear.

People are natural actors.  They have to be.  Family time is quite different from alone time.  At least it is for me.  I try to shelter those I love from the darkness, but sometimes it surfaces.  I literally don’t know who I am.  There’s a certain continuity to the “Steveness” of my everyday existence, and that essence, for lack of a better word, accepts many things literally.  I trust people I know.  For the most part, I trust those I meet in their professional capacities—the store clerk, the mechanic, the professor.  I realize that they have inner lives as well, and they may or may not be unfurling the banner for all to see.  We all have filters.  Some use them more regularly than others.

My knee-jerk literalism generally lasts only a second or two.  My brain catches up and says, “this is where your critical thinking should kick in.”  Often that works, but it’s tied in with emotion as well.  The human thought process is certainly not all logic or reason.  Even the most Spock-like among us have emotion constantly feeding into our thoughts.  That’s one reason that artificial intelligence isn’t possible.  Those who think they can logic their way through falling in love are sadly mistaken.  We can’t explain it because we don’t understand it.  And we’re nowhere near being able to.  For business dealings we expect literalism.  But then there’s always the fine print.  I’m not that naive.  I do struggle with my literalism.  It’s set me on the wrong path before.  But certainty still eludes me.

Stories in the Snow

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Birds are quite capable creatures, but some have learned that by hanging out around human dwellings, some of our species give handouts.  For me, the sight of a cute little junco shivering outside the window leads me to break up the hardened bread slices that I save for them and toss them outside when things are either buried in snow or ice.  This year we’ve had a bit of ice and some snow on top of it, which makes a kind of canvas for seeing who’s come to visit our crumbs.  My daughter pointed out to me that we had some feather prints as well as footprints, so I thought I should go ahead and record them.  If this were mud and a few million years had passed we’d perhaps have ended up with fossilized feathers.  And nature’s canvas is endlessly beautiful.

I imagine people tend to be partial to birds because they look so delicate and fragile.  Well, at least the little ones do.  Our natural sympathies make us feel sorry for them when nature makes finding food difficult.  The survivors among them, however, are tough.  Birds skirmish over food and can be quite aggressive around both a bird feeder or a crumb pile.  They were, after all, once dinosaurs.  And around here winter locked in before Christmas and has stayed around for quite some time, temperatures barely rising above freezing for many days in a row.  And I look for feather prints in the snow.  Try to find the beauty in the starkness of harsh weather (while looking askance at the energy bills).  Our animal companions can teach us much about life.  Their stories leave traces for us to follow.

Our species has often tried to advance itself at the expense of others.  I think of the tremendous environmental damage that we’re willing to inflict to enable AI.  What pollution we’re willing to dump out for using fossil fuels.  How much forest we cut down for our own use.  We drive vulnerable species extinct.  This makes me think of those creatures that have adapted to us.  Who speaks highly of rats, pigeons, or cockroaches?  Even sparrows, which can be quite aggressive, or even mean, reflect our attitudes toward the rest of nature.  I’m sure some sparrows come for the crumbs, even though I put them out with the juncos in mind.  Those that appear here in winter have likely migrated from even further north.  They handle cold I have difficulty tolerating.  And they leave art in the ephemeral snow.

Welcome 2026

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I put great stock in holidays, but I’ve never felt a deep connection to New Year’s Day.  I’m more of a morning person than the stay up late sort, and the New Year also seems cold after the coziness of Christmas.  But here we are in 2026 nevertheless.  We’re encouraged to look ahead.  I’m not much of a corporate person and I don’t see much wisdom in devising five year plans in an unpredictable world or any such nonsense.  The way things have been going in the news, it’s hard to have a five-day plan that bears any resemblance to reality.  But New Year’s Day does seem an appropriate season for optimism.  Hope stands here, anticipating better days ahead.  I am, despite appearances, an optimist.  I do believe in progress and the calendar keeps on ticking over regardless.  What will 2026 hold?  Who knows.  Best to take it one day at a time.

For me personally, I’ve got a couple books nearly complete and I do hope to find publishers this year.  And I’ve got many others started as well.  Writing is an act of optimism.  I’m always touched when someone lets me know they’ve found my work interesting, or even helpful.  Someone once contacted me to let me know Holy Horror had helped them through a difficult time.  This made me happy; writing books is a form of connection.  When I read books—a major planned activity for 2026—I’m connecting with people I don’t know (usually).  Writing to me feels like giving back.  The funny thing about it is the tension of having little time to do it seems to make it better.  I always look forward to the break at the end of the year but I find myself using the time to recover rather than for the intensive writing I always plan to do.

I have spent the last several days doing a lot of reading.  That too is a coping technique.  I’ve got some good books that I’m looking forward to finishing in 2026.  And the blog bibliography continues to grow.  Looking ahead I see reading and writing.  That to me is a vision of hope.  I didn’t stay up to midnight last night—that only makes me start out the new year grumpy.  No, instead I woke up early to start the year by writing.  And reading.  What does 2026 hold?  I have no idea.  I’d rather not speculate.  I do believe that as time stretches on some improvements will begin to take place.  I do believe holidays are important, both looking back and looking ahead.

Symbolic Light

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I’m a great believer in symbolism.  I have made a number of symbolic gestures in my life, whether anybody notices or not.  Today is the winter solstice, a day of great symbolic importance.  Not only do we light a Yule log at home, accompanied by poetry reading, but I have another, private symbolic act.  This year I will substitute our usual nightlight for the wicker tree.  Not the one from the movie, thank you.  No, many years ago, when my mother was still alive and working at a local department store, she bought us a small wicker and plastic Christmas tree.  When you plug it in, it shines with white Christmas lights.  Every year I set it on the landing at the turning point in our staircase to substitute for our usual night light.  We have an older house and the nightlight is important for going downstairs when it’s still dark.

The symbolism here is that my mother is bringing light on the shortest day of the year.  The solstice has been observed from time immemorial in northern climes.  We may not have a white Christmas this year but we’ve already had a pretty significant snowstorm (all melted by a significant rain and wind storm), but the solstice is about light, not cold.  You may not have noticed it, but the sun is setting just a bit later these days.  It’s also rising later, as it will continue to do until the second week of January.  The solstice is the day when the number of hours of light is the least, when the longer evenings are offset by the later mornings.  Earth-based religions, which gave us Yule, longed for days of greater light.  This was the symbolic reason for Christmas so near the solstice.

My symbolic switching of nightlights isn’t the only symbolism I realized this year.  As I was thinking about the significance of this day for making the change I realized that the nightlight we normally use dates back to the year my mother passed.  We had one emotionally-wrought morning to sort through her belongings.  One of the little things I picked up was a stained glass lamp.  It’s very small, with a candelabra size mount for the lightbulb.  It took the place of our old stair-top nightlight.  And although today I switch to the tree my mother gave us, the light that we normally have through the night comes from a small lamp I inherited from her.  All of us together await the returning of the light.