Not Dead, Incapacitated, or Bored

January is usually that time of year when I attempt to withdraw from all human contact. After the relentless need to get stuff done before Christmas (several people didn't get presents who really deserved them, and for that my deepest apologies, and I'm running late on Ray Solberg's birthday), January is generally a time of staying in and feebly trying to catch up on correspondence. This year, I'm really sucking with the contacting people, so this post to reassure people that I am not dead, incapacitated, or bored.

I have so much stuff on my mental to-do list that I had to write it down in order to keep it straight. And nothing says "This will make a great blog post" like a list. The sad thing is that I'm probably reference this post as a to-do list for a couple of months. Here's what I have to do, as of 1/22/2008:

•  "Raw, New Things." This is my newsletter to the Esoteric Order of Dagon in which I review recent anthologies of Mythos short stories or novels. ~4,000 words. Done 1/24.

•  Tart up the Necromancer for Hire query letter. Which also includes a day trip to the library to find more literary agents who are amenable to fantasy submissions, as well as fantasy publishers who take unsolicited manuscripts.

•  Think up a better title (Are you there, Shakespeare? It's me, John) for the revision of "Sire" that I sweated over during most of January. Revise one more time and then send.

•  Complete and then revise collaborative story with David Conyers.

•  Revise "Death of the American Family Farm" and submit it to Space and Time magazine.

•  Write two stories for anthologies I've been invited into: A CSI Arkham story (and necessary research into police procedure and crime scene investigation), and one concerning anthropologists, and Greenland's Dorset culture.

•  Write story and submit it to Mythos Books' Cthulhu 2012 anthology.

•  Write questions to ask authors who were influenced by Robert Bloch, then write article on Robert Bloch's influence as a literary mentor.

•  I have not updated the Ultimate Hellblazer Index in six months.

•  Other stories that need to be written: "God of Chickens", "Almost Human", "Rather Short for an Angel", "A Certain Society of Concerned Citizens", "Captain Scar", "Beanie Babies", "Darwin's Cosh", "The Secret History of Earth", and "The Whiskey Tango File".

•  And at some point, I want to take six months and write a horror novel, Hag.

•  I owe a lot of people email.

My non-work, non-writing schedule for February looks like this:

Feb 1-3: Templecon. I spent the 26^th painting up my bane knights so my Warmachine forces will look good on the table. I will not have time to paint and assemble my harrower.

Feb 10: A "Write Your Own Valentine" get-together with the SouthShire Roundtable.

Feb 15-17: Boskone. To add insult to injury, I am not the Guest of Honor, although the mass slaying of peeps could possibly make up for this.

Feb 19-21 I am having my niece and nephew over during Winter break. This begs the question of how the hell am I going to keep them from being bored? I think I could park Redhead Reader in front of the bookshelf and she'd be happy, but doing that for three entire days would be irresponsible. Her brother, Redhead Runner, I have even less clue about.

So hello to all of you out there! I am not dead, incapacitated, or bored! I love you all and can I start referring to you as my fandom?