Hey, is this thing on?

Sorry to have been so quiet. My mind is full of revisions, the upcoming Hamline residency, and thinking about the new iPhone. For me, the process of writing a lecture for residency takes six weeks. The first five weeks are devoted to worrying about it, the last to actual work. It’s a very time consuming process.

Lisa’s post about summer writing hit home for me. Now, I don’t garden. That involves lots of bending over, and I get wiggy with abrupt postural changes–plus once I found a toy snake in the backyard, and that’s far too close to a real snake for comfort. I don’t have a dog to walk, just three neurotic cats who sit in sunbeams and look at me like I should be working on my lecture. The outside does not beckon to me, because it’s oddly not air conditioned out there.

But the weather’s all wrong. My book is a contemporary retelling of “The Snow Queen.” It was going to be called The Snow Queen, until my helpful editor suggested otherwise. (The helpfulness did not extend to suggesting a new title. I might have to use one of Ron’s cast-offs.) As may be apparent, there’s a lot of snow in it.
I wrote the book in a wintery haze in January and February–it snows emphatically in Cleveland during these months, an exclamation point on the season–and when I needed to see the particular way snow behaved, I could just look out the window. In the first half I am to do a better job capturing what it feels like to live in a Minnesota winter, the different ways the snow expresses itself, the way the air feels. And I have no idea. I can’t relate. Winter feels so far away right now, even further than the iPhone shipping date. I’m left to close my eyes and try to remember my feet crunching in the snow as a kid, dragging a sled down the sidewalk. But then I just start getting anxious for my lecture for winter residency.