I read – in a couple of places on the intertubules or overheard on a TV fluffy-news item sometime in the last couple of days that some genius has deduced that mid-January is without peer, the most depressing part of the year. Forget about Christmas, and such moveable feasts such as post-natal depression, the suckage-factor of this time of the year cannot be measured with current technology. At least he got some news coverage out of this blinding flash of the obvious.

And this is actually rather bizarrely comforting – at least I know it just isn’t me. Other people are feeling the great dreary weight of generalized malaise and suckage too. I’d be cheered right up, except for my own accumulation of post-Christmas blah.

Let me count the ways, enumerate the bleakness, have a nice wallow in it… at the very least, it gives me a nice blog-entry topic. Actually I haven’t felt much like blogging, either producing free bloggy ice cream or reading anybody elses free bloggy ice cream. Some of the best have quit, pulled the plug, nothing more to say, and everyone – including me seems to have said it all before; much better, with more zest and with a great deal less laborious effort. It all seems terribly stale, flat, pointless, joyless.

The presidential contest 2008 promised to be unutterably depressing and pointless; Her Inevitableness versus The Fresh Prince of Illinois. Yuck. Bill Clinton. Double-Yuck. Nancy Pelosi. Triple-Yuck.

Even the discussion groups I participate in, the other members appear to be enervated and depressed. Days go by without any comments or new topics. I am winding up a project for the Independent Authors Guild, to collect up a number of books by our members to donate to the BAMC patients’ library. Since before Christmas, authors have been mailing books to my address so that I will be able to deliver one big box of them to the volunteer librarian. Getting boxes of books in the mail almost every day – what could be more exciting? But I haven’t been able to generate much interest in this outside of the contributors themselves… and the library may already have enough book donations anyway. Delivering yet another box of them to BAMC just feels like one more onerous chore.

I had a spike in sales from nice book review and instalanche around the first of the month, but nothing much since then. There are six or seven other copies of “To Truckee’s Trail” that I sent to people in September on promise of an eventual review, but no review produced to date. I’ve pretty much given up on following up. Just as a note, the cost of those review copies come out of my budget. No review means I might as well have made a nice bonfire and burnt them in the fireplace, except for this way I can claim the expense on my income tax.

Another cause for malaise – income-tax filing time. I know the deadline is April, but I like to beat the rush.

Received a rejection from a publisher on the first volume of the Texas-German trilogy, from a place that didn’t even have the courtesy to even send a letter saying no thanks. I don’t know why this annoyed me so much, but it did –having to hunt them down and ask seemed very much like waiting to hear the results of a medical test. You wait and wait and wait, never get a call… and then when you finally call and ask, they tell you “Sorry, you’re dying from the ingrown toenail. Have a nice day and best of luck.” This is why writers go mad, although I would swear a lot of them started out that way anyway.

The weather is dreary, it’s cold. I’m not making any money, from the book or much else, the dogs are doing their best to kill me on the morning walkies, and I don’t much want to do anything else than sit down and pound out another half-chapter for the last book of the trilogy. It’s a refuge in a way, just about the one thing that I can control. If great writing comes out of misery and depression – it’s going to be a pretty damn good read.