We got a decent amount of snow yesterday, a few inches. Today, the high's supposed to be 43˚F, so a great deal of it will melt today and make the roads and sidewalks icy tonight. Currently, it's 41˚F, with the windchill at 35˚F.

Yesterday, after Spooky read aloud to me the pages from Sunday and Monday and then "Highway 97," I had the best writing I've had in years, and I wrote 2,395 words on "Tupelo (1993)," and I found THE END. The story comes in at 19,583 words, the longest Dancy Flammarion story and the only time I've ever offered a novella in Sirenia Digest. What does it mean when you go to type "Monday" and you type "Monster," when you try to type "longest," but type "lonely," instead? In the past ten days, I've written 14,225 words. And that's not some sort of first draft. That's essentially finished, polished prose. I don't write in drafts. I will go over the story once for typos and looking for any continuity errors, but that's it for editing. And now I am utterly exhausted, so I'm taking today off. After I handle all the email that backed up while I was writing the story.

I've not left the house since the 20th. I wonder if I could manage to stay inside until the Horror Clown and his Nightmare Court are no longer in office, assuming that day ever comes?

The cough is better, but it's still with me.

Yesterday, we started a new jigsaw puzzle, something by Charley Harper. And we watched four episodes of The Newsroom, in which Aaron Sorkin tried to warn us about the Tea Party know-nothings destroying the Republican Party. In which he predicted the fall of the electorate to fake news. In which he predicted our whole current crisis. And no one listened. They were offended and felt their intelligence was being insulted. I'm finding, more than ever, there's not much joy in being able to say "I told you so."

I have two photos from yesterday, the first of the falling snow, the second Spooky took while I was writing: