While I do not bow even to Scrooge in my bah-humbugism this time of year, even for me it’s still kind of a letdown when the most recent or any other holiday is over. Days, if not weeks, of excited anticipation, gone in a few hours, not to reappear for another year, and then it’s back to nothing more than normal everydayism.

But what’s normal for a writer? What is the status quo for those of us who lie for a living? Especially for a writer such as my humble self, with a yen—not to say an insistence—on the thrill, the joy, the excitement of story story STORY. Give me vampires and shapeshifters, space ships and dragons, murders and explosions, love, hate, romance, loss, tragedy, comedy…in other words, give me a book or seven to read, or one or eleven to write, and I’ve got all I need to be happy—well, other than endless glasses of iced tea, being the true blue Southerner that I am.

Those of us born in the South must have tea. Coffee is for you other folks with the misfortune to be born on the wrongest side of the Mason-Dixon Line. (Of course, as everyone knows, the Mason-Dixon Line was surveyed between 1763 and 1767 by Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, to resolve a border dispute between several British colonies in Colonial America. Everyone knew that, right?)

Forgive me. I tend to wander off into history at the slightest provocation. I spend much of my time in Elizabethan England, or Regency Bath, or Sherlock Holmes’ London…seeing a trend here? I’m a serious Anglophile. I’m sure other countries have history, but you couldn’t prove it by me.

So, as I was saying: the cure for the end-of-holidays letdown is something new to read or, for those of us who lean that way, something new to write. Right now, my co-writer and I are hard at work on book two of our paranormal series THE BALEFIRE CHRONICLES. Keep in touch for more information on that and our other projects.