Good Gawd! My last journal was in early October, and now there are only hours left in the last day of the year! I don’t think I have ever skipped an update as long as this before. Why? I’ll tell you why… I think.

I think mainly because so little has happened was worth reporting on. Sure, I’ve been somewhat active and done various kinds of work, but it seemed like nothing that would be of interest to anyone. Was it? Well, let’s see if I can pretend it was.

Among other things, I made all the preparations needed before winter set it, so that I wouldn’t have as much to worry about if it was going to be a one snow storm after another, socking me in. I bought an insane amount of fresh coffee beans from the Farmers’ Market so that they would last me through until March, imagining that fresh snow was inevitable. Unexpectedly, there hasn’t been any snow to speak of in downtown Toronto – unusual for this time of year. Still, there is plenty of winter ahead to dump ten feet of snow on me, if Nature decides to. I also arranged to skip some regular doctors’ appointments until the weather improves.

If you follow me on FaceBook or FurAffinity, you have seen the small amount of art that I’ve completed and posted. There are a couple of things in progress, but it has been slow going. I plead lack of strong motivation. I don’t mind the work, but where are the crowds and applause of yesteryear? It seems that as the modern digital age goes on, the audience grows more apathetic, or perhaps just takes the artists for granted. After all … do we really need artists anymore? Every day I log onto FaceBook and I see AI inspired “art” in my feed. Yes, it’s great fun for all those non-artists out there, who can prompt their AI to “create” highly professional art for them, but for me it’s just incentive to watch another YouTube video or another movie on DVD. My money these days is more on my writing.

Speaking of which, I am well past 10,000 words on my new story. I began it November, and have been working slowly but steadily. Progress has been slow for several reasons, including too many hours on YouTube, watching how WWIII is playing out and how shitty superhero movies have gotten. Slow though my writing has become, the story has been unfolding in my mind as I work.

I had only a rough idea how “The World Begins Again” was to be told. It was a story that happened between the first of my Fraggle Rock tales and one after Darl had become a Fraggle, but it occurred to me that I hadn’t considered telling how his first day went. After all, Darl would be overwhelmed by new experiences, and would meet the other Fraggles for the first time. This seemed to me to be an important step in his transformation, and shouldn’t be glossed over. The problem was that I had no plot. What was I going to do without a plot, just have Darl say, “Hello Gobo, hello Wembley, hello you other guys”?

Not having a plot was a bit of a setback, but I started writing anyway. I worked through the opening scene, trusting that my imagination would come up with something worthy while I set the stage for the second scene. Fortunately, my genius didn’t fail me. I came up with a very serviceable plot, full of ideas and action and all that.

One of my friends wrote science fiction professionally. He didn’t like talking about his work except in general way, such as, “Yes, it’s coming along well,” or “Hopefully the first draft will be done in a month.” I have rarely read any of his work until his books are in the stores. For some reason, I am an entirely different kind of writer, and have to resist the temptation to blab about it as though I expected to be struck by a twenty-three pound meteorite tomorrow. I think I’m actually fairly safe then, in not divulging any more of “The World Begins Again,” and sparing the world unnecessary exposition.

One final note – the line is from a song in the first episode of Fraggle Rock, and I plan it to be the very last line in the final Fraggle Rock story I write.

I should say that Santa has been good to me, but in all honesty, I can’t. My friends have been good to me, and gifted me handsomely. I especially appreciated the bottle of pricey apricot brandy, the collected first 12 issues of Hot Rod Magazine, the book about how Alberta is burning itself down, the paper Tie Fighter kit and the hardcover copy of Tim Horton’s life. Just the thing when I want a quiet donut out of the snow. But the rest had nothing to do with Santa.

I decided to treat myself in absentia, and gave Saara a fully articulated action figure of astronaut Dave Bowman from 2001, dressed in his orange EVA suit. I gave Tangel a little figure of the Cat Taxi from My Neighbor Totoro. And they have me a second vehicle from The Adventures of Tintin. This one was from a book set in New Deli, India, and illustrates Tintin and Captain Haddock in a taxi driven by a Sikh. I wonder what we’ll all give each other next year for Christmas?