Thoughts on Winter Hiatus

Forty years ago when I was in elementary school, there was a wonderful time of year that stretched from early December through early March. Growing up in Swords Creek, Virginia, on a dirt road meant the first December snows gave us a nice, two-inch thick ice layer above the gravel and red clay. If we were fortunate, and in the mid to late seventies we often were, this ice layer would remain in place for the better part of four months.


Ice meant no school. And, no school, even for a kid who loved school, was a wonderful thing.


Russell County had numerous dirt roads such as the one I lived on, many of them narrow twisting things that were hard to navigate even on a good day. A school bus had no hope of delivering cargo in ice, so the students stayed home, sometimes for six weeks at a time.


Snow days were filled with sledding, sometimes down mountainsides and into ravines that make the adult in me doubt the sanity of the nine-year-old. There was the time when I hit a mogul with my aluminum bowl sleigh, flew about six feet into the air inverted and landed on my head. I remember a crunching sound, after which I lay on my back for a few minutes in the deep powder.

My mother wanted me to be a doctor someday, so I was bombarded by biology texts from an early age. I understood the spinal chord ran down through the vertebrae, and crunching noises were not a good thing. I did a quick inventory: still breathing, that was good. Heart beating. Yep. Wiggle the fingers. Very nice. Wiggle the toes. Yep.


I survived, needless to say. Although forty years later if I bend my neck back it makes a very disconcerting popping sound.


The rest of the time was filled with reading, playing, listening to the radio (1973-1983 had better music than today, sorry millennials), and watching TV. In short, it was fun, it was restful, and I miss it.


Nowadays, I can't stay home on six-week long snow vacations. There are obligations. But, I still feel that call to hibernate through the winter months.


This year, I took a break from writing until mid-January. Sinead is on hold. Writing about nineteen-year-old assassins is challenging. Instead, I'm about 25% through Valkyrie: The Road. It's post-apocalyptic fiction set in the world I created in Turning the Darkness. It's almost writing itself.


Afterward, I will return to Sinead, but I have a feeling there's going to be a detour. I woke up one morning with a story about this man named Garrett in southwest Virginia who decides to become a bounty hunter. He doesn't talk a lot, but there's a whole slew of other characters around him who talk a great deal. I think I'll write down their story and see where it goes.


After a nap. It's cold outside.