I keep thinking of vintage song titles that would be a good title for this essay. “Freeze Tag” or “When the Ice Goes Out.” I guess we’ll see what happens when it’s finished.

Southern New England is having its first real winter in a long time. Not a hard winter, not so far, but a real one, the sort that used to be routine in this one-of-the-most-rapidly-warming parts of the world. It’s snowing gently as I type this and we’ve had some kind of white on the ground since midway through December, with the exception of Christmas Day itself, because we had some rain and a thaw.

It’s been nice, though it’s messing with my running schedule and the horses are stir crazy because the trails are treacherous and the outdoor arena is a sheet of ice, and so we are reduced to taking them for little walks under saddle on the residential roads near the stable to get them some exercise. I swear Spóla said to me yesterday, “If I have to look at that mailbox one more goddamn time…”

She is a wild creature of the tundra, she will have you know. She loathes the arena; she tolerates roads; but she’s truly happy on the trails. Unless there are bugs. Spóla hates bugs.

This is all a digression.

Anyway, we had a mild ice storm last night, and so my first task this morning was to go out and treat the walks so people can get into and out of our house without crampons. To do this, you use a device you pull on over your boot comprised of rubber straps and metal springs. The brand we happen to have are called “Yak Tracks,” and their purpose is to bite into the ice and keep you from sliding away and breaking your head open.

As I was shaking animal-and-vegetation-friendlier ice melt onto the skating rink outside, I got to thinking about the little things we have to do every day to stay alive, and how grounding they are in this terrible time of upheaval and needless killing and illiberalism in the country that I live in. The king is mad and the councilors are jockeying for position, trying to seal their power while they can. Lots of innocent people at home and abroad are paying with their lives, their health, their fortune.

Turns out that’s much more fun in fiction.

(I said to some friends the other day, “I just realized last weekend it’s going to be the Year of the Fire Horse soon. These writers have no subtlety at all.”)

Anyway, we live in an age of wonders, where Mtv can both exist and not exist simultaneously, in a kind of quantum state of The Buggles. Where information is fungible and I sort of wonder if all those extra fingers and backwards feet and occasional feathers aren’t a clue that the alternate reality genAI shows us isn’t a side trip into Faerie. Nothing is true there, remember. And don’t eat the food or drink the wine.

Or the Flavor-ade, for that matter.

I’m writing again, a little, carefully. My brain seems to have regenerated whatever neurotransmitters or electrical signals it uses to make shit up. I’m not back to working on Shipwreck Star yet (Sorry, Gillian. Sorry, Joe. Sorry, Jenn.)—but I am writing a novelette and I managed to get myself past the first act break and the midpoint (two places where I have absolutely been getting stuck as hell even when my brain started to make interesting sentences again) and the Guys Downstairs are sending up useful memos again with things like “Go back and put a mention of [thing] in the second scene, you need to establish it for later,” and “You can foreshadow this thematic element with a concrete image here.” And my favorite, my structural sense is coming back, that knowledge that X implies Y and that if I pull on a cable here I’ll level the whole building over there.

It’s been a long time since those memos were getting through, and it turns out I cannot write without them.

I’m allowing and encouraging myself to enjoy the process, too. To have fun with the things I’m coming up with, to take delight in the fact that I can sit down and work for a half-hour and come up with a page of interesting things.

(I am not and have never been a fast writer, though I had the reputation as one. What I used to be and want to be again is a consistent writer, the sort who gets there one bite of elephant at a time but takes a few bites every damn day it’s feasible to do so. It adds up.

And I kind of think the social pressure (mediated by social media and the industry and things like NaNoWriMo) to “write fast” is bad for art, artists, and readers too. I think the slow writers, like the slow runners (which I am also) need to stand up and identify ourselves. I think if it takes you a half hour to write 250 words, or an hour, or all fucking morning, that’s fine. Beating yourself up for it isn’t gonna make you write faster. Or better. And you do not have to write 2000 words a day every day or do “writing sprints” to be a Real Writer. It is okay to be meticulous and thoughtful, to edit and revise and rethink, even in your first drafts. As long as you eventually finish them.)

All this is a long road back to the Yak Tracks (not a sponsor), and of course TV has been showing us things that aren’t so for a hundred years now. Propaganda is not new; viral misinformation is not new. But I am finding that right now, getting grounded in reality and community—things and people I can touch, small, talk to face to face—is making a huge difference for my sanity. Cooking, cleaning, repairing that loose nail in the threshold that is gonna rip somebody’s foot open one of these days. Two taps with a hammer, problem solved.

We need that. We need that sense that what we make is real. We need to chop wood and carry water, or whatever our equivalent is. Mop the floor; dust the cobwebs. Pull on the Yak Tracks and go deal with the ice.

Organize, get our feet on the ground, show up to protests and meetings. That’s how we get through these times.

Anyway, this ice is all supposed to melt this afternoon and tomorrow. But it is gonna be pretty for a few minutes when the sun comes out.