When I fell asleep last night (note I didn’t say went to bed), the world outside was wet and foreboding, much like that giant log flume at the amusement park when you were 5.

When I woke up this morning, everything last thing as far as the eye could see was encased in ice.  It seems Mother Nature wanted to teach me not to complain about rainy days in January instead of getting "real" winter, so She gave me a taste of both.

For the record, diminutive half-beagle/half-Chihuahua dogs like mine don’t much care for walking on ice-crusted lawns.  Apparently it made her paws all cold and offended her delicate sensibilities.  Believe me, you haven’t really lived until you’ve seen a small dog hove her back end in the air somehow while taking care of the morning business.

Where was I?  Right, the world was, well, is encased in ice.  Which means all the Big Weekend plans have officially been cancelled for today.  The Puddinpop’s afternoon basketball game was called, the Puddinette’s standard Saturday trip to "The Store" –which somehow always becomes about 4 stores – is postponed, and we’re all basically stuck in the house looking at each other, waiting for someone to snap first.

Of course, I see this as a particularly fine opportunity to slip in one of those legendary 3-4 hour winter afternoon naps, but it seems my better half hath declared that since we’re going to be just hanging around anyway, we might as well clean up around the house.

As you can imagine, this plan was met with nothing but boundless enthusiasm.

But I digress.

I suspect we’ll compromise on someplace in between an afternoon of utter, shiftless laziness and one of immeasurable productivity. 

My money’s still on the nap, though.

Later on, I’m going to slow cook some beef within an inch of it’s life in a hearty barley stew.  If I’m lucky, I’ve got a Guinness squirreled away someplace to cook with. 

Either way, odds are good that between dinner and the big fire I’m about to build, we’ll all survive Icepocalypse 2012.

If your Saturday plans too have been waylaid by an icy cocoon, may your hearths be warm and your cocoa sweet.  And try not to slip and crack your coccyx when you go to check the mail.

In fact, why not just forget about the mail?

Wouldn’t you rather take that nap, anyway?

Pud’n

First off, “whoopee” is a strange word.  It looks strange.  It sounds strange.  Say it with me, “whoopee”…”whoopee”…”whoooopeee”.  See?  Hardly  seems like a word.  I even had to check online to make sure I had it spelled right.  Thank goodness all that anti-SOPA blackout stuff is dictionary.com and wikipedia were available.

Anyway, so, yeah, it’s “whoopee”.

Also, I should probably mention before I write too much more that I’ve been fighting a particularly nasty cold all week.  And by fighting, I mean whimpering softly to myself while wiping the incessant flow of snot from my now-blistered nostrils with what seems like those special kind of tissues that are embedded with 40-grit abrasive sand.

Of course, after three days of nose-blowing, all tissues are basically sandpaper.

Beyond the whining, the point is that I’m pumped full of cold medicine, and the volume of oxygen my brain has been receiving lately is but a fraction of the usual amount.  Thus, I’m wandering around a fugue state that alternates between the random expression of nonsense (curly soup! Dancing Oompa Loompas! Michele Bachmann!) and outright hallucination (please stop eating my ring-tailed lemurs, Mr. Elephant, and why are you cauliflower blue?).

Good. Now that that‘s out of the way…

In case you missed it – although I don’t know how you did since I talked about little else for a while – I finished my first novel last year.  Since then, it’s been edits, edits, revisions, and edits.  Two full passes later, I’m now mostly happy with it.  Truth be told, though, I’m beginning to suspect that an author is never truly, completely happy (or done) with a book.

I still have a few questions about whether everything makes sense, and worst of all, I’m no longer a credible resource when it comes to that plot.  After all the writing and revising, I need someone with a clear, fresh set of eyes to tell me if what I suspect might not be the best way to handle a couple of things are actual issues or just me being hypercritical of myself.  Someone with an opinion I trust has the latest draft right now, and is (hopefully) doing exactly that.

So then, what now?  And I don’t mean, what do I do when Beta-Reader Prime (a key Transformer in the next installment of the film series, no doubt!) finishes?  See, that’s an easy one: fix whatever is still broken and then begin the arduous process of amassing query rejections from agents.

Unless it’s massively broken or just crap, but we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.

No, what I meant by that question is, what project comes next, Puddin?  I mean, after 2010′s “120,000 Words About Nothing” challenge and the 2011 push to finish the novel, what now?  Surely I’m not going to just sit back and rest on my (remarkable short and unimpressive) laurels, while the cold medicine and copius pints of beer pilot me through another year of blog posts, right?

Right.

As I said in my belated New Year’s post, 2012 will be the year of my first non-fiction book.

But wait, you say, why non-fiction?  Why now?  After all the effort to pick up momentum on the fiction side of things, why drop that to focus on something completely different?

Well, because all my life, I’ve envisioned myself writing novels.  I always wanted to create imaginative fantasy worlds where people deal with the same problems we deal with, but while, you know, occasionally having to blow stuff up, shoot things, maybe escape the undead, or train unicorns.  But, you know, half-dressed and without head colds.

The thing is, though, just because I dreamed that doesn’t mean it’s the right – or only – path to take as a writer.  Which is honestly something I never considered until after I started Puddintopia.  Even since the long-ago 2003 and 2005 versions of the blog that have been lost to the vagaries of time (not really, but I never migrated those posts into the current blog software), people have been asking me why I didn’t try to write professionally.  When they asked, my brain always translated that to mean I should buckle down and write my fiction books, but eventually, after enough of you asked if the book in-process would be Puddintopia-esque, I began to understand that there might be other options.

What I’ve realized is that some of you, at least, seem to enjoy the quirky, often-a-mere-step-away-from-abject-nonsense approach I bring to Puddintopia (and to a lesser degree, Hoperatives, although I do try to make sense with those) posts.  And, to be honest, I enjoy the kind of silly-but-pointed view I take here.  I’m not trying to slap myself on the back in a fit a congratulatory gymnastics or anything, but if I didn’t like it, I wouldn’t do it.  My first goal is to entertain the Puddinette, by which I mean to make her wet herself in laughter; the second goal is to entertain myself.

So with that percolating in my noggin, sometime early last year I had one of those Eureka! moments, and I’m not talking about vacuum cleaners.  I thought of a topic that I have enough personal experience with to develop into an entire book and that could definitely use a quirky/fun approach as compared to what else is out there.  It’s something that touches most people’s life nearly every day, but is still incredibly misunderstood.

And, no, I’m not telling what it is.  Not yet. Although I might drop hints every so often.

So, then, there you have it. I haz a supra sekrit non-fiction book project on the front burner for 2012, and The Heavy Lifting starts next week.  I’m hoping to have a first draft completed much faster than the novel, because a) I’m a more experienced writer now, b) I can write non-fiction faster than fiction and c) this book should be a good bit shorter than the last.

With any luck, then, I’ll be back in the edit-edit-revise-edit Loop of Doom before Independence Day.  And then I can start sending queries to a whole slew of non-fiction agents and accumulate their rejections.

So…who wants to race?  Most rejections by New Year’s wins!

Pud’n

Every so often, as the author of a successful blog, you’ve got to take a moment to respond to reader correspondence.  You probably can’t imagine the daily avalanche of email and and such that require responses. 

Of course, neither can I. 

Notice that I said successful blog above.  While Puddintopia is undoubtedly a lot of fun, it’s not exactly a cornerstone of internet traffic.  I’m sure other blogs, like Scalzi’s Whatever, and Dooce’s, um, dooce, that generate upwards of tens of thousands of hits a day probably get more mail daily than Santa Claus, IN gets letters from grade schools in early December.

Puddintopia, on the other hand, gets, um, less than that.

At any rate, I thought it might be fun to hit the mailbag, except, as noted, there isn’t much of that around here.  Well, there is, but it’s mostly spam.

But, you know what?  Spam deserves a response every now and then, right?  I mean, not like an actual reply or anything, because that only results in more spam, at best, or, you know, identity theft in the case that you chose to help that poor Nigerian dictator launder 27,000,000 dollars into the US through your checking account.  But I digress.

So then…to the spambag*!

Earlier this morning, I received this golden little nugget:

To: Puddin at Home

From: Columbia House

Subject: Got the day off? Spend it with us!

Imagine my surprise at first, thinking I was being propositioned via email!  I got my underthings into quite a bunch over it.  In fact, I was preparing to write out a sternly-worded reply wherein I would suggest that

1. they ought be ashamed of themselves for attempting to tempt a happily married man and
2. their salacious offers might have better luck if they were to get to know their recipients a bit better and target the ones actually getting a day off of work.

I was not one of them.

I swallowed said stern reply, though, when I read that the inside of the email.  It was simply a DVD club trying to sucker me in one of those 12-for-a-dollar deals where the "Club" somehow ends up owning not only your DVD player, but your house, your RV, your dog, and your first-born child if you ever try to escape, er, unsubscribe.

Nothing much fun to reply to there.

My next favorite item came from a magazine:

To: Mr. Puddin

From: RealSomethingMagazine.com

Subject: SHIRLEY, A Something Offer for REAL SOMETHING Readers

Dear Real Something Magazine,

Based on the fact that you seem to understand that I’m to be contacted at puddin@puddintopia.com and you even included the honorific "Mr." as part of the recipient address, I’m a little baffled as to why you seem intent on calling me Shirley.  My name isn’t Shirley, and with the exception of those three days I can’t really remember in Vegas in 1998, I surely don’t believe I’ve ever gone by Shirley. 

Also, regardless of what your records might indicate, I am not now, nor have I ever been, a reader of "Real Something" Magazine.  I’ve never subscribed to "Real" anything magazine.  In fact, the only magazines I have subscribed to at any point in my life were focused on beer, cigars, video games, and/or photographs of heavily airbrushed scantily-clad female celebrities whose print features oddly seemed to correspond with a new TV show or movie release.  As if someone was using the publication for press.

At any rate, at the moment, the only magazine I might have any interest in would proudly display covers of tall, curvy, glistening glasses of beer.  As you can imagine, then, I’m not terribly interested in whatever homemaking tips your periodical has to offer.

Please make a note of it.

And again, don’t call me Shirley.

Finally, there was this jewel of a comment submitted to Puddintopia:

From: hhpzwxgbcz

Subject: nzgbpqveejoupqjb, gsxoxjntpo

I, um, just don’t have words for this one.  The best part, though, is that this comment was left today on a nearly month-old post.  Really, comment spammers?  Really?  I mean, it’s like you’re not even trying anymore.

It’s sad really.

Please do better.

Because if this is how it’s going to be, future installments of spambag are going to be pretty dull.

And no one wants that.

Pud’n

*Minor details have been changed to either protect idiots or make this bit seem funnier.

It’s 8:45 PM on a Friday night. Four hours ago, when I left work, I would have bet all the gold in Fort Knox that I was more likely to spend my evening scraping crusty barnacles of the bottom of the Queen Anne’s Revenge than hanging out at a roller skating rink.  But you get two guesses where I am at the moment I’m writing this, and I’ll give you a hint:  there are no boats nearby.

Yes, somehow I managed to end up at a roller rink on a Friday night.  In other words, what little pride I might have had when I woke up this morning is no longer even in the same time zone with me.

What’s even worse is that I’m not even skating.  I’m sitting off to the side in a booth reminiscent of Al’s Diner.   You know, from Happy Days?  I’m pretty sure blonde wood-grain Formica went out of style in the mid 80′s.  And, well, if you’ve been wondering where it ended up after that, I know now.

So, here I am, surrounded by elementary and middle school kids, one of whom is the Puddinpop*, skating around and around and around in circles.

Circle and circle and circles.

Oh, hey, did I mention they’re skating around in circles?

The thing is, I just don’t get the circles. And yes, I’ve been roller skating.  I mean, at some point in the far distant past – when indoor plumbing was a rarity and dinosaurs still roamed the Earth – roller skates touched my feet.  And to most everyone’s surprise given my otherwise total lack of grace, I managed to remain upright most of the time.

But while I wasn’t falling down, I wasn’t exactly sure what to do with myself.  Besides following the mullet in front of me, that is, which was apparently following the mullet in front of it.  At the time, it was one big chain of humanity following the regrettable 80′s hairstyle ahead of him or her, with the hair at the very front chasing the hair at the very back, making a great circle of unfortunateness.

I assumed at the time that the situation was a singular incident; that other people put on roller skates or ice skates and then went off and did…stuff.  Surely someone had fun activities and adventures that didn’t include seeing the same posterboard ad for Jimmie’s City Records every 360 degrees.

Turns out, though, I was mistaken.  Roller and ice rinks the world over are filled to capacity with circle skaters during "open" skates each and every day.  I guess someone must find that sort of thing fun.

Maybe.

Then again, some people find doing their taxes fun too.

Its not that I don’t get skating.  I play ice hockey in a recreational men’s league.  And roller skating seems like it has potential.  But I find wandering around in a circle about as entertaining as watching mushrooms grow.

I suppose it could be just me.   Some form of character defect, perhaps?   Maybe it’s indicative that I have an underlying philosophical problem with Man’s Endless Search for Accomplishment.

That seems unlikely, though.  I’m the same Puddin that once considered sleeping until noon, getting up for a Big Mac and a haircut, taking a nap, and waking up just in time to meet my pals at the bar a Saturday well spent.

I don’t know. The good thing is that the Puddinpop seemed to enjoy skating with his friends.  Truth be told, though, after an hour or so I recognized that look in his eye that said he was questioning how he might apply his competitive nature to Circle Skating 101.

See, even the kids get it.

Because when you’re playing "Follow the Mullet", nobody wins.

And apparently the game hasn’t changed in 30 years.

Pud’n