“Ya’ll know what’s weird? Sometimes I have weird thoughts. Is that weird?”*

I seem to have nothing to say. No, really. I can’t get anywhere on this third book idea or even the idea I had for a fourth book – which involves planning for the holidays and should be easy-peasy – or blog posts. I’m doing good to get an email done.

What is up with this? I don’t get it and it’s a strange, unsettling feeling. The last time I remember feeling this way – sort of – was the month of August. That was a blue month. The book was at the printer and I felt foreign. It was an antsy, jump-out-of-my-skin feeling that was kind of awful. But even then I had no lack of whinage about it.

But this, this complete lack of topics of anything to say? I felt like this once before, the summer after my husband and I separated. I had nothing to say and even worse, I didn’t like my writing voice anymore. At all. I forced myself to draft the introduction to the summer section of More Culinary Kudzu. I gave it to a friend to read and kept asking what she thought of it. Finally, the night Katrina hit, Tillman and I were marooned at her house. Under much duress she admitted that she had actually read it, although she had told me before she hadn’t yet had time to, and, well, she didn’t like it all that much. It was too negative and complainy and angry. It made her not want to read any more of it as full as it was of bile and bitterness against…the heat and humidity that is a Mississippi Delta summer. So. There was that.

There has been no great upheaval in my home life over the last couple of months. Well, besides, Christmas. There was upheaval aplenty during December, which I do need to write about for that holiday planning book, while the agony is still fresh, as a writer friend urged me to do.

I’ve drafted something for this blog and have an idea for a couple of posts for my blog but still ya’ll. I just can’t seem to get with it. I know, I know. Listen to this whining. If I were reading this, my advice would be to just freaking write. It doesn’t matter – at all – if you don’t “feel” like it.

I think I’m still suffering the effects of an all too-busy autumn and holiday season. I also think I may require more time alone than the average person. My favorite kind of weekend in the world is not a whirlwind of fun and activities from Friday evening to Sunday afternoon. Rather, it is a long two days full of enticingly-empty blocks of time, so that I can stay in my house the whole time, perhaps working at the computer, perhaps reading, perhaps wasting way too much time watching The 100 Greatest One Hit Wonders on VH1, or perhaps getting a wild hair and dashing down to Jackson to spend a few hours at a bookstore, perhaps going to Oxford to sit on a friend’s patio and drink beer. Those are the kind of weekends – with all the choices and options – that I crave at least once a month. Call me indulgent and I won’t disagree. That’s just part of my makeup; I need that alone time. I haven’t had one of those weekends since September. Yeah, so. I blame my lacklustre everything as of late on that fact.

*Second-favorite line from The Girls Guide to Hunting and Fishing