It’s St. Nick’s!  I have a (tentacle) stocking up and shall receive tasty Godiva truffles!  Okay, truthfully, the stocking is always up because it amuses me.  It was a craft project from a few years ago after seeing such a thing on a website for Lovecraft Christmas songs.  I couldn’t justify the money to buy two cd’s so I could get the tentacle stocking for free, so I went to the fabric store and dug through the remnants (mmm, remnants) until I found a sickly mossy green velvet and a dirty, shaggy dog fur that just made me happy and put this monstrosity from the deep together for my “mantle” (read: tv stand).

I understand that celebrating St. Nick’s is a bit of a local phenomenon.  Not terribly sure if it is the Dutch influence or the Catholic influence or the combination of the two in my hometown that made it a thing.  In my house, it was simply a night where I put a stocking on the door of my bedroom and in the morning, it would be lumpy with treats.  My favorite was always a Life Saver book which is funny because I don’t especially care for hard candy.  I just liked that they came in a book-like package.

We never did the stocking thing for Christmas, just St. Nick’s.  And, much like so many other holidays, St. Nick himself had very little to do with it.  I remember hearing the story of treats being left in children’s wooden shoes (Dutch) and their stockings as they hung by the fireplace, but that’s all pretty vague now.

So, not that I bought myself truffles for St. Nick’s, no; I actually bought them because I told myself I could have them if I completed my Sherlock stories.  At least one.  Or perhaps a truffle a chapter.  Who knows if they’ll actually last that long.  I’ll probably freak out in a sugar rampage one day and inhale the whole box and make myself sick regardless of what I promised myself.  (Read Allie Brosh’s God of Cake on Hyperbole and a Half for a brilliant example of such a thing.)

I had made a similar promise to myself with Star Trek: Into Darkness.  Bought myself the movie and swore I wouldn’t watch it until I’d finished a chapter.  Didn’t happen.  I have no willpower at all.  (Depriving oneself of Benedict Cumberbatch is unhealthy, anyway.)

I would love to have Lazarus Machine done by Christmas.  Of course, I had hoped to have it done by the beginning of November so I could focus on something else for NaNoWriMo, and then I had hoped to use NaNoWriMo to help me finish it.  That didn’t happen either.  In fact, I think I might actually have a negative word count for November.  (I don’t even think I wrote a blog post.)  I went out of my way not to write.  Granted, my brain is a bit bogged down in my own personal hell right now, but somehow all that anxiety has overwhelmed my ability to write as well.

So now, that story has taken me over a year, and I do want it to be finished.  I want to do other things (which I’m not doing even though I’m not working on Lazarus) and I want to move forward.  But I’m frozen with anxiety and indecision.

At least I had yesterday and today off.  This is my first “weekend,” meaning two days off in a row, since, quite possibly, August.  Working retail means irregular days, which is fine.  I love having weekdays off and can’t imagine how anyone functions doing the 9-5 thing with appointments or banking or whatever.  It also means I rarely work more than three days in a row before having a day off, which is nice.  But sometimes I just need two days off to cleanse my head.  I spent yesterday and today watching Big Bang Theory for hours, and being totally lazy, and oh, I watched Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy because Martin Freeman is totally adorkable.  🙂

Writing was in my head, but I kept doing one more thing before I’d do it, read one more story, watch one more video, do dishes, whatever would keep me from having to do it.  Seriously, I buffed my fingernails and dusted off my ceiling fan. So now it is quarter to midnight and I have to work tomorrow (though not in the morning, thankfully) and while I at least relaxed on my days off, I did nothing of any use at all.

Well, not nothing.  The buildup of dust on the ceiling fan was starting to defy the laws of physics.