A Snowy Day (or three)

I refuse to call winter storms by their media-generated names. Winter storms are as common around Minnesota as rainfall in Washington state, warranting no notoriety. That said, if they are impressive enough, I may remember them fondly based on other events...

There was the massive blizzard of January in 1972 or 1975, when we had to sleep in our neighbors' basement because our electricity was out and they had a fireplace. I was 4 or 7, and that house's furry residents were the models for the black labs in SPOTD. Despite my deep fears of those dogs, I don't remember them being a problem.

There was the Halloween blizzard of 1991, forever connected in my mind with the Twins winning the World Series and me moving into my first house. I happily carried boxes through knee-high drifts, glad to be out of the stinky rental that made me cry.

And there were the blizzards that interrupted performances of The Sound of Music (in high school) and Cinderella (this past spring). Snow + the smell of decaying theaters. Good times.

Today's snow is less than memorable as a weather event. Some flurries off and on. Probably some wind later to swirl it around and make driving hazardous. But warm temps overall (30-32ish) and nowhere to be other than at home mean that, for the most part, this weather "event" is mostly an excuse to sit by the fire and read and revise Lio and Lamb in anticipation of my alpha reader's critique.

Here's the printed text.

My writing habit is to revise online as I write, which slows me down but works best for sustaining an ongoing sense of accomplishment. Then when I pick up the writing the next day, I revise my previous day's work again before moving on.

With SPOTD, I printed out, reread, and revised the entire text (all three books) over the course of a few weeks, sitting in the sun on my deck in the summer. After I broke the series into three books, I further revised and edited each volume multiple times. And as I self-published, I repeated the task several more times with the set text.

I haven't reread much of Lio and Lamb, with the exception of going back once in a while to refrech my memory of a minor character's name or small plot point. I'm uncertain how it will go. I AM certain I will remember this snowfall in connection to the reading.

Here we go...