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Been away from here a long time, as usual. Our smoky summer is long gone and winter has started with a couple of snowfalls that have since melted. Temperatures hovering at freezing so far, but real cold is coming, the weather folks say.

April and I set to leave for our 14th winter stay in Mexico December 29th, my 84th birthday, though she's been hobbling around with rheumatoid arthritis lately. She's had a touch of it for years, but it's gotten especially bad since this spring. Been trying to beat it holistically, but she's ready to try conventional medicine finally.

Me, I've had a bad back and stiff knees since our encounter with a big Pacific wave on the way in a water taxi to Yelapa two years ago. Both of us suffered spinal compression fractures that day, or have I mentioned this already?

My novel is out to several publishers (three, or is four, rejections so far), and I think of putting together a couple collections of my stories, probably to be self-published before I quit the game. Perhaps I will have to self-publish my novel too, eventually. So be it.

Meanwhile, I read every day or evening. Just finished Don DeLillo's Zero K. Before that (my introduction to him) read Mao II. DeLillo's pretty dark and deep, rather difficult but brilliant. He looks at what's happening in the world around him and mulls on it in his fiction. Not for everybody, I guess, but he makes you think.

Otherwise I'm reading Paulette Jiles, a marvelous writer my wife and I used to know when she lived in our area up here in Canada. She now lives, and writes about, Texas, particularly about mid-19th-century Texas and the conflict between white settlers and Native Americans, notably the Comanche and Kiowa, who raided white settlements and captured those they didn't kill. In The News of the World and The Color of Lightning Jiles manages to be empathetic to both sides, and recreates, in a wonderfully readable style, a lot of what that conflict must have been like. What's especially interesting is her take on the experience of white captives among Native Americans. That many after rescue, particularly those taken as children, preferred to stay with their captives, and suffered from being torn from them, is documented in such books as The Captured, by Scott Zesch, a book I have and have read, as Jiles no doubt has too.

Check her out online. There's a very good interview with from the Texas Monthly, and her blog, despite her disparagement of it, is always interesting.

That's all the news from here, as I root for Trump's fall and all his minions and all he stands for in my native country.