We get the bulk of our annual rainfall between December and April, and after that it’s so unusual that the weather people comment on air about a few drops in June, September, or October.

In fact, a lot of people here go looking for winter. At the same time New Yorkers are heading for Florida and the Bahamas in droves, we’re bolting skis on the roof of our cars, packing chains, and heading up to the Sierrra – our real mountains – in hopes of finding the deep snow and freezing weather that promise good sport.

What my family realized when we moved here and did it the first time blew us away. About the seventh day, when your clothes are too damp to get completely dry at night, and your lips are chapped, and the cold’s getting into your bones, you bolt the skis on the roof of the car again, and drive right out of winter! Four hours after that last bit of ice down your neck and you’re sniffing spring flowers, hearing birds chirp, and shedding sweaters for polo shirts.

Now that’s my kind of winter!

I hope you saw “The Muse” with the always wonderfully cranky Albert Brooks and Sharon Stone. I may not have the delectable Sharon Stone – indeed, I could not afford her version of The Muse. I am lucky, though, to have friends and fellow writers who perform some of the same functions, but without the requirement of little, blue Tiffany boxes in payment. On a slogging day, I can email one, who’ll give me a little pep talk. When I’m searching for a character’s uniqueness, I may see it in a friend and morph that onto the page. Yesterday, Val McDermid, author of The Wire in the Blood and  Place of Execution, visited Janet Rudolph’s regular crime author salon, and her matter of fact, thoroughly professional approach to the writing life was the latest inspiration.

Now, to get organized and into that last scene for the last time…I hope.

One way to be heard in all that noise, I was told, is to keep your blog fresh. Update it so people will come back. Provide comment options, and be ready to engage. Get out the word via other social media when you have something new on your blog. Okay, but 177 million tweets sent on one day in March 2011. And as of January 2012 Facebook has 800 million active users.

Getting noticed can be a matter of where you show up in Google search. There are companies that have sophisticated ways of helping with that and no, I don’t mean by burying porn words in your code. It has to do with identifying your website by the true defining terms (“mystery writer” for example) to the bots crawling around in the ether 24/7. Those companies have many, many clients who are also defining themselves with terms like “mystery writer,” of course.

A successful blogger is a little like a champion surfer, staying one length ahead of the massive, curling wave about to swallow him up. A slight error, a shift of weight that slows him down ever so slightly, and under he goes, not to be seen again until he mounts a new offensive.

The noise online is phenomenal. There are, at any moment, perhaps 50 million people competing for eyeballs and what marketers call “top of mind.” Lately, in the small corner of the blogosphere where I live, some excellent bloggers and entire blogs are calling it quits. A good blog takes thought, commitment, energy, and focus. And these wonderful authors are not sure there’s a payoff. Can busy readers afford the time to drop by your blog? Do blogs sell books? There’s no reliable data that says so, and authors aren’t feeling it. Well, if they don’t sell books, do they support the market for books? Bookstores are closing and the online market is flooded with 99-cent e-books.

Change is the only constant, and as the noise in the machine reaches epic proportions, we who blog have to figure out the next moves.

I’m back to the blog after a couple of weeks off. First, I’d like to invite you to come to one or more of the handful of newly scheduled events I’m doing in the next couple of months. (See that page on this site.)  The first is February 9 in Sunnyvale. I’ll be on several Sisters in Crime panels, and doing two library talks about the way huge amounts of money are moving the art world internationally via the famous auction houses, private sales, and the experimental creation of an exchange “market” for art modeled on the stock market.

Right now, I’m trying to decide what to do with the next Dani O’Rourke novel. Candidly, the editors who liked the book felt they couldn’t justify buying it because rights to the first in the series belong to another publisher, one that wanted the second but would have tied it up for a decade as well. The book industry is rather tangled and unsure of itself these days. Many authors are throwing up their hands, heading straight to e-books they can publish and control themselves, and offering them at ultra cheap (right down to free) to generate interest. That’s even turned out to be a way to interest those same reluctant, traditional publishers to later buy the same book and re-publish it if the author has done a super marketing and sales job on her own.

The editorial feedback my agent and I have gotten for THE KING’S JAR has been good enough to make me think it is ready to share. Question is, do I serialize it for free on this site, self-publish it and the next in the series, or leave it with my agent while the traditional market stews about how to proceed in general?

Anyone with an opinion is welcome to chime in – I know I’m not the only published author struggling with this issue in 2012! What are you doing? What are your friends doing? And, Readers, is it true you’re abandoning print for e-books (at least for fiction)?

Happy holidays and warm wishes for your happiness and success in the New Year!

A robot that irons. My habit for decades has been to wait until the floor beside the to-be-ironed hamper is piled with the overflow of waiting, crumpled stuff before I drag out the squeaky ironing board. I was lucky for 18 years: Tim tackled it while watching “Law & Order,” and I’d come out from the study to find neatly folded pillowcases and my shirts on hangers, and all he wanted was a kiss and vast amounts of praise, which I was happy, happy to give. I’d rather have him than a robot any day, but what can you do?

A film option for MURDER IN THE ABSTRACT. Okay, that’s big time dreaming. but more to the point than a pony, right? I mean, why not? We could pitch it as “The Thomas Crown Affair” meets “Law & Order.” You have a better idea, I’m listening.

The happiness of my grandchildren. Whatever makes them smile makes me smile too. Fortunately, they all love books. (I think it’s genetic.) The youngest is only 2 and the oldest is still shy of adolescence, praise be, so they don’t yet see me as a peculiar old lady…their Christmas gift to me!

Peaceful change in the world. Here at home, let the spirit of Occupy bloom in peace. In the rest of the world, I hope that the hunger for money and power submits to a greater hunger for the common good. But I’ll settle for no more suicide bombers in civilian neighborhoods.