A very small number of people (possibly equalling the number of people reading this very post) may have noticed that our less than lively pace of updates here has slown to a dismal crawl, punctuated with the occasional desperate plea to come back tomorrow, next week, when it gets better, when it gets different, when I grow up already. Or something of that nature.

This post both is and isn't like that.

On the one hand, the Wombat had bona fide intentions to return to some semblance of productivity with regard to the File. These, in turn, were undermined by circumstances in fact beyond the editorial staff's already shaky control, to wit:

1. The Official Editorial CPU (referred to lovingly around the office as "The Spentium") is badly antiquated, and has not enough RAM to properly run the bloated monster which is Microsoft XP. Startup is an endless and agonizing process, and while browsing, word processing, and even a little photo editing still work fine once the programs have been slapped into life, a click between open windows is now a decision made with great deliberation, and indeed is often the occasion for a trip to the kitchen for some more tea. Either major surgery or a replacement is now clearly in order.
   
2. The Unofficial Secondary CPU ("Theresa's Nice Laptop") has, in an appalling bit of bad timing, died for the second time. We've sunk enough time and money into trying (ultimately without much luck) to get it fixed to be frightened of running out and buying a new one without a lot of serious thought. See #1 for where that leaves the both of us.
   
3. Just when that particular music demanded some facing, we both got hit with a distinctly flu-like virus. The Wombat shivers as it types! How much do I love you?
   
4. Work continues to be rather all-consuming while I'm in the office, and the sense of "no time to fool around and think about what to post later" is now pretty much the norm.
   
5. Aforementioned all-consuming nature of the job is attended by a growing awareness of how easy it would be to lose said job by choosing to comment on any aspect of the book/publishing world world that I could be perceived as associated with at work. And at work I pretty much touch on....well, you get the idea.
   
6. Aforementioned all-consuming nature of the job means that I don't wind up with the time and/or energy to learn about the wonderful world outside of current books and publishing. And that I'm starting to forget most of what I knew about old books. Which leaves me little to write about, outside of that which I feel sufficiently dissuaded from getting into.
   
7. During what little time I'm able to grab for writing, you'd think I'd be working on my book, wouldn't you?
   

With all that, the sane thing to do would be to call a hiatus. A cease-fire. A Winter Break. A Sabbatical. Something covered under FMLA, perhaps. The problem there is that it would just feel dreadful to lose the strange, tenuous, perhaps shallow sense of connection this ill-maintained jumble of thoughts and idiotically convoluted brainteasers allows me to feel with...here it comes...you.

That's right.

It's your fault.

OR...maybe I'm just too much of a narcissicist to give up on this little stage at the back of the coffee shop (and no, we're not getting in any more of the brioche this week. Our supplier moved to Prague.) In any event, I am going to try to do some things differently around here. Most of it, you won't like. Long, rambling posts that are straight out of the History Channel of memory, and badly edited at that! Things of that nature. Sounds pretty wretched, doesn't it?

The Quiz -- I tried to banish it once. But the File without the Quiz is like a cute little monkey without virus-carrying lice; we pretend to disdain the lice, but secretly we're rooting for them to take over the world. Go, go, you little bloodsucking champions! Similarly, the quiz parasitically leeches our precious time and thought away from all that we could do and accomplish. It drains us of energy and supplies us with nothing satisfying in return. It's like Everybody Loves Raymond in this respect, and that's one of the most successful shows in the history of television. Deny it if you can.

So the quiz stays, if at all possible. But the Quizmaster is now overmastered. I desperately need some guest MCs to come in and preside over it. Write today, won't you? Because if you won't, who will?

All right -- I will. But you'll regret it.

Final bit: Though all of the above is characterized by what spelling-challenged nations refer to as "whingeing," I will add one dissonantly happy note, in the form of a link to four years ago today.