It’s a sunny morning in my neck of New Jersey, and unlike the photo to the left, snow-free. The wind is relatively calm, and from my window I can see all kinds of birds pecking at the feeder and except for the barren vegetation, it could almost be anytime of the year. But it isn’t, and I don’t need to step outside into the mid-twenties chill to feel the hollowness of the season in my bones, especially when the Weather Bleaters are predicting a Snowmageddon for the weekend.  Sorry if I’m being a bit of a Debbie Downer, but seriously, after the choreographed optimism of the New Year fades back into the mundane, what are we actually left with? Only the anti-climatic yawn of the Dead of Winter and the mind-numbing ennui that follows.

Maybe it’s just a sugar crash after all those Christmas cookies, but last fall’s good intentions and best laid plans now seem as sensible as earmuffs in August. What happened to that get-up-and-go, those ideas that seemed so workable, those plans set to be implemented as soon as the everything got back to normal, post-holiday? Instead, you’re quickly finding out that things don’t really change, that everything goes comfortably back to the way it was, or more often than not, gets just a little bit worse. (Like waiting for that first paycheck of 2016? Times like these make you wish you’d majored in creative accounting and not creative writing.) You’re finding yourself just a little more broke, a touch fatter, a tad less cheerful and a whole lot lazier. A stretch on the sofa feels more natural that an extended stretch at laptop, and when you do find yourself in front of a screen, it’s more likely for Netflix than for fixing that severely flawed manuscript.

Not that you haven’t tried. To fix that manuscript, I mean. But everything you seem to write is crap. As it was the last time you looked at it just before Christmas. When you told yourself you’d make it better next month. When you had more time. When everything calmed down.  After the New Year. When all that holiday hoo-hah is behind you and you can finally think again. In January. Because in January the Universe presses the big RESET button and all wrongs get righted, everything gone down goes up, all promises are kept. When the Muse of Inspiration suddenly infuses us with glorious plot threads, miraculous turns-of-phrase and endings so sock-blowing that ever-elusive editor you queried back in the fall suddenly jumps from your proposal and screeches “MY GOD! THIS IS GONNA MAKE US MILLIONS!”

As if. So what to do?

Beats me. I’m depressed, remember? Deads of Winter tend to breed brain-deadness. Or at least that’s how it feels from here. All I can offer is this isn’t my first Dead of Winter, that I’ve made it through several, and there’s just something about January that breeds contempt. And invariably, things do pick up by February. Maybe it is all that holiday crap we ingested and like a six-year-old on Halloween night, we just need to sleep it off.

Okay, whine over. Back to work.