Someone has taken up a sifter and sprinkled just enough powder over the neighborhood to add some white, but not enough to blot out what's underneath. It is quite cold for here (in the 20s), but I see from my Weatherbug app that it is -1 in Amherst, Massachusetts, where Maggie goes to school. My sweetheart joked that Maggie (now home for break) must think we're having a heat wave. I suspect, however, that it is at least that cold for many of my New England and upper Midwest friends, and I hope you are all staying warm.

This morning, I will not be meeting my writing partner for a joint writing session because she is hosting author day at her local elementary school, where she is having Michael Dooling visit. Instead, I plan on spending a couple solid hours here at home. I will turn up the heat a smidge and see about getting some solid writing time in. Or revision time, actually. Because revision is SO much fun, as everyone knows. Am I right?

Revision is fun, of course, in some ways. It is highly satisfying to get rid of unnecessary words and to find better words here, better wording there, more immediacy here, better rhyme or alliteration there. It can also be a real challenge, as when you worry that you will never accomplish in real life the book you see in your head. You know, the perfect one where every single element is exactly as it ought to be and there's not a punctuation point amiss or a phrase that doesn't sparkle.

The thing is, even though I am revising picture books, and relatively small ones at that - the "long" one is just over 500 words, the shorter one is well under 200 - the task nevertheless feels HUGE. And I worry that I won't be able to fix the manuscripts, and that they will wither and die, like some of the others in my files. I try not to worry that I am, in fact, an incapable hack who has no business attempting to write these particular books, but those thoughts sneak in now and again.

I have decided to put the kibosh on the them.

Interesting (or maybe not) note about the word kibosh: its etymology is rather uncertain. It seems like it ought to be Yiddish, but it isn't, and there are claims that it might be Irish or Turkish or even French. I was raised pronouncing it KI-bosh, with a long I sound in there, but my sweetheart and many other folks I know pronounced it something more like ka-BOSH. And when it comes to negative thinking, I believe I will put the ka-BOSH on those negative thoughts, because it sounds significantly more violent. KaBOSH kaBOSH kaBOSH!

Tell me about your work, and your weather, and what you think (or don't) about the word kibosh.