So there I was on Sunday night, reluctantly watching the Grammys, wondering when they were going to get to showing the Foo Fighters or Jack Black again, when I realized what an incestuous self-serving marketing trick the Grammys really are. Now, hey, I’m not an ass. If I won a Grammy, I’d freak out and start spouting off about how “important” the award is and all that. But seriously, until that happens, I’m going to poke fun at things like that stupid way Taylor Swift gets when people clap for her: “Really? Me? You’re clapping for me? ME?! I just can’t believe it! Can you believe this? No!? Me either!” Oy. And I won’t even get into the whole Nicky Minaj thing at the end. WTF was that, anyway? But here we all are, talking and writing about it breathlessly like it was the greatest few hours of our lives, buying the music, believing the hype.

This is day two of a month-long trip through a special kind of hell for me as a writer. Throughout February, all manner of book bloggers and strangers will be posting about Lovesick, my second novel. They’ll compare it to my first, comment about how it could have been better, opine about what was great, good, and bad. It’s all good stuff, and I’m hella glad they’re doing it. Still, I think I’ll spend most of February cowering under my desk, if it’s all the same to you.

The Woebegone Umbrella: “If my umbrella could cry, it would be crying now.”

The Literate Bears: “Papa Bear grabbed his tattered copy of Moby Dick and lumbered off for his morning constitutional.”

The Wooden Uncle: “It took nearly three weeks before anyone realized that my uncle had turned to wood.”

The Scared Goldfish: “Goldie surely sensed his own impending demise, watching the colorful flecks of too much fish food raining down from the hand of Chuck, his careless owner.”

A Tasty Time: “Carla stood in the kitchen, a bloodied chef’s knife in her trembling hand, still furious that Diego had spoiled their tasty time with too much salt.”

Give it a try!

For the past few years, a couple of friends and I have made a yearly pilgrimage to their factory. Through mutual connections, we got to be friendly with Martin’s Director of Instrument Design, Tim Teel. Tim’s a luthier himself and a super nice guy. This year, Tim was kind enough to give us an insider’s factory tour. I never get tired of talking about guitars or seeing how they’re built, so it was a lot of fun to see it again with the guy in charge of design.

As it happens, I was planning to purchase a Martin this year, so I got the skinny on my chosen model (GPCPA4) from Tim himself. Needless to say, I am now one guitar richer. And I LOVE it. Truly. My fingers are sore as hell from playing it all weekend.

Funny thing about Martin. I’ve met my fair share of employees there, from factory workers to back-office types, and everyone says the same thing: I love my job. They’re proud of what they’re building over there in Nazareth, PA, and they should be. That, almost as much as the sound of my new guitar, has made me a lifetime Martin fan.

Check out some pics I snapped while there. I was far too involved in my tour and guitar to pay attention to taking pictures, so forgive me for having so few.

A habit of mine on cold days, when I’m in the shower, is to linger while enjoying the warm water, reading the backs of the various skin- and hair-care products. As a writer, I’m obviously sensitive to words. One day not too long ago, I began to notice something. The language on these products makes no sense. It all sounds great and likely subconsciously stimulates some normally dormant part of my reptilian brain into buying more, but when you stop and actually read this crap, it makes you wonder why we bother slathering this junk all over ourselves.

I don’t normally make New Year’s resolutions, but I’m going to break with tradition this year. This might sound a little out there, but I firmly believe that when the universe is trying to tell you something, you need to shut up and listen.

Lately, it seems like everywhere I turn I’m meeting someone involved with the guitar or someone who is looking for a guitar teacher. So what, right?

About 250 years ago, I was pretty serious about music, the guitar specifically. I even have a little page on my personal blog devoted to stuff I recorded over the years. I was the kind of person who practiced between 4 and 6 hours daily, running scales, writing music, and generally making a lot of (mostly) organized noise.

Merry Christmas! Or, if that’s not how you roll, Happy Holidays! Take it from me, the best gift you can give an author is the gift of support. So how do you do that?

Here are 10 ways you can help an author this holiday season:

1. Buy a copy of the book

Seems like kind of an obvious one, right? You’d be surprised how many times I’ve heard authors talk about readers who borrowed their book from their <insert family member here> and just loved it! It’s not that authors don’t appreciate the sentiment. We do. But the cold hard reality of this business is that sales matter.

I lasted about a month with my Ubuntu Linux laptop and arrogant, misguided anti-Apple attitude.

So what the hell happened?

For a while I was happy. I think the newness of it all hypnotized me. I kind of liked Ubuntu’s Unity until I didn’t. Same goes for Gnome 3, which I eventually settled on over Unity.

The trouble is, the software and hardware aren’t up to a standard I demand. In a typical writing session, both Unity and Gnome 3 would freeze at least once. Unity threw up bad enough one day that I was left with no icons, no launcher, no nothing. I spent a good hour figuring out how to fix that problem. As usual with Linux, the solution boiled down to running some obscure, undocumented script. I found myself constantly on the web searching forums for fixes to other annoying problems like how to get the Banshee music player to stop giving me a pop-up notification for every new song, or how to get the standard Ubuntu login screen back after some window manager I’d tried replaced it without asking. Or how to get my backup drive to auto-mount. You can kill a whole lotta time trying to figure those kinds of things out. There was a time in my life when I loved working on problems like this. Now, I say it’s a waste of time.

So I went to Staples. They were having a sale on Dells. I thought I’d pick up a Inspiron or some such thing and use Windows. At least Windows isn’t quite as closed as Apple, and it, you know, works. Plus, I can buy whatever machine I want. But nothing caught my eye. Everything looked cheap and the multi-touch aware touch pads didn’t work well, I felt.

I came home, determined to make Ubuntu work. I’d gone way out on a limb by publicly bitching about Apple, after all. I couldn’t back out now. It’s just a breaking-in period, I told myself.

A day later, I lost an entire session’s worth of writing when, mid-sentence mind you, I found myself suddenly staring at the log-in screen. Gnome 3 had crashed. Again. LibreOffice couldn’t recover the file. It was like it had never existed.

That’s when I thought, “Is it possible that Apple’s products really are that good? Maybe it’s a good thing that they control their hardware and software so closely. Maybe I’ve just gotten it all wrong.”

I think I have.

Apple, I’m sorry. You get it. Oh, and the Kool Aid tastes wonderful, especially with crow.

Carry on.

Rumor has it that Stephen King wrote all his early novels with Blackwing pencils. I know he wrote Dreamcatcher that way. At least that’s one story. Another story I’ve heard is that thriller writer Lee Child wrote the first of the Jack Reacher series, Killing Floor, in pencil. Elmore Leonard supposedly writes in pencil. And Joe Finder does as well. Some scenes, anyway. Hemmingway, Steinbeck and Truman Capote (a Blackwing user) were pencil writers all at some point in their careers.

So why pencils in this day and age of sophisticated computers and writing software? I can think of a few reasons:

1. There is something satisfying about the feel of paper, about working with the hands and simple tools.

2. Writing long hand, whether with pencil or pen, forces a writer to think about words more carefully before committing them to paper. Word processing software is wonderful, but it does have a tendency to produce word-vomit without good self-discipline. I’ve often thought that the number of unpublished novelists would drop drastically if agents and publishers forced hopeful writers to submit good old fashioned typed manuscripts.

3. We’ve all had the experience of meaning to sit down and “get some work done,” only to find that our wireless connection has gone down, our disk has crashed, or some other thing has gone wrong out of the half-a-billion things that can go wrong with our computers. One work day later, we haven’t accomplished anything except waiting to speak with tech support. This doesn’t happen with a pad of paper and pencil, although I suppose spilled coffee could derail the process for a few minutes.

4. Less distractions. Doodling is probably the writer’s biggest enemy using a paper and pencil. Or the fridge.

5. Writers are forced to retype their entire manuscript after committing it to paper via pencil. That’s a great way to catch awkward language and typos.

Well, I’ve obviously since received the pack I ordered and, no surprises here, I love ‘em! So does my father, a semi-retired woodworker who uses them for drafting duties. He’s a sucker for a quality pencil.

The Blackwing writes as smoothly as a good ballpoint pen and maintains its tip much longer than other pencils. The “lead” in those others is brittle. The Blackwing’s lasts and can withstand normal writing pressure. I sharpen mine with a hand-held sharpener from Staples. Just a cheapie thing, but it works well. Blackwings are not cheap, but I guarantee they’ll last longer than less-expensive brands.

One of the things that got me interested in the Blackwing (or maybe obsessed) is the staggering amount of creative output produced over the years by this pencil brand. I was hoping that having one in my hands and set on a blank page might inspire something amazing. That has yet to happen, but I love the thought if it.

And so does Cal Cedar, the company who makes them. Sure, they want to sell pencils, but they really seem to get it. Check this out: Blackwing Experience. Remember, we’re talking about a pencil, for God’s sake. I love it. They’re also offering a limited edition 6-pack: 3 602s (for writers) and 3 Palominos (for artists) for $10. The link is on the Blackwing Experience page.

Long live the Blackwing!

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to get back to fantasizing about writing an entire novel with these things. On legal pads.

If someone came to me and asked if they should make a prediction about the future of the publishing industry in a blog for all to see, I would tell them, in a word, “No.” I’m going to ignore my own advice.

I predict that 2012 go down in history as the year of the ebook. There. I said it.

Here’s what I mean. I think that in publishing circles, 2012 will be marked as the beginning of the end of mass-market paperback, trade paperback, and hardcover formats. Am I predicting the end of physical books altogether? No. There will always be a place for books. But when it comes to fiction and most types of non-fiction, I think 2012 will mark the beginning of the end.