Yes, yes, this newsletter covers Valentine’s Day, otherwise known as VD – bwahaha – the day when everyone gets to have a “heart” attack. The only question is whether your coronary comes from a lustful arrhythmia or a caffeine spike from eating megatons of chocolate.

I favor a confection known as Nipples of Venus, which sort of blurs the line between passion and pigging out. Hey, if “life is like a box of chocolates” as Forrest Gump said, Nipples of Venus are my turn-on. But I get a few Valentines too – even though my longest relationship only lasted two hours (gotta beat that two-hour mark). You know you’re not a heartthrob when Cupid shoots you with soggy soda straws.

That said, my email used to get a lot of “Dear Abby…” stuff. Started when I was writing columns for StorytellersUnplugged. The subject matter was wide open but defaulted over 10 years into mostly Q&A’s based on email responses to Sullygrams and columns. About three-quarters of the questions that came in were on relationship problems. Talk about an education! For an author who invents characters for a living, it was like reading the diaries of Freud, Jung and Casanova.

Anyway, the advice-seeking emails slacked off when StorytellersUnplugged went dark over a year ago. But if you check your driver’s license to make sure you’re old enough and are sitting down, you can still go “back to those thrilling days of yesteryear” because all those columns are now restored on my author’s site. I was honored to pen over 120 of them with crazy titles like KY JELLY AND THE HEADLESS SQUIRREL (2006 09-16 SU column ). Mixed in by date with Sullygrams, the columns begin here on page 2 and run through page 4: https://thomassullivanauthor.com/Sullygrams&Columns/Sullygrams&Columns-page2.html

So, how did your new year begin? January is named for the Roman god of beginnings and endings, you know. My January generally lives up to its reputation. There have been beginnings I celebrate for things that will never end, and there are endings such as the passing of close friend Glenn Frey that are far too terminal. This year included some shocks in the latter category. One was the stabbing death of a 27-year-old friend, another the unexpected death at age 46 of Dolores O’Riordan whose iconic song “Dreams” became a benchmark in my life.

And I don’t know if this is a beginning or an ending, but my first hardcover novel out of New York was/is THE PHASES OF HARRY MOON and it’s seeing some new action. The EP Dutton edition, 1988, struck a lot of sparks in the literary world, including a Pulitzer Prize nomination. The Chicago Tribune couldn’t make up its mind whether I was a John Barth, John Irving, William Gaddis or Kurt Vonnegut Junior, so it concluded I might be a combo of all four! The novel is quite different from anything else I’ve written. A fun-house ride through a carnival of outrageous humor with poignant twists and unexpected turns, it remains in many ways the closest thing to my natural voice. 30 years on it still has a cult following. Ironically, sudden recognition at the same time for one of my stories in a whole other genre created an identity crisis in the marketplace that I’ve never recovered from. Fans of contemporary mainstream literature shy away from my genre reputation and genre fans return the sleight. I am “the man [writer] without a country,” it would seem.

Be that as it may, here comes a celebratory new issue of THE PHASES OF HARRY MOON from Crossroad Press -- https://crossroadpress.com/product-category/authors/thomas-sullivan-2/ ! Neither the digital age nor Amazon had begun when it debuted in 1988, so the e-book edition is a first appearance in that format, BUT…a new hardcover and a new trade paper edition will also be forthcoming, I hope soon. More on the hardcover/trade paper as they become available. The e-book is already up on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0798NN8X8/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1516825905&sr=1-1&keywords=the+phases+of+harry+moon

Whether January is beginnings or endings, it always redirects life. If you are above room temperature you meet the definition of being alive and something is happening to you. The quality of that depends on how you look at it, how you process substance. Or as I put it recently on Facebook:

Skied my paper thin skull into oblivion this morning – absolutely hypnotic state! Over hill and dale, crashing the still life woods, exploding through mists like a phantom from another dimension, round and round I went, at least twice as far as any of the other 50+ skis I’ve done this winter. Touched all the stations of lives I’ve lived out there and let my mind soar unfettered from one perspective to the next. I guess there’s a bit of Zen in that – and so be it – but when you stop reaching for things, you affirm your freedom, your potential, and the freshness of life before you. I love that renewal. It’s not the kicks in the teeth that should consume you, it’s the sudden kickstart of the heart that tells you your dreams were justified after all. If you’ve ever seen romantic idealism in anything go the distance you know that nothing short of that will ever do. It may be one minute to midnight, your back may be against the wall, but an eternity of all that matters is within your grasp. There are no endings. Only the sweeping aside of ashes, the tabula rasa that beckons words to leap from your blood, and the excitement of freedom as pure and unblemished as a snowfall.

This month’s photos below: #1-2 color edits are a pale substitute for winter’s glistening magic on Elm Creek’s ski trails, but either way you get eye candy; #3-5 my sister Merry Elizabeth, followed by the two of us in our Detroit backyard, followed by one of the steamships my Granddad Sullivan captained; #6-7 a blue morning at Elm Creek and a photo from the foot of my yard; #8 keeping up the nautical tradition of Sullivan sailors, that’s little Tommy Sullivan, my mother and my sister possibly on Saginaw Bay (though we lived on the East Coast for a while, and that could even be somewhere in South America); #9 my mother and father – yeah, my dad has a broken nose (tape), he had Eliot Ness’s old job (“The Untouchables”) as a Federal agent; #10 four on a couch – our happy family quartet!