Hello again.

Sorry for the long silence. It was not by choice.

I've just lived through the Christmas from hell. Most of it was spent in a bed in St. Vincent's Hospital in Santa Fe. Parris took me in to the hospital emergency room on the morning of Christmas Eve, and they admitted me almost immediately after diagnosis. It seems I had a raging e-coli infection of my urinary tract. Urosepsis, they called it. So I spent Xmas and the days after in a hospital bed, hooked up to catheters and IV tubes, getting some heavy duty doses of antibiotics and some of the other wondrous products of modern medicine.

The good news: the antibiotics worked, and knocked out the infection. I was released a few hours before the end of 2010, and have been recuperating at home ever since. I'm still taking oral antibiotics and various other pills, and will be for a while, but the worst is past... and boy, am I glad to be be out of the hospital.

I was weak as a kitten when first released, and I still tire easily... but I'm stronger every day. Strong enough so that, yes, I still intend to make the trip to LA for the TCA. And yes, I will still be doing the signing at Vroman's... though it remains to be seen how taxing that will be for me. If you're attending, I would ask you to go easy on me and only bring a book or two for signing, and not everything I have ever written. I have to watch my strength.

The bad news: well, obviously, there's nothing like a week in a hospital bed to kick a hole in your plans and good intentions. I did hope to have some exciting announcements to make at TCA, but that won't be happening now. But hey, all the great stuff HBO will be rolling out about the GAME OF THRONES series should provide excitement enough.

I don't want to trivilize what I've just gone through. I'm a generally healthy guy, and this was the most serious bout of illness I have suffered in decades, and the first time I have seen the inside of a hospital (emergency room visits aside) since 1973. But I am on the mend now, and I expect to be back to my old self by the end of the month at the latest, and back to work well before that.

Until then, though, I probably won't be posting much here.

Thanks to all of you -- friends, fans, readers -- for your understanding and good wishes.