Resistance Resolved

I returned to the novel a few months ago, surprised to find that I had a lot less to accomplish in order to finish this draft than I believed. I quickly wrote Chapters 12, 13, 14, and 15 in less than a month, and assumed I'd motor write through Chapter 16 -- the final chapter -- in a similar fashion.

And then I stopped.

I finished Chapter 15 on a Thursday morning, so I took Friday off (I try to take a day off when I finish a chapter or story, a recommendation I picked up from Dorothea Brande's fabulous book Becoming a Writer). That evening, Husband and I headed off for a weekend getaway to Berkeley, our last shot at some vacation time before the two of us become three.

Monday I returned exhausted, so I took another day off. Normally I might have pushed on through, but again, "woman's work" intruded--the exhaustion attendant to the growing of Number Three won out over my work ethic, and even dulled the guilt a little bit b/c it's not just me I'm thinking about when I sleep most of the day now.

Tuesday, I forced myself back to my favorite table at my favorite cafe--and discovered another problem related to Number Three: I'm no longer comfortable for long periods of time in the cafe chairs, so after several hours of producing NOTHING I gave up and went home. I spent most of the afternoon working on transforming our office to Three's room.

Wednesday I woke up determined to work at home, in my far more supportive chairs. We all know how it ends when I try to work at home. More energy pumped into Three's room.

Thursday and Friday I decided that as long as I was resisting work, I might as well give myself REAL permission to do so--and so I poured myself into Three-related projects, with no thought to the novel at all. The only condition: Monday I would return to work.

And I did! Yesterday I made notes for what will be the last chapter of the first draft of this book, and today I wrote the first 500 words of it!

Despite the "lost week," I don't feel as badly as I usually do about walking away from my writing. Part of that has to do with listening to the David Allen podcasts at www.43folders.com. One, in particular, is about procrastination, and ways around it/through it.

Regarding working THROUGH procrastination, it was suggested that often the problem has to do with the task at hand not having been broken down to the most basic WIDGET property of itself. In the case of Chapter 16, then, I set myself the MOST BASIC WIDGET STEP of reading the notes I'd been gathering for the last several years regarding the ending of this book.

But easy as that should have been to do--the notes are very neatly collected in a binder that is tabulated into three acts, and the acts themselves are separated into chapter groupings--I still didn't wanna. Part of that, obviously, is my general weirdness about finishing things--I get a little wonky when the end is near. I know that about myself, which I why I am a hugely happy follower of the WIDGET approach--tiny little baby steps distract me from the finish line. I'm not COMPLETING THE FINAL PAGES OF MY NOVEL. I'm "preparing the chain of events" for the chapter; I'm "writing 500 words"; I'm "writing 500 words"; I'm "writing 500 words"; and somehow, 500 words from 500 words from 500 words from 500 words from now, I'll surprise myself by making it to the finish line.

Which is how, of course, I got back to work yesterday.

But last week, I resisted the WIDGET approach, and still, I got a lot done. I moved Husband's clothes in the master closet, and turned what had been his closet into Three's domain. I sorted all the baby clothes my mother had saved for 30+ years into bins by size, and laundered the clothes appropriate for Three's early months. I sorted through 6--count 'em, 6 banker's boxes of Husband's unfiled papers, and filed them. And I started selling books we don't want, to make room for Three's first library and storage system. I didn't write--but I did something important, and pressing, and this is also GTD-appropriate. Like Allen said in the podcast, if you're procrastinating one thing, then you better have a lot of other things you're doing until the resistance passes--and I did!

That said, by week's end I was near my usual "I haven't written in a week and I'm falling mentally to pieces" point--I do get crazed when I stop work. That was sort of a relief, actually--I'd been worrying that maybe I'd be okay, not writing, just doing house stuff ... and I'm pleased to report, I'm not. I can do it about three days before I start to ache for my writing. By a week, the ache is a full-blown "get thee to a word processor!" scream in my head.

I'm guessing the moodiness isn't easy on Husband. But he did get a fully organized, color-coded wall of the master closet in return for my week at home. And I got reassurance that despite the unbelievable amount of time and attention I devote to Three's impending arrival, I haven't yet completely lost myself.

So I'm happily back to regular programming.

JSF & KRAUSS

A few months back I made my feelings about Foer-the-person very clear here.

Not long after, the new book dropped, and I bought it, figuring it was no longer fair to keep ripping into the guy unless I actually read his work. To be honest, I dreaded reading the book, and let it sit on my bedside table for almost a month before I steeled myself sufficiently. However, eventually I did reach for it, and I have to say, I thought it was great from the very first page. I loved this nine-year-old and I willingly followed him all over the boroughs on New York as he battled his own inner demons and went searching for the lock to fit a mysterious key. I loved his friends, too, and his relatives, and not only did I laugh out loud at many passages, I also cried a great deal, too. So JSF got points on both those counts. Lots has been said in not very nice ways about the “gimmicks” in these pages (photographs, sketches, pages of number-strings) but I, for one, found them not gimmicky in the least (and let me be the first to say that I am always always reading with my gimmick-radar on, which is why I refuse to read 99% of everything that has any relationship to McSweeneys). I found all those photos and sketches and numbers to be completely character- and experience-revelatory. Ultimately, I liked this book so much that, finding myself with an hour to kill during errands last week, I chose to drive myself to the nearest bookstore and read the last 100 pages leaned up against a bookshelf with a store copy in hand, because I just didn’t want to wait until I got home. And I cried at the end, sitting on that bookstore floor while people stepped over and around me, so there you go. I said I’d withhold judgment until I’d read the new book. I read the new book, I liked the new book. The guy can write, and I wish him the best future career. That said, I also wish he’d keep his clapper shut.

Anyway, since I like books and I like marriage, and Nicole Krauss is married to JSF, and her new book dropped around the same time his did, I ordered both her new book and her first. I’m halfway through the first novel now and Jeesh, this woman’s imagination and her extraordinary, aching, precise prose are breathtaking in the extreme. I’m reading this book slowly because I don’t want to finish too fast, so yeah, I think she's pretty good, if not better than her husband, too.

On Books, Because Writing Has Halted Due to Parental Influx

First off, if you've read DFW's Broom of the System, which yes, I did force myself to finish because I was in snowy Meeker, and really, there was nothing else to do, somebody, please explain it to me. I didn't get it at all.

But on the other hand, great book: Meg Wolitzer's The Wife. Too lazy to hyperlink today -- go look it up yourself. Perfect length for 2-hr flight from Denver to LA, and if you're a writer, it really does "the writing life" to a fantastic (by which I mean, totally imaginative to the extreme heights of possible career trajectory) and absorbing degree. I hate to fly, but the book kept me tuned in enough to not flip out entirely, and considering my general choice of flight reading is back issues of New York Mag and whatever tabloid has Jessica Simpson on the cover, that really is saying a lot. (Fair warning: if you're not, yourself, a wife, The Wife may not resonate as deeply for you ... don't say I didn't warn you. But for me, thought it was great, since I spend all my time thinking about issues like being a wife and/or writing. FYI, last year's I Don't Know How She Does It was similarly successful for me, so there you go.)

Famous Last Words

Ok, all those things I said late Wednesday about all those things I was going to accomplish ... poof. Some combination of hypnosis (snow on mountains, light on snow) and hormones has felled me in my tracks.

But I'm still getting a lot of reading done. Abandoned Hedwig & Berti "toot sweet," as I like to say. I don't need "charming" Holocaust novels, thank you very much.

But Thursday night I read Lily Tuck's The News From Paraguay, and I'm here to tell you, it absolutely deserved the Nat'l Book Award. Totally absorbing, lovely prose, fascinating story, time/place fabulously rendered. Go Lily Tuck. All naysayers should just be quiet.

Have moved on to Xmas present from Husband, who upon hearing me say I was no fan of David Foster Wallace--Husband has been re-reading A Supposedly Fun Thing ...--offered me a copy of DFW's first effort, The Broom of the System, and said, "Try this."

Began it last night on a couch in the living room next to a roaring fire and was having NONE of it. Moved into the bedroom and it began to grow on me. So there you go. I'm only 145 pages in of this nearly 500 page paperback, so the jury's still out, but I'm sticking with it so far. It's a little bit Vonnegut-meets-Pynchon-meets-DeLillo, but since I haven't actually read any other DFW besides the first 30 pages of Infinite [Book]--has anyone ever read the whole thing, now, really, I mean, every single phrase, no skimming?--and the lobster article he wrote for Gourmet mag this summer (or was it Bon Appetit?)--maybe that's how all DFW is, anyway? I, for one, have little to no clue, really, except to find author photos featuring men in knit caps slightly ridiculous (see the photo in A Supposedly Fun Thing ... and I'm sure you'll agree).

And while we're on the subject, Lily Tuck's author photo sucked, too. How severe can one woman be? I mean, she might as well have been wearing a wimple.

On Being Home

One of the benefits of being in any of my mother's houses is she always has a large stack -- more precisely, stacks and stacks and stacks -- of hardcover novels around, usually a) new; b) recently dissected by the NYRoB (my mother actually reads the NYRoB, unlike me, who before cancelling my subscription years back would just let it pile and pile until the pile was yellow and easy to clear out of my tiny West Village apt); or c) totally over my head, usually Russian or South American in origins. (This is a woman, who, in the last four days, while suffering the flu, has been watching Chabrol films on DVD, and describes "Before Sunrise" as "fourth rate Rohmer"). She does her shopping at Three Lives, which is about three feet from her apartment in NY, and she ships boxes of her finds out here to Meeker, which is why late last night I was curled up with The Master--final impression: gorgeous book, a perfect Jamesian ghost-story that is totally illuminating, and fittingly, haunting--and why today I finally got a gander at ...Max Tivoli. Wasn't as thrilled with that one as the Toibin; I felt that reading through the first two-thirds of Tivoli was harder work than a work that I wanted, but the ending was so lovely and heartbreaking I think overall it's a success. I cried, despite feeling slightly annoyed at how exhausting / ennervating I found the actual reading of the book to be, so clearly I cared more than I supposed. He snuck up on me, Mr. Tivoli did.

Which is pretty impressive, considering that when I was a child my best friend and I were convinced we were spawn of the planet Xabadiaxalo, where people grown down, and that we'd been in a scientific accident when we were what would pass for 11 here, and our aging process reversed, so that we were now cursed to grow up. Our fellow Xabadiaxalans sent us to Earth so we wouldn't feel like freaks. We wrote several novellas about our lost lives, and illustrated them too.

Anyway, snow came in last night and went all day and we have inchees and inches out here. Something about the snow made it tough to work most of the day, though I did get lots done on the 2N treatment late this afternoon. Tomorrow afternoon I spend some more time with Darlene.

Friday I think a bit more about characters for 2N, work up better histories for them that I can refer to later on in the process, when I get confused (which I know will happen, so better to get that packed away now). What is Daniel's actual family background? I sort of like the idea of Daniel's parents and sister being in a cult somewhere in the Northwest, whereas I think Nic has to be wealthily orphaned, sort of like my sister's old friend Thomas Shaw, who lives directly opposite my parents in the Village and who was left a Picasso that you can see hanging inside his living room, if you're gazing carefully from across the street in my parents' living room, which my sister and I, sometimes, are.

Then, Saturday, start the actual writing of 2N Ch. 1.

Then, when parents leave LA on the 14th, I need to turn my attentions to finishing Ch. 1 and having a finished finished finished Darlene to workshop, plus a new draft of a new story, if I'm not to get behind my New Year's resolutions just out of the gate.

MY NEW YEAR'S RESOLUTIONS

* Produce a new chapter draft each month, plus a new story draft for collection each month
* Workshop a new story for collection each month
* Submit stories to lit mags in batches, quarterly (March 1, June 1, Sept 1, Dec 1)
* As soon as draft of 2N is complete, find readers -- (no endlessly tinkering with early drafts, as I did on Hart! Tinkering can be done AFTER first round of notes received ... must avoid losing steam in anyway I can this time ...)

To bed, perhaps with a copy of a novel called Hedwig and Berti that my mother handed me a few days ago -- comes highly recommended by Three Lives, but since I don't really know the "new" guy there, I'm not sure what that means, yet. Haven't been in there myself in ages, since I'm trying to watch the profligate spending habits and find that anytime I'm in a really good bookshop I walk out with too many hardcovers. (How else to explain my walking into Skylight just before Xmas to get a copy of Black Beauty for my cleaning lady's daughter, and ending up lugging home Dave King's The Ha-ha? Actually, there is an explanation: I knew him obliquely at Columbia, back in the day. Also, while we're on the subject, it was a pretty good book--he set himself a difficult task, narrating it through the eyes of a hero who can't talk nor read nor write but is otherwise completely able-minded, and I found that, despite this, he succeeded in finding a way for that hero to drive the narrative, not just have it happen around him. And he plumbed him deeply, too, and didn't beatify him in anyway either--he had warts on him, and he was totally realized, and though parts were a little cute--did his room-mate have to be an Asian-Texan soup-maker with an industry going on in the kitchen? did the kid in his charge have to be half-black? ((that said, it does make the movie-version seem inevitable, and I suppose that's what we want, right, we novelists who writing in a sea of other hopefuls are hoping somehow to hit it bigger than them? I can't blame him ... I mean, my agent said to me, when I first pitched her the plot of Hart, "who do you see starring in the movie?"))--it was overall a good novel about which, I kept saying as I read it, "Wow, he did a really lovely job," and if you don't believe me, ask Husband, who had to suffer through my saying it over and over again.)

Progress Report

Got a pretty good plot-line map together today, so tomorrow I'm going to use it to fill out my existing treatment for 2N. Ending is still a little hard for me, despite the fact that the final scene was the first image I conceived for this entire story. Problem is, I think one of the characters must succumb to Hodgkins if the final image is going to work ... however, since this character takes a lot from a close friend who recently fought his own bout with cancer, and has made it through, killing off fictional character comes hard. But it's really beautiful, the final scene, if he dies ... really. Hmm.

Otherwise, spent the day gorging myself on left-over sweets from my parents' New Year's bash (my mother trucks in the entire contents of Dean & Deluca when she comes out here) and reading The Master, the Booker short-listed novel by Colm Toibin. Am loving it, not just for the lovely prose and imagination-mirroring-meandering of its narrative, but because I feel Henry James' pain (at least as it's created by Toibin) -- how hard it is to balance life with art, and not feel you are missing something at one, by favoring the other ...

OK, tommorow: 2N Treatment work
Thursday: Dirty Darlene work -- finish new draft!
Friday: Start working on 2N Chapter 1

Oh and on This American Life ...

A wonderful story on air this weekend that was so good I stayed in my car at the parking lot of my gym in the sweltering heat to hear how it would end:

"a story by Jonathan Goldstein about what it's like to date Lois Lane when she's on the rebound from Superman."

Hmm. Wonder if his novel Lenny Bruce is Dead is as crappy as the Amazon reviewers claim.

Slowly but Surely

337 decent okay sorts of words and a font-experiment:

Last night, as I began reading Plot Against America, I was struck, as I always am, by Roth's sure touch. His sentences have a sense of authorial certainty that I envy to no end. Every word is perfectly chosen, every clause indelible, every detail indispensible. How many writers can really list all the ways women work, all the things they cook and clean and organize daily, filling a long paragraph with this list, and not seem like they're just jerking off on the page? (I didn't mean to conjure up Portnoy with that statement, but there you go.) I was ruminating about this, and then I began to wonder if maybe how his sentences LOOK, art-wise on the page, has anything to do with this --

-- so today I came into the office and surfed around to find a font that approximates that in the new novel and the copy of American Pastoral that's in the office. I ended up at fonts.com, where fonts aren't free but at least you don't have to wade through "surveys" to get to the good stuff. I searched by sight, and came up with a font called Hollander, which I bought and installed on my machine. Then I killed a bunch of time making my Chapter 1 look a lot like Chapter 1 of American Pastoral ... and I gotta admit, Maud Newton was right on the money:

My work looks better and I'm willing to convince myself it reads better, and with that Dumbo-esque metaphorical-flying-feather in mind, I managed to get Anna out of Hillsdale and onto Route 44. Yippee!

Sunday Wifely Sunday / OUTSIDE VALENTINE by Liza Ward

I may have hit the pinacle of housewife. Yesterday I cleaned up after the cats, changed, laundered, and folded the sheets, made the shopping list and weekly menus, SHOPPPED both at Trader Joe's AND the Mayfair to fulfill needs of said list, worked on wedding photo albums, and still found the time to make my own power bars.

In between all this I read the Sunday Times (new NYTBR: BLAH AND OVERBLOWN IN EVERY WAY ... how did they possibly make it LESS interesting/insightful?) and got through the underwhelming OUTSIDE VALENTINE by Liza Ward.

OUTSIDE VALENTINE is another entry in the pile of books/movies/albums about the Starkweater murders. (By the way, I can make this segue to my impressions of the book because much of the time I found myself quietly chastising the housekeeping skills of various fictional characters from my real-live couch while I waited for my home-made power bars to finish baking. Seriously. How sad is that?)

Anyway, the "hook" of this novel is that Liza Ward "lucked" into being the daughter of a Starkweather survivor (her father's parents were killed by the crazy teenagers), which meant she could easily get enough publicity to make most people blind to the problems with this book. Reviews were so glowing I bought into the hype, which is not a common thing for me, and may account for my disappontment, but there you go.

First, a quick plot check. OUTSIDE VALENTINE tells three stories: that of the middle-aged Lowell Bowman (the survivor in question, 1991); Susan Hurst, a girl who lives a few streets down from the Bowmans and will someday marry Low Bowman (told from her POV in 1962); and Caril Ann Fugate, Charlie Starkweather's girlfriend, who narrates the killing spree (told from her POV, 1957). Ward is pretty good at writing the girls -- she writes vivid scenes, and the teenagers are fully drawn and completely believable. The problem is when she tries to write the Lowell Bowman, whose adult life in 1991 is meant to anchor the narratives of the past.

I have two issues with Lowell Bowman. First, Ward presents him as terribly damaged and emotionally remote because of the tragedy he's experienced -- however, she never succeeds in bringing him to life, perhaps because he's so remote to her she can't feel him, either. (If indeed she started this project as a way to get closer to her father or understand him further, as far as I can tell she hasn't succeeded).

But worse, I thought, was the way she used Lowell to function in the plot. Because we see the girls as teens, and we experience the events that shape them, they are completely alive to us. However, Lowell is absent for the central event of his teenage years -- the murders -- so Ward chooses only to show him as a grown-up, having lived with that absence for decades. So she has to invent a "today" life for him that will drive and anchor the more vivid "past" parts of the narrative, but the life she chooses for Low is wish-washy and unbelievable. He's a failing art dealer in New York who has grown cold to his wife and distant from his children for reasons that are never explored (I'm sorry, but "30 years ago my parents were murdered" is not a good enough reason if you've been functioning just fine until now). Worse, the 1991 plot development that drives the descent into the 1957 and 1962 narratives is Lowell's adult wife Susan asking Low what's in a safe deposit box that they've been billed $3000 for: and he CLAIMS NOT TO KNOW.

Ok, I'm sort-of-in-a-fiction-sort-of-way okay with forgetting what's in a safe deposit box. HOWEVER, if you don't know what's in it, then why the hell do you refuse to go deal with it? Shouldn't you be curious, especially if there's a $3000 rental fee hanging over your head?

Totally annoying. If I had been the editors of this book, and my writer told me she needed a safe deposit box because the contents of said box were going to be the link to Susan's 1962 narrative sections and Caril Ann's 1957 narrative sections, then I would have had him OPEN THE BOX at the start of the novel, b/c this move of having Low avoid it and avoid it for 300 pages is completely stupid. It just makes him annoying, and more over, it tries to turn the contents of the box into A HUGE SURPRISE, which, of course, it's not. It's a really lame trick. REALLY REALLY LAME.

That said, Liza Ward is not a terrible writer. She was totally convincing with the female characters in this book, and had she written a novel entirely about Caril Ann or even Susan I would probably have loved it. But she didn't. Ah well.

However, today I get my copy of The Plot Against America, so onto better pastures tonight.

And now from Philip Roth...

Like I said, I liked the suggestion reported by Maud of formatting your own pages to resemble those of books you love. So I spent a little time with the novels I love, or rather, the very very edited selection of them that I have in the office (I am trying to cut down on distraction around here):

David Leavitt, The Lost Language of Cranes
Somerset Maugham,Of Human Bondage
Ann Patchett, Bel Canto
Philip Roth, American Pastoral
Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle
Walllace Stegner, Crossing to Safety
Oswald Wynd, The Ginger Tree

I was immediately stymied, mostly because I don't actually OWN any of the fonts in these books, and I really do draw the line at spending hours finding them for free. But something worthwhile did come out of all of this ...

I found notes in my paperback copy of American Pastoral from the one time I met Philip Roth.

The occasion: a seminar at Columbia run by David Plante, who met Roth during the London years and was close friends with him. This seminar took place around the time of the Leaving a Doll's House / I Married A Communist flap, and David thought his friend was really depressed with all the savage press and so pressured him to come into the city and be adored by all of us. And we adored him. Meeting Philip Roth is like meeting Bill Clinton, and I know, because my family home is in Chappaqua and you really can't go out for Starbux without tripping over Secret Service everywhere these days -- in the Chinese restaurant, for instance, there's a huge shrine to Bill, every missive from/to the proprietors to/from the (eternal) President framed on the walls and annotated with photographic evidence of the mutual love-fest. To follow this digression further: I first experience Bill -- my friend and yours -- in the Chappaqua bookstore, called "The Second Story," which made more sense before it lost its lease upstairs from its current space. Anyway, I was browsing for the newest collection of Munroe stories to give my mother for Xmas, and I literally ran into a Secret Service agent as I browsed, which made me pull my head out of my ass and notice that I was sharing the tiny space with two booksellers, two Secret Servicemen, three completely overwhelmed locals, and Hillary, Chelsea, and Bill. I was pleased to see Hillary also had the Munroe stories in the enormous basket of books they were buying. Bill was mobbed by everyone in there, who couldn't stop touching him, and H. and C. looked on, slightly bored. I pretty much fainted against the bookshelve and gazed. The pherenome level was EXTREME and palpable ... we were clearly in the presence of a happy penis with an enormous brain.

Which is pretty much exactly how I'd describe my impression of Philip Roth, with one slight modification: more-depressive/guilty/less-functioning-but equally-adventurous penis, enormous brain. He was talking about Sabbath's Theater and American Pastoral, and every woman in the seminar room was draped across her patch of table, gazing longingly, twirling her hair. And not just the Jewish ones, either. Even the macho-est men in there were leaning towards him. Even the girl who two weeks early had railed and ranted about his being a horrible mysogynist was practically melting in her chair from his heat.

So here's what I managed to write down while I tried not to DIE just sitting there:

American Pastoral, first published in 1997, was first attempted by Roth in 1972. He was making notes about a girl who blows up the Princeton library, 7-8 years into the Vietnam War. He got 60-70 pages in, couldn't make it work, and gave up. (Tell me that isn't completely comforting in EVERY way.)

Ultimately, he reapproached the project when he started thinking about the Swede as a corrective to Mickey Sabbath ... once the focus had shifted from daughter to father, he found it easier to write the book. The reason he wrote the story from Zuckerman's POV was that he decided the Swede couldn't ever be conscious in the same way Zuckerman could, so he'd have to borrow Zuckerman's consciousness, a trick accomplished in what I consider the most amazing piece of writing EVER, on page 89 of the Vintage paperback ed:

Dispelling the aurar of the dinner at Vincent's, when I'd rushed to conclude the most thoughtless conclusion--that simple was that simple--I lifted onto my stage the boy we were all going to follow into American, our point man into the next immersion, at home here the way the Wasps were at home here, an American not by sheer striving, not by being a Jew who invents a famous vaccine or a Jew on the Supreme Court, not by being the most brilliant or the most eminent or the best. Instead--by virtue of his insomorphism to the Wasp world--he does it the ordinary way, the natural way, the regualr American-guy way. To the honeysweet strains of "Dream," I pulled away from myself, pulled away from the reunion, and I dreamed ... I dreamed a realistic chronicle. I began gazing into his life--not his life as a god or a demigod in whose triumphs one could exult as a boy but his life as another assialable man--and inexplicably, which is to say lo and behold, I found him in Deal, New Jerset, at the seaside cottage, the summer his daughter was eleven, back when she couldn't stay out of his lap or stop calling him by cute pet names, couldn't "resist," as she put it, examining with the tip of her finger the close way his ears were fitted to his skull.

It's amazing, right? 89 pages into the book, in which all has been Zuckerman: Zuckerman at dinners, Zuckerman at reunions, with just an em dash and a "lo and behold," we drop into the Swede, and we're all Swede for more than 300 pages to follow, without another look at Mr. Z again!

AMAZING.

The last note Roth pressed upon us was his feeling that a book has to argue an assertion, and so must employ specific DATA ... for instance, if he was going to talk about the loss of old for new, he needed something concrete to cipher that through. So he chose glove-making, and having chosen glove-making, he spent weeks visiting one particular factory, making notes.

LOVE HIM LOVE HIM LOVE HIM.

Okay, that said, nothing more inspiring than typing out a favorite passage to set you off into your own work ...

That First Date Feeling

An amazing thing has just happened. I just spent 45 minutes in a bookstore and didn't cry. In fact, I BOUGHT BOOKS. I read book jackets. I was thrilled there were so many choices!

I did not, as I have had for the last 18 months, feel jealous, petty, or small. I did not think all the books were yelling at me, screaming "WHY DIDN'T YOU WRITE US YOU PATHETIC POSEUR?" I actually kissed my almost-husband and sat on the floor with him and BROWSED without alarm.

Walked out with David Leavitt, Steven Byers, and four years worth of THE BEST AMERICAN TRAVEL WRITING in preparation for our 4 week honeymoon, a lot of which will be spent on trains where hopefully I will gaze out the window and have brilliant, travel-writing thoughts. I couldn't stop grinning.

And then I remembered:

This was the feeling I'd felt the night I met Dave, heading out to mee him for our first date on the heels of a fabulous workshop with the late Hubert Selby Jr. I was totally hyped up on the discussion the group had had about a story a friend of mine had written, and had spent three hours pushing for him to keep the PERFECT WONDERFUL SUBTLE ending that no one else in the room got. It was living writing to me, and I was thrilled to get to read it and talk about it ... and then I went on the best date of my life with a man who loved watching me love talking about writing, and dear reader, in 39 days I get to marry him.