10

I transcribed something old, and the words and characters changed as I typed. Also: the meaning of some dialogue was apparent to me now in a way it wasn't then. I was more naïve about how people thought, and what I'd written as coincidence now struck me as the beginnings of conniving behavior.

One character is too much a reactor and a deliverer of straight lines, with some quirks I know will come later. I was thinking of her being the moral compass of the piece, but that requires a vocabulatry I haven't given her yet.

I have sketched out some sedentary but funny interactions. But there's no clock on it. There's no increasing pressure. So I have to decide I care enough about this piece to go back and fix it. Or: does it need increasing pressure? "When all else fails, have a guy with a gun come in" seems arbitrary. I'm early enough and free enough to just play with it until something natural makes me want to keep the pages turning.

A Day's Pleasure: an explanation

What you see above is a late (but not final) image of the wraparound cover of a book I wrote and helped design. It's called A Day's Pleasure, and it was issued in March 2009 by Knopf. There's a good description of how it came to be riiight here.

I don't think there's a full image of the cover anywhere else on the web, which I rather enjoy. To see what the book looks like, you more or less need to own a copy, which is cool. Likewise, there are no images of the Patrick McDonnell illustrations anywhere, and only one person has shown a scan of the JD King plate.

There seem to be almost no copies available, and to answer people's questions: there were 850 copies that I signed and numbered for Powell's (and which sold out in five days or so). JD and I also signed and numbered 100 limited edition copies. There's an ultra-limited edition: twenty six copies, signed, numbered and slipcased.

Significant Objects

This was fun to do. And it's my first published fiction since Sunnyside.

A New 0

Gave it a couple of weeks and realized I didn't want to write it. There's a school of thought that getting into any writing situation, no matter how ludicrous, will ultimately teach you something. Which is true. But I think I'd rather be taught something else by some other story.

This was going to be a short story, but the subject matter would have required a novel's-worth of preparation. I'd rather do something else.

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I'm thinking about the Literature of Contempt. Also - related - the Literature of Insecurity.

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I don't know the answer to this: when gathering threads for a story, it's necessary to shift focus repeatedly, to be distracted by the wind so you can be open. Why is it, then, that the internet is so disruptive to thought? I think it might be because it mimics the freedom of woolgathering while substituting, like a cuckoo's egg, its own images for the ones you might have made up.

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