22. Thereabouts.

I'm just starting to see the outlines of the whole piece's form. It's not so much that I've hiked up a mountaintop. More like I've heaped jigsaw puzzle pieces into different stacks and I've started to figure out that a certain percentage of this thing is going to look like seashore and a certain percentage an egret. Or turkey. No, no, egret.

I am feeling blindly, but every day I have a few lines that seem apt, and I write them down, and I just yesterday got to the place where one set of lines met another, two railway tracks heading in the same direction.

18, more or less

Working outside of my comfort zone.

I have a basic structure in mind for this -- it's something relatively short and I think I know most of the actions that have to happen. But each individual scene doesn't have a shape yet. Generally I need an ending before I can get comfortable with the rhythm and the depth of detail and the places to deviate. If I know the end it's easier to know when I'm driving toward it and when I'm faking left.

Accepting now that I don't know any of that now, today I just started writing what I do know. In the middle of maybe six scenes. It's a little like doing a jigsaw puzzle and taking the pieces that are definitely people and definitely faces, and leaving the blue sky for later.

15

That count is estimated, as I'm working in a weird format.

Anyway: I actually did have a guy with a gun come in, and everything changed. I'm currently wrestling with whether combining two ideas is going to generate one deeper storyline. The alternative is that it's going to be two separate horses jogging along together until they don't. One of the pieces I'm toying with is significantly older than the other, which might work well.

The key to this current piece is staying true to character, which feels now like trying to stay on a balance beam during a hurricane. The hurricane is the dark force of comedy. Every moment is a chance to toss away character in pursuit of a laugh, and the discipline is all about not going broad. Broad is bad.

I'm also learning that some ideas I knew I wanted to get to are no good anymore. I might have written them five years ago but not now. That story about Tolstoy? Alas.

The white noise has receded a bit and I think I'll threaten to keep at this until it's done.

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.