Rainy Wednesday
Work on the new novel went very well yesterday, finally. I'm sure it was Bunny's unflagging assistance that made all the difference. Alas, I am still very, very behind schedule. I have about 260 more pages to write in the next 15 days or so. And considering that I haven't taken speed in 2 decades, and I'm taking a 6-day vacation to Virginia beginning next Wednesday, well, you know, it doesn't look too promising that I'll meet that deadline, does it? (If your math skills are a little weak, it means I must write approximately 38 pages a day by next Wednesday. If you can keep your titters of laughter to a minimum, I will continue on with today's post...)
Assuming that no more pieces of the sky fall down on me in June, I should be able to have the novel finished by this time next month. First draft, anyway. We shall see!
It would of course behoove me to stick to the schedule since I am now booked solid for the rest of the summer with editing deadlines, and beginning work on the new novel in late August...
I spent most of last evening sitting out on my deck, ostensibly editing the new pages I'd written yesterday, but in actuality I was just staring at the trees and the sky and the little gold fiches at the feeders, etc., etc. The deck out back faces west, so you can sit there and watch the sun set. It's not Maui or the Riviera or anything, but it is beautiful nonetheless.
2 houses over, there is a house with a trampoline in the backyard. There's a very tall wooden fence separating the yards, but I kept seeing these little girls' heads popping up and down and they were laughing a lot. I know that American suburbia is notorious for being a breeding ground of intense familial dysfunction, but you know what? I absolutely don't care anymore. Those little girls, whoever they were, seemed really happy last evening. And they live in an idyllic little American neighborhood and they go to a good school. What could be better? Even if they should wind up in therapy someday, having supremely unfulfilled lives or something, they'll probably at least look back on last evening as a moment in their childhoods when they were perfectly happy. Right?
When I was almost 8, and it was the end of my 2nd grade school year, the TV show I Dream of Jeannie was extremely popular. And to my utter delight, my mom bought me these really really great summer pajamas that were fashioned after Jeannie's genie costume on the show. Even though Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bobby Kennedy were both assassinated right at that time, and the Vietnam War was raging and tearing everybody apart, etc., and even though I accidentally spilled cherry Hawaiian punch on my beloved transistor radio at our little "last day of school party" and it stopped working (and I wasn't allowed to get a new radio because they were expensive back then and I wasn't supposed to take the radio to school in the first place), even though all these intensely unfortunate things happened, what I remember most vividly about that period of time are those PJs and how thrilled and happy I was bouncing around on my bed, wearing them; getting to spend at least one fleeting moment of life being Jeannie, really getting to explore my inner Jeannie-ness. (The idea that 7 summers later I would be trying to kill myself becomes just a blip on the familial dysfunctional suburbia screen.)
You've got to take those moments of happiness wherever they pop up and just really live the hell out of them, right?
Last night, after I came indoors that is, it was all about popcorn and this:
I really love that movie. I hadn't seen it in years. If you recall my recent post about Like Water for Chocolate and the shock of how non-high school time really flies, I was similarly stunned to discover that this movie, too, has been out for 14 years already. Just astonishing, the way time zips by. This means that Johnny Depp really is, like, in his forties now. Suddenly that made absolutely no sense to me. How the hell did that happen?
Assuming that no more pieces of the sky fall down on me in June, I should be able to have the novel finished by this time next month. First draft, anyway. We shall see!
It would of course behoove me to stick to the schedule since I am now booked solid for the rest of the summer with editing deadlines, and beginning work on the new novel in late August...
I spent most of last evening sitting out on my deck, ostensibly editing the new pages I'd written yesterday, but in actuality I was just staring at the trees and the sky and the little gold fiches at the feeders, etc., etc. The deck out back faces west, so you can sit there and watch the sun set. It's not Maui or the Riviera or anything, but it is beautiful nonetheless.
2 houses over, there is a house with a trampoline in the backyard. There's a very tall wooden fence separating the yards, but I kept seeing these little girls' heads popping up and down and they were laughing a lot. I know that American suburbia is notorious for being a breeding ground of intense familial dysfunction, but you know what? I absolutely don't care anymore. Those little girls, whoever they were, seemed really happy last evening. And they live in an idyllic little American neighborhood and they go to a good school. What could be better? Even if they should wind up in therapy someday, having supremely unfulfilled lives or something, they'll probably at least look back on last evening as a moment in their childhoods when they were perfectly happy. Right?
When I was almost 8, and it was the end of my 2nd grade school year, the TV show I Dream of Jeannie was extremely popular. And to my utter delight, my mom bought me these really really great summer pajamas that were fashioned after Jeannie's genie costume on the show. Even though Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bobby Kennedy were both assassinated right at that time, and the Vietnam War was raging and tearing everybody apart, etc., and even though I accidentally spilled cherry Hawaiian punch on my beloved transistor radio at our little "last day of school party" and it stopped working (and I wasn't allowed to get a new radio because they were expensive back then and I wasn't supposed to take the radio to school in the first place), even though all these intensely unfortunate things happened, what I remember most vividly about that period of time are those PJs and how thrilled and happy I was bouncing around on my bed, wearing them; getting to spend at least one fleeting moment of life being Jeannie, really getting to explore my inner Jeannie-ness. (The idea that 7 summers later I would be trying to kill myself becomes just a blip on the familial dysfunctional suburbia screen.)
You've got to take those moments of happiness wherever they pop up and just really live the hell out of them, right?
Last night, after I came indoors that is, it was all about popcorn and this:
I really love that movie. I hadn't seen it in years. If you recall my recent post about Like Water for Chocolate and the shock of how non-high school time really flies, I was similarly stunned to discover that this movie, too, has been out for 14 years already. Just astonishing, the way time zips by. This means that Johnny Depp really is, like, in his forties now. Suddenly that made absolutely no sense to me. How the hell did that happen?
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