Cheat Again, Like the Saucy Redhead You Are

Well, I'm just going to give up feeling badly about swiping stuff back from my kill file, and embrace it instead as a handy resource for increasing my word count without actually having to do any work. As I said before, "I did write the section, just not recently," and as my mom responded, "The writing counts no matter when the words were written. It was your creative decision to include them so they count!" Which just goes to show that one should always listen to one's mom. In any case, it's not like I stuck something in from a different book, or something -- the section goes there.

Oh, the redheaded part?

Last Saturday, the 22nd. Fetching, isn't it? I can't believe I never thought to do it before. I've been joking that I'll have to get a new redheaded personality to go with the hair, but I had to stop when my friend Pat said a touch dryly: "You've always had the personality, the hair just caught up."

Word Count: 31,357 (+1,157)

Work for a Living: THE REVENGE

So I've stopped working full time at the Best Day Job in the World and have gone to an 11am-5pm schedule, five days a week. That gives me time in the morning to either go to the damn gym (many thanks and a big middle finger to the endomorphic ancestors who have made this necessary) or to walk in the park and dictate fiction. So, not to make too many extravagant promises, but that should mean that this blog should hear from me a little more often.

I've been reading the excellent February House by Sherrill Tippins, about W.H. Auden, Carson McCullers, Gypsy Rose Lee and a supporting cast of dozens living in a house in Brooklyn Heights in the early forties, and it has been teaching me much. First of all, and I'm aware that I'm not the first to point this out, writers back then drank, my God. I'm fond of midprice Australian Shiraz myself, and Mike and I have spent some recent weekend evenings exploring the possibilities of the martini set I got him last Christmas, but holy cow, the Forties Writer Pro Drinking League is one I don't even aspire to. Add smoking to the mix and I'm surprised they lived to their thirtieth birthdays.

But where the book gets interesting is where it talks about their work habits, which is frankly what I look for in literary biographies. Carson McCullers found long walks to be "a therapeutic part of her writing process" and got lots of material from the things she saw, and Auden decided at fifteen that a great poet "arranges his life so that he can focus on his work." I haven't gotten to the Gypsy Rose Lee part, but I'd be interested to see if she wrote The G-String Murders naked, for the sake of verisimilitude.

Word Count: 30,200 (+620)

Sleep

Gawd, I know. I think it's the days getting shorter. You know, in the summertime, I used to get up at 5:30 a.m. and go to the gym? These days, it's all I can do to haul my butt out of bed at a pitch-dark 6:45 to get to work on time.

Because it's sleeping weather again, and I love sleep. I'll go to bed early just to sleep recreationally sometimes, I love it so much. All summer long it's been too hot to sleep, even with our shuddering old air conditioners: I stick to the sheets and I have to have a fan blowing on me, which always makes me feel like someone's poking me gently (pokepokepokepokepokepokepokepoke all night long).

Back when I worked the second shift, I could sleep as late as I wanted. My God, that was awesome. I didn't set an alarm for four years. I used to wake up at around ten, and then just lie there for forty-five minutes or so, dipping in and out of sleep. I called it "surfing the doze." I can't do that anymore. Even on weekends, Jamie needs his shot or I have to go to the bathroom or I might as well get some work done before Mike gets up. I miss it a lot.

I used to dream a lot about flying during the doze periods. When I fly in dreams, I start out by running, and the strides get longer and longer until I'm jumping about twenty feet at a time, and then I kick my legs out behind in the Superman pose and I'm off. It seems to take just enough effort that I feel like I've developed a new skill, like riding a bike. "Everyone will be so surprised when I show them," I always think. "Pretty soon we'll all be getting around like this."

The last time I had the flying dream was about six weeks ago. I ran, I jumped, I kicked and I flew, just like always, but when I got to the part about everyone being surprised, I thought "Gosh, every time this happens it turns out to be a dream." And I woke up.

Word Count: 29,580 (+574)

Write Other Things

So I actually have another demand on my time besides The Amateurs, a marriage, a cat and the Best Day Job in the World: a freelance writing practice. I've written articles for a couple of magazines and copy for a couple of PR ventures, but my favorite client by an order of magnitude is The History Channel Magazine (available in Barnes & Noble stores nationwide!). I get to write stuff for them that I'd be interested in reading, which is a great boon to a freelancer; it has taught me an awful lot and on top of everything it's thrown me a decent amount of spare change. Not enough to quit the BDJitW, but enough to finance a couple of pretty awesome vacations. The current issue, for any who are interested, features me on heritage breed livestock, which was of course fascinating but for some reason a deadly hard topic to write about.

I have deadlines coming up for two HC articles in December and two again in February, and -- this is so typical there ought to be a pill for it -- the need to simultaneously research and write two articles while trying to maintain any level of involvement in The Amateurs has rendered me all but incapable of doing either. I have never been one of God's anointed multitaskers, but faced by the choice of (a) researching haunted hotels on the Internet or (b) going for a walk with my microcassette recorder and dictating a thousand words of fiction, I seem to default to (c) picking out slipcovers for the dining-room chairs or (d) surfing the Op-Eds for my daily dose of outrage.

Word Count: 29,006 (+695)