Nurture Discontent

We recently bought a new map-of-the-world shower curtain to replace the moldy old kitty-cat one, and I was surprised to find it fostering discontent in me in an unexpected way.

I've always wondered if there isn't someplace in the world where we could live, comfortably and safely, on nothing but my income from freelance writing, which currently makes up about 15% of our total household income. We both have decent day jobs which are not too unbearable, but they take up way too much time that could be spent on writing a novel, learning French, baking our own bread, raising a puppy, reading the whole Bible including the boring parts, running a frame-by-frame comparison between the new Wizard of Oz DVD and the unremastered version, sleeping without an alarm clock every single day -- everything, in fact, besides sitting at a desk at some day job.

I don't know where that mythical place is where we can live on my writing money, but thanks to the shower curtain I now have a lot of possibilities lined up. "Maybe we can live on my writing money in the Aleutians," I'll say out of nowhere. "Maybe we can live on my writing money in Archangel'sk." The southern horn of Africa is the part closest to the toilet. "Maybe we can live on my writing money in Fianarantsoa. Maybe we can live on my writing money in Gaborone."

I don't really want to live in Africa; my notions of what weather and landscape should be are pretty firmly within a few degrees of latitude in the Northern Hemisphere. I would rather live on my writing money in Dun Laoghaire or Gimmelwald or the Catskills, if I thought I could. But I've heard of all those places, which jacks up the cost of living, I figure.

Anyway, I can't spend too much time on that kind of thinking -- I have to get back to work.

Word Count: 2,736 (+1,069)

Edit Preemptively, Times 30,449

You might think that I've refrained from posting for the last four weeks because the holidays, the transit strike and a string of freelance deadlines has occupied all my available attention. And you'd be right, but that's not the whole truth. No, the reason I haven't been posting is that I've done a lot of hard thinking about my novel and where it's going, and I've come to the conclusion that I'm going to have to start again from scratch.

Until now, I've been working on a kind of frothy, amusing novel with a good strong spine and a modicum of heart, and of course there's nothing wrong with that. But the surface is too slick, the spine is too straight, and it's altogether too conventional to be worth the trouble. There's nothing bent about it. It's like I'm watching When Harry Met Sally when I really want to see O Brother, Where Art Thou? There's nothing wrong with When Harry Met Sally; it's one of my favorite movies ever. But it's not bent.

I'm not going to toss out everything. I'm keeping the one scene that appeared in my original dream -- The Amateurs came to me in a dream, did I mention that? -- and the general plot, of course. I'm not going to start writing a different book or anything. But I'm going to sit down with the nutty little characters I've managed to extract from my unconscious, and try to get them to tell me what they want out of life, what they intend to do to get it and what kind of world they want to do it in. It's going to go slowly, but I think it has to be done.

It's actually pretty exciting, I think. The more you work on a piece of writing, the narrower your options become. I had written myself into a corner. Now it's wide open again.

Word Count: 1,667 (-30,449)