I hit a writerly speed bump the past couple of weeks. This happens. I’ve made a lot of progress on this book project since New Years, even if sometimes it doesn’t feel like it. There’s a shape I can see. There are several new essays that need honing, and some older ones that need reworking, and it feels like a narrative trajectory is shaping up. I’ve been sending things out, and a couple of them have caught, and a few have come back and for the first time in years that process does not feel life or death, does not…
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Five weeks ago I had reconstructive surgery on my left ankle, and I thought that being laid up would be sort of useful. That I’d get a lot of work done. I’d read books! I’d get back to the one I’m writing! I’d knit (I did knit …). The truth is that I seem to have spent most of the past five weeks fucking around on the internet. And complaining about not being able to do anything. I got nothing useful done. And so, I finally had to face up to the fact that I needed a new planning regime.…
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As you might have noticed, blogging has slowed to a trickle here at LivingSmall. For the next few months, I’m going to be prioritizing some other projects, including the new novel I’m working on. It’s been a long time since I’ve felt like I had a viable writing project, and now that I seem to have the employment/paying the bills thing sorted out, I need to put my writing energies into that project. Blogging won’t stop altogether, but it’ll be sporadic. Thanks for being patient everyone …
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So I have a new writing project — it’s in the tiny larval stages so I don’t want to talk about it too much, but I’m working on a murder mystery. One of my dearest friends here in town is Maryanne Vollers, author of the amazing books Ghosts of Mississippi: The Murder of Medgar Evers, the Trials of Byron De La Beckwith, and the Haunting of the New South and Lone Wolf: Eric Rudolph: Murder, Myth, and the Pursuit of an American Outlaw. We were both at a dinner party last night, and Maryanne arrived with a big bag of…
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Wow. This was a surprise to me somehow — Gourmet Magazine is closing. My first job out of college was repackaging Gourmet Magazine content into the first few volumes of Best of Gourmet and Gourmet’s Best Desserts (we also did other titles for Conde Nast). I’ll never forget going through the bound volumes of Gourmet Magazines — my task was to xerox every dessert recipe that had ever appeared, cut it out, and tape it onto a sheet of paper. These were the old days, when we did things on paper, and when type came back from teh typesetter and…
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So far, so good on the unemployment thing. While it’s never ideal to be the one voted off the island, I find I don’t miss the job at all — I miss the people I worked with, but I don’t miss being chained to my desk from eight in the morning until six at night; I don’t miss the anxiety of thinking someone might send you an instant message while you were getting a cup of tea and then decide you’re slacking; I don’t miss being treated as an incompetent by my manager, and I’m beginning to get over the…