Endeavor

I'm going through one of those stages where I have weird dreams. I'm climbing up a series of floors, and each story is barricaded behind a series of sofas, and a friend of mine keeps reaching out to me from the next level and pulling me up, and when I get to the top, I find a bar and order what I keep referring to as a "Goose and Gimlet," and the bartender has no idea what I'm talking about at all.

"When I was here, I wanted to be there. When I was there, all I could think of was getting back into the jungle." -- Willard

A month or so ago, I sent the first thirty pages of my novel, Happy, my Porn Valley story, to an agent. I wasn't sure whether or not to do it, but I did it anyway. A few days later, my cellphone rang, and I looked at the number. I didn't pick it up because I didn't recognize the number, but the caller left a message. So I listened to the message, and it was the agent, and he loved it. And then I hung up the phone, and then I sat on the sofa, and then I cried because I was so happy. Most of the time, I cry because I'm so unhappy, but this was like a Deus ex machina, and I was thankful for it.

"The Greek tragedian Euripides is notorious for using this plot device as a means to resolve a hopeless situation."

After that, writing the novel got harder, because it felt like a ghost was peering over my shoulder, but I got through it, because things have been kind of hard for me over the last few years, and I guess my general feeling about life now, having been through this, is that if God lays glass down in the road before you, you crawl across it. What I wrote wasn't perfect; I wrote it anyway. The other day, I tried to describe that choice as a fork in the road, but it's not. It's more like a toll. And there comes a point where you either keep writing or you don't write at all, and I can't stand not writing this novel, so I keep writing it. And I got through it. So now there's a contract between me and Endeavor on my bulletin board on the wall, held up by thumbtacks between this and this, and that's where I'm going. When the writing doesn't come easy, I lie in bed and make up stories about meeting Scorsese.

"This fucking life." -- Earl

One challenge is that my main character is going crazy. Maybe I know something of this from my not too distant past. (If you've been reading this blog for a while, you know what I'm saying, brother.) How do you articulate it? Insanity. There aren't really words for it. The letters gather themselves together and fly away, and there's nothing you can do but wave your hand and hope they return someday.

"Much of the time he talks to Rottman in a kind of gibberish, using nonsense words and sentences, albeit with the syntax and the cadence of proper sentence construction." -- "In Search of a Beautiful Mind"

I didn't appreciate this. It's stupid and petty and nothing with which I am interested in being affiliated. A long time ago, I was somebody who courted crap like that. I worked for Playboy for five years. Now, it makes me want to vomit, who I used to be, like that. She's dead. I killed her. Or she did. Who knows. It doesn't have anything to do with me. Or reality. As I write, a part of my laptop is being held together with Scotch tape. That's the truth. Everything else is a lie.

"Crossing the river, jumping from stone to stone, could be done only in one continuous movement. If he tried to stop or even think about what he was doing, he would fall in. His only hope was to keep moving." -- Infinite Potential

I had a dream this morning that I was a waitress, and everyone kept moving around while I was taking their order, and the whole thing was fucking impossible. The only way for the novel to make sense is for me to put myself in it, jam myself between its pages, stuck like a bug between its bookends, stringing out one more sentence that says what I'm trying to say. I'm halfway there. I'm looking for a second wind.