Pages

Tonight, I reached a page count in my novel that I've been aiming for, a number that suggests to me being over the hump of it, and hopefully resulting in some momentum while running downhill to the finish line. There's a ways to go, though, so we'll see how it goes. So far, it's been a grind most of the way. Lately, the most literary of music helps. All I know is that writing a novel is a b-i-t-c-h. Going in, you think you know, because you've read one or two or a hundred, but you realize about thirty pages deep that you have no clue what you're doing. It's like entering a haunted house but the car jumps the track, and you can't tell what's real and what isn't, if the story is what's crazy or if it's you, and the only recourse isn't lying on the bed with a pillow on your head but keeping on going. As of late, there's been a lot of pornography, a lot of dead bodies, and lot of the great sprawling cement mess that is Los Angeles. (Willard: "When I was here, I wanted to be there. When I was there, all I could think of was getting back into the jungle.") At some point, you start telling yourself you're engaged in some cathartic shit, when the reality that you stumble upon later on is that the skeleton in the closet is you. There's a frog on my desk, there's a sky that looks like it's on fire, and what's running through my mind is: "Baudelaire: Il me semble que je serais toujours bien la ou je ne suis pas. In other words: It seems to me that I will always be happy in the place where I am not. Or, more bluntly: Wherever I am not is the is the place where I am myself. Or else, taking the bull by the horns: Anywhere out of the world."