Checking Into Myself

I had/have largely abandoned this blog since January for several reasons, but I thought I would check in with myself now and then. I say check in with myself because I’m sure that no one actually reads this thing.

I’ve read several books since the last post, including Nick Hornby’s “Juliet, Naked”, Joshua Ferris’ “Then We Came To The End”, Cormac McCarthy’s “No Country For Old Men”. I’m taking to reading a lot of short stories by Dorothy Parker, John Updike, Harry Stephen Keeler, Ernest Hemingway, and others. I started writing one short story but it petered out, and I’ve mostly been working on a new novel. The novel I finished writing last year will be resting for some time, so when I go back I can be extremely depressed and critical and tear it apart and hopefully make it work (even?) better.

The novel I’m currently writing is just starting out, but I’ve got high hopes, not necessarily pie in the sky hopes, but so far I’m happy with what’s come of it. As a way to keep my brain operating despite the lack of sleep (3 month old twins don’t cotton to the newfangled idea of sleeping through the night) I’m doing a lot of research totally unrelated to this current novel, but pertaining to the next project I imagine I’ll be tackling later this year or even next year. It has to do with the nineteen-twenties, and it’ll be my first project not to be contemporary or almost-contemporary (the last novel I wrote took place in the early nineteen-nineties). At three o’clock yesterday morning I was calming a baby and watching Douglas Fairbanks Sr in “The Thief Of Bagdad” (not a misspelling, that’s how the film and the novel it was based upon spelled it).

I plan on getting back into the swing of this little blog a bit, so consider this a stretching out of the muscles. Today at noon I plan on getting a slice of pizza at a local place and working a bit on that short story that petered out, perhaps I can get it to unpeter, maybe even make it paul its way to completion.