It seems there is a definite trend lately with the book. The things that tend to need to be removed are the autobiographical bits. Or, more precisely, the autobiographical bits that conflict with the actual story of the protagonist. For example, this was removed from today’s chapter:

One of my jokes is that the part of my brain that used to secrete gym
procrastination was entirely made of fat, and has been burned out of my
system. But, in truth, my current success exists because it was
designed to route around my excuses. Gym workouts occur seven days a
week because it doesn’t allow for procrastination. But it’s very
straightforward: if you go to the gym every day, the entire debate
shifts from if you are going to work out today to when you will work out today.

I have no qualms with what was written. In fact, the seven days a week example is something I often say when asked about my own seven day a week workout schedule. The problem? The entire book I’m writing concerns the character having found the secret to gym motivation. If you have the motivation, there is nothing to route around. But these words flow from me so easily, it was hard to pick them out as false. Thankfully, it happened. I do fear that some of my bullshit will seep into the book.

Don’t get me wrong, most of the book is my bullshit. I guess the goal is to make sure only the relevant bullshit stays. It is sometimes hard to pull back and see these things clearly, though. There is such a notion of fixing the text that is there rather than wondering what should be there, it seems an ongoing task. Every chapter needs to be re-read with a specific goal in mind. One pass to read for passive voice. One pass for transitions. One pass for pacing.

It was good to read in the Sunday NYT Book Section this week that… well, wait… I don’t think I can say it was good to read it necessarily. It was … comforting(?) to read a profile of Gay Talese (whose work I’ve never read yet) and his writing routine. One thing he has going for him is specifically how I have always envisioned working in the future. He has a small basement studio that is basically a small basement apartment under his house, with no phone, windows, or anything. He just goes there and works. But when it comes to his routine, he left me the impression that it may never get easier. The profile (the relevant portion of which I will paste here rather than provide a link, as the NY Times paid archive system sucks) said:

"I suppose there’s a part of me that resists taking the easy way,"
Mr. Talese said recently, sitting in his underground room and holding a
hand up to his forehead like a swami reading his own mind. "As an old
self-flagellating Catholic, I need to suffer, and something has to be
hard to be worthy."

Ms. Talese said recently about the
composition of "A Writer’s Life": "I can’t say he never complained, but
no matter how hopeless it seemed, he went down there every single day
and sometimes back again in the evening. I often read aloud to him what
he’s written, and with this book it was literally sentences and phrases
that he kept working over. I’d say about something, ‘That’s good,’ and
he’d say, ‘You don’t have any taste.’ "

Mr. Talese, who has
compared writing both to passing a kidney stone and to "driving a truck
at night without headlights, losing your way along the road and
spending a decade in a ditch," is a painfully slow worker — a tinkerer
and reviser, an obsessive typer and re-typer. He keeps track of his
progress, or lack of it, with memos and exhortations to himself that he
posts on white foam panels on the wall, and the ones documenting his
work on "A Writer’s Life," which took him almost 14 years to complete,
are a road map of detours, false starts and dead ends.

Here is
an entry from 1997, five years after the publication of Mr. Talese’s
last book, "Unto the Sons," about his father’s family in southern
Italy, when he still thought the new book would be a sort of sequel:
"This memoir-history-nonfiction novel … can be terrific … if you’d
get down to it!" and he adds, "GT, what other stories — and when are
you going to get back into print!?????????"

From June 2001: "Where am I going???"

In July 2002 he decided that he had he had lost his "voice," and started all over again.

From
September 2002: "I had made wrong turns … for every body I did, there
were two that I started and had abandoned … or that I put aside" and,
again, "GT, where are you going?"

So, on one hand, it’s good to know that my self-flagellation isn’t unique. Although, I will still cling with unchecked optimism that each book will get a little bit faster. If for no other reason than not repeating many of the errors of this book. I think that is my goal. I want my second book to encounter all new errors. Because the only way to not encounter new erros is to not attempt something ambitious, and what fun would that be?

And, speaking of writers who also take a while to crank out the words, my one-time teacher Tom Spanbauer has a new book coming out soon. Well, I say soon, in that it is supposed to ship in May, but Amazon seems to be fine shipping it now. We shall see, as I just ordered it today.

Anyway, it is called Now Is The Hour, and it is described as such: "The year is 1967, and Rigby John Klusener, seventeen years old and
finally leaving his home and family in Pocatello, Idaho, is on the
highway with his thumb out and a flower behind his ear, headed for San
Francisco. Now Is the Hour is the wondrous story of how Rigby John got
to this point. It traces his gradual emancipation from the repressions
of a strictly religious farming family and from the small-minded,
bigoted community in which he has grown up, during a time of explosive
cultural change. Transforming this familiar journey from American
Graffiti to On the Road to something rich and strange and hilarious is
the persona of Rigby John himself. Intimately in touch with his fears,
hesitantly awakening to his own sexuality, and palpably open to life’s
mysteries, Rigby John is a protagonist whom readers will fall in love
with, root for, and be moved by. Now Is the Hour is a powerful, vastly
entertaining story of self-awakening, of the complex bonds of family,
and ultimately of America during a period of tremendous upheaval."

I can’t wait to sink into Tom’s luxurious prose once again. He is such a treasure to readers, as well as to the many people he helps become better writers. Check it out.

Today was a perfect day. Wrote and edited for a good while, did a good workout (save for my iPod not being cradled properly last night, focring me to workout without music), talked to my grandmother, started the new Stephen King book Cell, cooked some chana masala, wrote a blog entry, and (projecting even one step further into the future now) took a nice relaxing bath to cap the night off.

Was going to start reading a new book today when, out of curiosity, I cracked open the next Nabokov MFA book, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. I assumed the book I had was entirely that story, as the cover makes no other indication, but found that the story itself was a mere 80 pages, so I figured it would be good to dispatch another Nabokov book in the space of a day.

The biggest problem in reading Jekyll and Hyde, of course, is that it is written largely as a mystery as to the identity of Hyde, which is no mystery at all to a modern reader. So, it sort of had the equivalent of seeing The Sixth Sense upon someone’s recommendation that you’d never know Bruce Willis was dead the entire time.

Of course, there was perhaps some usefulness in the fact that knowing in advance that Jekyll and Hyde are one person. It allowed me to more fully appreciate the narrative, the way the story is told, how the clues are layered in slowly. Basically, it was like jumping to watching The Sixth Sense for the second time right off the bat and getting to appreciate how everything was told to you all along.

One of the things that was most interesting about the book, which is lost in the broad cultural knowledge of the Jekyll/Hyde character, is that it is not a duality of good and evil. That is usually how it is presented, that he divides himself into both sides, good and evil. Only it isn’t true. When he is Dr. Jekyll, he has both his good side and his evil side within him, although because of the presence of his good side, his evil side has remained in check constantly. When he is Hyde, his evil side takes over, and is also represented by the physical change of him becoming shorter and uglier, thus everything about him reflects his evil nature. It is shorter because it wasn’t as developed throughout his life; in theory, the longer Hyde exists, the taller he will get, presumably, as he matures that previously dormant side of himself. But even then, he is not pure evil, because he need to drink the a potion to return to living as Dr. Jekyll. So, there is still a hint of Jekyll in Hyde. So, the duality isn’t as cut and dry as usually gets told.

That said, it was inventive, as far as involving hyde in a murder that makes him a wanted man in town, known by everyone and wanted dead. This prevents him from coming out of hiding, basically having to live as a fugitive within Jekyll and not come out, because as soon as he reveals himself again, he will be put to death. It becomes a question as to whether it is better to die in spirit (within Jekyll) or in reality (as the dormant Hyde).

The narrative has an interesting twist in that the story ends before what was actually the best part of the reading experience. The story is capped with two letters from two characters who are dead at the time of them being read, which put all the piece in place. I assumed this would be something Nabokov enjoyed, as he loves using alternate narrative devices as ways to tell the story, but he didn’t go into it, too much.

In fact, this was the essay of his with the least depth. He spent most of the time retelling the story with passages from the text, going into the alliteration, etc. He be certain, he did draw a map showing how Hyde’s entrance to the laboratory linked to Jekyll’s house, although it wasn’t too hard to visualize that at all, really. He also goes into the lineage and possible meanings of the names but the most obvious is, of course, not very hidden: Hyde/Hide.

From the get-go, Nabokov seems to warn readers from taking this story in like a mystery, which is a genre bereft of style, since Stevenson, although writing a template that is still used in modern mysteries, writes with an abundance of style.

He points out two flaws in the story, mainly due to the story being told by two matter-of-fact narrators, such as they do not, nor should, have the language to properly express their revulsion at seeing Hyde’s face or the capacity to describe it for the reader. Nabokov suggests a workaround whereby just seeing Hyde brings out an artistic sensibility in the men, which would at least serve as a workaround for giving them better license to tell the story. The other issue is that we have two upstanding London gentlemen, and the story of Hyde always hints at pleasures and vices underneath the surface in this society, which again, they are not aware of to any significant degree to talk about.

One interesting aside is when Nabokov explores the possible homosexual themes in the story, which never occured to me at all, such as the absence of women, and the ways in which Jekyll has to cover up for Hyde, calling him his "friend and benefactor" in his updated will (redrafted in case he becomes Hyde full-time), as well as the notion that Hyde is blackmailing Jekyll for undisclosed reasons. Not much there, but good to note that Nabokov looks at these thigns from every angle.

Not as much from Vladimir on this, or me, but then again, compared to the mammoth Bleak House, this was still somewhat insightful for an 80-page novella.

Personally, I also kept thinking of Fight Club, since narrator/Tyler live in one body, although in Palahniuk’s book, the narrator has to remain unaware of that fact, because he is telling the story and the readers aren’t supposed to know that information. Here, Jekyll knows what is going on all along, but he isn’t telling the story, so you can get the same "twist" toward the end, because no deception is used. Both narrators find out the information at the appropriate time for the reader.

For my own book, there is a section where Jekyll sees himself as Hyde in the mirror that might be able to tart up one specific scene in my book. We’ll see.

Next up in the Nabokov MFA Program… Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way (book one of Remembrance of Things Past)

This is being written at Samovar Tea Lounge in the Castro (thanks to some hijacked wi-fi access, thanks to whomever you are), which is where I tend to work when I’m not working at home, usually on days where the beautiful weather outside gets a gravitational pull on me that continually makes me wonder why I am staying in the house all day. Rather than just abandon things, I just go remote, taking a laptop/paper/pens where I can work and drink some delightful tea in the process for a few hours.

Whenever I work here, there is usually some breakthrough, which is probably connected with my desire to flee the apartment having something to do with some "block" with the novel. Not a writer’s block, as it is already written, but just something preventing me from giving the current chapter the love it needs.

A breakthrough with the current chapter just happened and, as per usual, it seems stupid and obvious in hindsight. But, then again, what doesn’t?

In order to avoid this in the future, I am once again writing it down as a means of reinforcement. And, hey, if this stuff can help someone else, even better…

So, the current issue with this chapter had been about flow. It just seemed to be too… random, too tangential, it needed something to bring it together and give it some degree of focus.

The chapter is about a character named Angie. The main character uses Angie to transition into his backstory, since the protagonist of this book is horrible at providing information to the reader, so all of his backstory needs to be "tricked" out of him somewhat.

It seemed simple enough, using the present day interactions with Angie to ground the scene and to pull the narrative in and out of flashback, in much the same way the "Rules of Fight Club" are used to add backstory and keep things planted in the present as soon as a rule is once again presented.

But, for some reason, it wasn’t working. No matter how many times I tightened the text, it just lacked cohesion. It wasn’t coming together to become a chapter; it was just a loosely connected series of anecdotes. The whole was never becoming bigger than the sum of its parts.

So, armed with a printout, a notepad, and (just in case) my laptop, I headed to Samovar and tried a new oolong. I still prefer my black teas, but it was getting too late in the day to inject that much caffeine into my system.

Reading through the printout, I documented the action of each paragraph, which is just tedium. But when I started reading those notes over again, a pattern I didn’t see before started emerging.

From my perspective, Angie was always the spine of the chapter and everything else was a flashback/anecdote that shot off of the main Angie narrative. But, it turns out, that was the flaw in my thinking.

The first reference to Angie is that it distracts the main character from his workout. Some of the Angie passages pull his focus from his workout, and serve as a means of transitioning to the other information that needs to be conveyed in this chapter. However, other Angie sections seemed to be transitioning out of those passages and getting things back to the "present-day" workout.

So, basically, the spine of the story isn’t Angie, but the lead character doing his present-day workout. Angie is a transitional device to and from the present-day workout to the supplemental information/backstory.

Once I sorted that out, I went back and coded each paragraph as to when it would have to occur to uphold the logic of the story, whether it could only be known by the protagonist in the present day, whether it is information about the past that needed no knowledge of the present, and then whether it was Angie transitioning to the past, or Angie transitioning to the present.

Now, the whole chapter has clarity. And many of the trouble spots are glaringly obvious as to why they were tripping me up. Sometimes Angie would be transitioning to the present, followed by information about the past or vice-versa.

That made perfect sense, though, when the thinking was that Angie was the spine of the chapter, rather than a transitional device.

But, once again, no use dwelling on things like this, or how much time it took to sort out. The good news is the riddle of Angie is solved, and the chapter will be reworked tonight and put to bed by tomorrow.

Onward!

Got a really late start on the book today, mainly due to my doorbell going off last night.

It was about midnight, and I probably crashed on the couch at about 10:30 p.m., to ensure that I would wake up early, hit the gym, and be in book mode by 8 or 9 a.m.

The doorbell starts ringing, someone just holding it in, and then hitting it repeatedly. This happens often as my apartment number sounds similar to the apartment on the ground floor, so there are always food delivery people and people looking to, umm, well, let’s just say one effect of marijuana might be impaired hearing. And you might push the doorbell frantically if you were trying to score some more late at night.

I stumble into the hallway, clearly coming out of some advanced dream state, and I have no clue how to make the doorbell stop. I recall fumbling for the nearby kitchen lightswitch, but then realizing I don’t want to wake up anymore than I already am. I look out the pepphole, no one there (always want to make sure someone is trying to just get into the building and not my apartment). Finally, my mind pieces together how to buzz someone in, and that’s the end of the ordeal.

There is almost never a case of someone actually coming to my door when they are buzzed in. It is always other tenants who locked themselves out, and usually people who want the people on the ground floor.

But for some reason, my system flooded with adrenaline, and I couldn’t fall asleep again until 3 a.m. It wasn’t a good awake feeling, more like a bit of insomnia, where sleep was desired but unobtainable.

I still woke up around 6:30 a.m., but knew from how I felt that it would be a bad idea to stay awake and try to push through the day, so I went back to sleep, and woke up at around 9:30 a.m., at which point I would normally have already had breakfast, worked out, showered, and been into book editing mode.

Of course, nothing preventing me from just sliding things around and still crossing everything off my list, which is what I’m doing, but it was still freaky.

My schedule is something that does seem to come up a lot, in that people don’t really think of it as a schedule. The perception seems to be that I just sit around and get to do nothing all day. And, I do understand how that perception could exist, although it doesn’t quite represent the truth.

Recently someone asked me when I was free for dinner, and I told them that I had nothing at all on my calendar for the next three and a half weeks, so just book whatever they wanted, and just let me know when they wanted to get together. No need to go back and forth on days and times, whatever is good for them works for me.

Now, this could easily be misconstrued as my having nothing to do, were it not for the fact that it takes a lot of work to keep a schedule this free. Personally, I think filling my schedule up with dinners and hanging out and everything else would be ten times easier. There is no discipline in doing everything. I don’t initiate a lot of events anymore. I skip a lot of concerts that I would have definitely gone to in the past. Touring broadway shows are skipped far more often than attended these days.

My schedule is kept wide open because I want there to be space in which I can move around. Right now, in my refrigerator, there are probably a dozen already-prepared, already-portioned meals in containers. There are also salad fixings. This means I can have dinner within five minutes of wanting it. Grocery store runs are attached to other times when I am out running other errands. When I do coo, it is usually 2-3 dishes at once, resulting in a fridge full of containers.

Basically, it is a LOT of work to have a schedule this open. But given how most people do things, it isn’t surprising that it is interpreted incorrectly.

Not to mention, a lot of the stuff that does occur during the day are things I consider to be part of my workday. So, if I am reading, it isn’t that I’m not working. Reading is a fundamental requirement to get better at writing. This isn’t the same as most people reading for entertainment, although it does entertain me, as well.

Even going out for an afternoon walk can be a good way to refresh myself for another round of writing. I would say that I have three or four writing sessions per day lately. Probably hitting about 6 or 7 hours total. In between, I work out, watch a movie, read a book, go for a walk, run some errands.

But it is always clear to me when I am done for the day, and when I’m taking a break, and until I’m done for the day, the book occupies the majority of my thoughts.

I guess it’s just frustrating when you get that sense of people not respecting my schedule, or even thinking I have one. Sure, it is very flexible, but that is why I like to know what is happening in advance, so I can make sure all of my checklist items for the day get done.

It is similar to when people ask me what my next job will be. Now, don’t get me wrong, I am applying for work right now, but again, there seems to be that underpinning of not taking what I do seriously. That I’m here on vacation from reality.

Oh well… not really much I can do about this stuff aside from continuing to work on the book. Which is what I’ll be doing right after clicking "Post" on this.

The whole time I was reading Madame Bovary, the thought that kept running in the back of my head was why it had taken me so long to read this book. When I came out in college, the faculty advisor for our gay student group was the school’s French professor, who was doing translations and such of Gustave Flaubert. He would encourage me to read Flaubert, and I would tell him I’d look into it, and nothing more would come of it. There is definite regret that I didn’t take advantage of that point in the right direction early on, not to mention having the resource of somoene intimately knowledgable on Flaubert available to me at the time. Oh well, it didn’t happen, and now I’ve read it, so let’s move on…

Mdme. Bovary is one of those timeless books that read impeccably without requiring much in the way of translation or accounting for the fact that it was first released in 1856. Despite the fact that it is a novel, the piece has a beautiful poetry about it. Beautiful imagery combines to illuminate the hollow hearts of the characters.

The novel is basic enough on its surface, as it follows the meeting of Charles and Emma Bovary through to their marriage and (spoiler alert) graves. The whole novel seemed to be about restlessness, in some way. How Emma kept trying to find happiness in the arms of other men, rather than her distant husband. It was rather nice to have a novel where nearly none of the character are all that endearing.

Ultimately, the language of the novel was far more interesting to me than the story. It was interesting to see how Flaubert could make me such a conflicted reader so often, wanting to rush ahead for the sake of the action, but dragging my heels to admire the beautiful interplay of his words. Not to mention, how you are pulled along as a reader with characters that are not all that empathetic.

This book would have been finished a bit earlier had I not been in one of my writerly broodfests a while back, with all of the ‘woe is me’ nonsense regarding the glacial pace of my own work, which becomes its own self-fulfilling prophecy. It is unclear whether reading something as masterful as Flaubert during such a period would serve to inspire or make one question why they would even be attempting such a well-worn path. In any event, my mood, writing, and reading all picked up recently, so Bovary was written in two major clips, with the bookmark resting at the end of Part One for longer than it should have.

The story basically shows Emma who, discontented with her husband, falls in love with another man. Despite it being an emotional affair, it never crosses the physical line, and when he leaves her, she is devastated. In her depression, they move to a new village where she begins a physical affair with a wealthy landowner. There is never any doubt that he doesn’t love her or share in her romantic fantasy of their relationship, and he eventually dumps her, which sinks her into another depression.

Finally, she meets the first guy again and begins having a long-distance affair with him under the guise of her traveling to that town once a week to have piano lessons. All this time, she starts piling up enormous debts unbeknownst to her husband. When her debts and adultery become known to people around them she (spoiler alert) commits suicide. Her husband, who despite not being her romantic ideal, remains loyal and true to her to the end, and he dies shortly thereafter.

As per usual, Nabokov geeks out over Bovary, constructing a timeline based on when Flaubert was writing the piece, and arcing back to compute that Charles Bovary was probably born in 1815, in order to place him on a historic timeline with French Kings of the time and such. This seems to be his first inclination with everything he reads, as the book always shows his markings on the first page of the first chapter, and it is always loaded with dates. The need for this exactitude continues to elude me. Maybe someday I’ll wonder why I ever took it so lightly, but we aren’t there yet.

Nabokov says it is important to understand that the characters are all basically philistines, and not mere bourgeois. For example, Emma is shown to be a voracious reader, but Flaubert points out subtly that she is a bad reader, by listing out the evergreen cliches around which she is most attracted, as well as that she uses fiction to put herself into the place of the female protagonist, which Nabokov detests of all readers. He writes:

"Books are not written for those who are fond of poems that make one weep or those whoe like nobel characters in prose as Leon and Emma think. Only children can be excused for identifying themselves with the characters in a book, or enjoying badly written adventure stories; but this is what Emma and Leon do."

In the first instance I recall (although my memory is often for shit), Nabokov questions whether Bovary is meant to be a realistic or naturalistic novel, listing out some of the flaws that would be present were it to have actually happened, but concluding with some nice words about books in general:

"In point of fact, all fiction is fiction. All art is deception. Flaubert’s world, as all worlds of major writers, is a world of fancy with its own logic, its own conventions, its own coincidences. The curious impossibilities I have listed do not clash with the pattern of the book — and indeed are only discovered by dull college professors or bright students."

As he is the former, and I’ve never been the latter, none of these "impossibilities" even tripped my radar. To give you some idea, one of his quibbles is that Emma had not been horse riding for several years is able to get on a horse and gallop away with perfect poise and never feels any stiffness in her joints afterwards.

The most important thing I hope to take away from Bovary as a writer is his counterpoint method that he uses to fuse two parallel dialogues together. Here is a passage where an entire table of people
are all sitting around chatting, but we see how Emma and Leon (her first affair, although it hasn’t happened yet in this scene) steer the conversation from the topic at large to a more personal sub-conversation:

Homais asked to be allowed to keep on his skull-cap, for fear of coryza;then, turning to his neighbour–

"Madame is no doubt a little fatigued; one gets jolted so abominably inour ‘Hirondelle.’"

"That is true," replied Emma; "but moving about always amuses me. I likechange of place."

"It is so tedious," sighed the clerk, "to be always riveted to the sameplaces."

"If you were like me," said Charles, "constantly obliged to be in thesaddle"–

"But," Leon went on, addressing himself to Madame Bovary, "nothing, itseems to me, is more pleasant–when one can," he added.

The conversation between Emma and Leon always stays on-topic with the others, and is carried out fully in front of them, but it is clear that they are bonding on a deep level during the course of it. there is another scene at a county fair where Emma and her second lover, Rodolphe, set their flirtation against the backdrop of farming awards being handed out in a ceremony one level below them in the town square:

And he seized her hand; she did not withdraw it.

"For good farming generally!" cried the president.

"Just now, for example, when I went to your house."

"To Monsieur Bizat of Quincampoix."

"Did I know I should accompany you?"

"Seventy francs."

"A hundred times I wished to go; and I followed you–I remained."

"Manures!"

"And I shall remain to-night, to-morrow, all other days, all my life!"

"To Monsieur Caron of Argueil, a gold medal!"

"For I have never in the society of any other person found so complete acharm."

"To Monsieur Bain of Givry-Saint-Martin."

"And I shall carry away with me the remembrance of you."

"For a merino ram!"

"But you will forget me; I shall pass away like a shadow."

"To Monsieur Belot of Notre-Dame."

"Oh, no! I shall be something in your thought, in your life, shall Inot?"

"Porcine race; prizes–equal, to Messrs. Leherisse and Cullembourg,sixty francs!"

Rodolphe was pressing her hand, and he felt it all warm and quiveringlike a captive dove that wants to fly away; but, whether she was tryingto take it away or whether she was answering his pressure; she made amovement with her fingers. He exclaimed–

"Oh, I thank you! You do not repulse me! You are good! You understandthat I am yours! Let me look at you; let me contemplate you!"

If I am able to take anything away from the book, that would be a key stylistic element that really made those scenes come off the page (although I do not know if they have any similar effect out of context).

It was used most effectively when the characters stare at each other silently, after saying words that just hang in the air about the path upon which they are heading, and instead of them interjecting over the farming awards, the awards just drone on, adding dramatic tension that seemed heightened moreso than using text alone to convey the same scene. Not to mention, the comic potential which Flaubert even used, interjecting "Manures!" into the midst of watching a relationship bloom.

As for Flaubert’s style, Nabokov calls his judicious use of the word and preceded by a semicolon, which usually follows a list of actions or items, but the semicolon gives the reader a perfect pause, and the and flows the reader directly into a culminating image that resonates much deeper as a result. I know I do go out of my way to end certain paragraphs with certain words, because of the increased resonance (something I did get out of all that journalism and press release writing), so just another thing to try and work into the toolkit.

There is also an entire horse theme that, when pointed out, was clearly there all along, but I personally didn’t piece it together on my own. When Charles first meets Emma, he is on a horse that shies violently, which foreshadows his fate with her, etc., etc., and many other horse-involved things happen throughout.

The best part of reading about the horse theme is Nabokov’s delight in certain sexual overtones to the imagery, where he adds "Freud, that medieval quack, might have made a lot of this scene." and then later on, adds again "Old Freud chuckles in the dark."

Which calls to mind why I like Nabokov so much in the first place, the joy and love he brings to what he does, even when he is, at the same time, being sort of dry and academic.

It seems that perhaps the next move isn’t reading the next Nabokov MFA book (Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is up next), but maybe something that Nabokov penned himself. It has been too long since I’ve read one of his works.

I’m having more "A-ha!" moments than eight seasons of Oprah lately…

So, I’ve been editing today, and reworking a sentence, then the next sentence, and finally the paragraph, and as much as it is better than it was before, it still isn’t magic. Then I finally started looking at it from a different angle, which is basically stopping myself from fixing what IS THERE and instead questioning qhat SHOULD BE THERE.

I think there is such a tendency to just try and polish and hone, when sometimes what is on the page now doesn’t really get questioned enough. Basically, every sentence has to earn its keep. Most of the time that something doesn’t seem right is just an indication that perhaps it isn’t supposed to be there at all.

Of course, as soon as I pushed past whether the troublesome paragraph was needed, the answer was a quick "no." And, a much more amazing paragraph quickly came from nowhere to fill that hole and make it so much better.

I guess the ongoing issue seems to be that I have good instincts, but my skill level isn’t at the point where I can easily identify them yet. It’s just that something is wrong, as opposed to immediately identifying the culprit. Just a matter of plugging away and becoming better at this, it will all sort itself out over time.

Hmm, a lot of my little projects these days are huge timesucks.

The plan today was to read all of the Chuck writing essays and Q&As, watch the first segment of the Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth DVDs, do some writing, read some Madame Bovary, and call it a day.

I guess somewhere along the way I forgot how many Chuck essays they were, as I often didn’t read them. I would just be sure to go to the site on the first of each month, grab the text (screen grabs, couldn’t get the actual text), and plop it into a folder. As it turns out, there seem to have been 24 essays total (although I am missing one of them), and it took hours and hours and hours to go through them all.

The upside is they highlighted a lot of the good choices I made, and showed me ways to improve others. It was also interesting to see how when it at first seemed like I was violating one of his rules, especially ones where he strongly encouraged you to not do something, my text started as a pure violation of the rules he laid out, but as they were rewritten, they changed slightly to adjust for the rule. Like, he says to never let your characters be alone and thinking, and when I read that, my first reaction was "Oh, shit! I do that a lot." But when I thought of the chapters where this occurs, I had already added specific devices where the narrator does interact with other "characters" to get him out of a pure monologue.

Strangely enough, Chuck started talking about Joseph Campbell in one of the last essays, so even reading these long-dormant PDFs on my computer transitioned nicely into my day as it had been planned.

Anyway, it’s after 9 p.m., and all I did was watch the end of Proof, work out, read all of the Chuck essays, and watch the Campbell segment. Not that I’m calling it a night or anything, as soon as I finish this up, I’ll be jumping into the book for a bit. I’m on the fence as to how to proceed chemically, though. I haven’t had any caffeine since early afternoon, an intentional plan to ensure I crash early tonight, but I might actually want to plow through a bit longer. Oh well, we’ll see what happens.

As for Proof, I wasn’t a huge fan of the play when I first saw it. It wasn’t bad, necessarily, just didn’t really wow me. Seemed overly geeky, with all the characters talking about advanced math theories, and just didn’t find anything with which to connect.

With that background, I somehow still give the movie a shot. Not sure why, but I totally get into it. I’d been putting it on as I was falling asleep for the past few days, but this morning was getting sick of seeing tiny segments of it, so had to plow through and finish already. The nutshell version is that Gwyneth Paltrow wrote this huge math proof that can potentially change the math world, but seemed unable to address the burden of having this huge task ahead of her now, despite it being her creation and her intellect. Draw your own conclusions as to what I took away from it, heh.

The GOOD news, and I know I’ve cried wolf about this before, but there is, now, absolutely nothing else that was originally (and wrongly) slated for me to do after this draft which was more properly suited to happen before it. I’m done. Nothing to do but… plow through 700+ page draft, and make it magic.

Gulp.

One of the other things I wanted to do BEFORE I get too into this draft, which was something I was wrongly planning to do AFTER for whatever reason, is to review my notes from the Dangerous Writing workshop I took with Tom Spanbauer, as that outlines a lot of the rules for the style of writing to which I aspire.

In addition, I want to read all of Chuck’s writing notes that he posted for the past two years on his website. They aren’t there now, were only available for a month, and in a format whereby you weren’t supposed to be able to store them for later reading. Of course, I stored them all, heh.

So, tomorrow, the day will start with reading those, which will take a good 2-3 hours.

In addition, I’m trying to get myself back into Madame Bovary, which has been set aside as of late. As I think it is imperative to read to become a better writer.

The last piece of the puzzle is to start watching one segment of my Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth DVD every day, as he explores the basic architecture of storytelling through the ages, and the archetypes people continually gravitate toward as readers as a means to view their lives through a specific lens. I’m not sure my book locks into any of those, since it doesn’t seem to have classic underpinnings that I recognize, but I’m glad to be wrong and have something archetypal to which I can hitch my wagons.

I think that is the last of the stuff that was always intended to be done AFTER the draft was written.

OK, I watched last night’s Bill Maher show, went to the gym, had lunch, everything is ready to go…

In a drama queen moment, the only reason I’m posting this now really, after I finished my cardio at the gym I went to the water fountain as I don’t hydrate during my workouts. On my way there, I notice the incline press is empty. So, I tell myself, when I walk back, if that’s still empty, I should have a go at it, just because.

So, I walk back, it’s empty, I toss 25 pounds on each arm, adjust the seat and pop in. I do a set, paying extra attention to my vantage point, the feeling in my arms, picture someone standing directly in front of me, push the handles up quicker, etc. Between sets, I notice that I drape my arms over the handles instinctively, like a scarecrow tacked up at the elbows. Think that body language might be useful, we’ll see soon enough.

Now that I’m home, I’m about to begin work on the book. The book, for a while now, begins with a guy in a gym whose life changes on an incline press. Like I said, total drama queen moment, but there you have it…

Enough of this, though, I’ve got more important text to massage…

Well, it is all ready to go now.

In the past two or three days, I’ve read every scrap of paper, every draft, and every last thing ever written for however many years I’ve been at this book.

I cut and pasted every piece of information into a document to ensure everything interesting from every draft ever written has a chance to make it into the final draft.

Everything from that document was then pasted to the end of its appropriate chapter in the document I’ll be working from.

There is now a timeline that shows the duration of time between every event in the book, which is a MUCH longer timeframe than I would have imagined. It happened in a much tighter timeframe in my head, but given the nature of the events in the book (various character’s weight losses, writing a book, other time-based factors), it is good to see how it all pans out logically.

So, tomorrow, I will begin the final edit of the penultimate draft of the book.

For the record, just to see what happens, I am starting with a document that contains 765 pages, 196,727 words, 2,251 paragraphs, and 57 chapters. (I work in Courier, 14pt type, double spaced; so bigger text than normal, just to make it easier on me for long periods of screen time. It would never be 765 pages if you printed it out at a more normal size/spacing)

The document with all the rescued bits, which are now part of that draft, contained 25 pages, and 2,852 words, and many of them may not make the cut. Just wanted to delineate what is just pasted to the end of the chapters, versus what is text ready to be massaged and edited.

And there you have it. Not sure how many updates will occur during the writing. We shall see…