I write sporadically. The work-life-hobby harmony of a restaurateur is prone to disruption. One recent novel was completed in bursts that bordered on the spasmic. It’s currently being ignored by at least a dozen agents; I keep chopping it up and frankensteining it together in the shadows while I wait.
The current novel-in-process has reached the 31K-word mark; I’d been in a good habit of using a thirty-minute hourglass to get a chunk of writing done every morning after the younger kids left for school, but that practice has fallen off of late. The source material for it is a mash-up of dialogue and scene ideas that I scribbled down on a plane flight from Costa Rica. Frankly, I’m a little bit bored with it. It’s a hardboiled cops and robbers thing with action and dialogue that are a blast to write. It asks (or will ask, once I write that part) a central question of “What would happen if prediction markets got really sleazy?” that interests me.
My most recent short story came to life via a series of voice texts to myself, some while driving from one workplace to another, others in the middle of the night. Most of my short stories go through creation, evolution, and become the best version of themselves over the course of a weekend. After that, they get no more than a bit of copy editing as they age in limbo, drifting around in the inboxes of literary journals.
I’ve gone back to Notes of a Dirty Old Man by Charles Bukowski and found that is doesn’t grab me the way it did thirty years ago. The Buried Giant was an instant classic for me; when I reread it earlier this year, I read it so fast that I almost choked, like eating a sizzling, juicy ribeye steak without chewing it well enough because you’re famished. Three generations of my family are currently reading The Count of Monte Cristo at a variety of paces and interest levels. I’ll simply say that I adored the picture-book version as a boy.
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