In which needed changes are acknowledged.

I just watched Julie and Julia — loved it –and now I”m feeling down about my silly-ass blog.  I want to write a Themed Blog!  I want followers!  I no longer want this to be a damned online journal, like my beloved Volumes I through, umm, VIII.  Or is it.  It might be VII.

Needless to say my real concern should be the book I’m writing.  The woman in the movie, who, like me, had never finished anything, set a goal:  x number of recipes in 365 days.  A reminder from God that I need to put time limits on myself.  Set goals.  Establish schedules.  (Indeed, for me, rigid schedules.)  I have never accomplished anything any other way.

But here is what I want to say right now: the book-in-progress is Good.  I am a good writer.  I have always been been an effective and engaging writer, and now I am pretty good.  (Dan would say very good, and he might be right; but he compares me to himself, and I compare mself to P. D. James.)  I’m not saying an editor will not tear the manuscript to0 shreds, but that is what editors are supposed to do.  I know — I am also a pretty good editor!

Walking Among the Dead is good, but that means nothing if it’s never finished.  Likewise, Small Hands is good, Poirot’s Narrative is good, The Atonement of Ivan Cole is good, The Nail is good, and Miss Jack in (forgot what state) is good.  None are finished except Small Hands, and I cannot offer that for publication.  (And if I did, Poirot fans would hunt me down and kill me.)  Miss Jack, like The Nail, is about a copyrighted character.  And they’re good fucking stories!  Why am I even beginning on good fucking stories that can’t be published?

There’s hope for Atonement, but the problem is, it’s not the time for that one.  I have to get Colbert out of my head first, or I will see him throughout as clearly as I did in the first five pages.

No, I need to get back to Romania and London and Istanbul.  I need to set a deadline.  I need to work a certain number of hours a day.  Can I do this?  Can I stop sitting here looking at photos of men kissing and scrolling through page after page of photos showing Stephen Colbert’s crotch?  Goddammit!  I bet not one other Fangirl has the level of obsession I do — and look now, I have turned this paragraph into another Colament!

Vlad Tepes.  Mournier O’Connor.  Hassan Ali Barakah.  Mara Ciuta.  Gregoire Lasalle.  The Oath of the Bleeding Eyes, as bizarre and convoluted and burdensome as it is (the Oath, I mean, not the book) — what else?  The many kinds of love.  The holiness of the sex act.  The dashing of the Triumverate’s pride like, I don’t know, like pottery thrown onto the pavement.  Ha ha ha!  A most forgettable simile!  Fear and strength and jealousy and pushing past imagined limits, and music and dance and Death.