Pepper of the Earth - The Home Office Record & Mostly Daily Gazette

If I have the rules right, this is where I say, “Hey wait, where did the summer go? It was here last time I looked.” Messrs. Chilly, Rainy, and ‘Tis the Season whipped us up a frothy gray start for the Labor Day Weekend, though Sunday recovered enough for a very pleasant Pimm’s party at Pete’s, a few blocks away. Pete knows a bunch of cute techie girls, so that was particularly good fun.

By Monday we were neck deep in a warm change of seasons, and frankly a guy can do worse. Pierre and Seth and I went off to take in the DADA at MOMA exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art, which is beautifully put together. Is it art? Well, only their hairdressers know for sure, but it’s fun to see so much of it in one place — I especially enjoyed seeing some solid work by Man Ray; the narrator of my novel-in-progress is named Mandel Ray (because he’s a nut), which is close enough for government work, and it felt serendipitous to see such stuff in the show.

The book; the book. I’m a little shy of 15,000 words in, which is about a quarter of what I think I’ll need all together. That’s a lot, and a little. I have a few more weeks before the arid crinkle of the bank account — like the sound Windows makes when it empties the recycle bin — sends me back to the office, if there’s still a job for me there. After that I suppose I’ll need to learn to spend my time indoors, and finish the beast on nights and weekends.

Pointillist (working title) is the story of an Internet relationship that starts well and ends badly; it’s funnier than I thought it would be, which is a good thing, and it wanders widely so far. I write at it nearly every day for two hours, or four, or six, depending. There’s a bit of quantum theory in it, because I wanted to clear a few things up (”Schrod, Boston’s most ubiquitous seafood catch of the day, was named in honor of Schrödinger, who was variable and ubiquitous in his tastes as well” — hey, just because you read it in a book doesn’t mean it’s true). I’m pleased with where it’s all going, but I’m quite slow at it. Somehow it’s never as lively here at the desk as it is in the movies, with all that tap-tap-tap typing going on. But by bits and pieces and fits and starts, something is slouching on forward into the future, and that’s good fun, ain’t it.

The curve has been a tough clamber, and one of the things I’ve found along the way is that I really can’t do much else on the Net while I’m working like this; I had imagined that I’d have all this time for photography, time to write a few articles that are now long overdue, time to catch up on this and that. And, naturally, time to blog.

Nope. I’m online when I write, but that’s largely for research and Wiki browsing. Otherwise, I’ve been slipping toward hermitage by degrees. But hey: I can tell it was summer, because I never made it to the beach.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 6th, 2006 at 17:57 and is filed under General Musings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.