July 8 2010

I've enjoyed these quiet days at work. My productivity skyrockets when the boss isn't here. I finished my work today before lunch, so the afternoon has been spent working on the novel, taking walks, and shutting the blinds and my office door to do push-ups and sit-ups in privacy. Everyone is going batty. My secretary is going to paint the bathroom, and I caught our intern on the Facebooker.

I'm not sure what our next door neighbors do. Their blinds are always closed, and their door is always locked. They have a bell and a "No Solicitation" sign. I think they're either E-bay sellers or Soviet Codebreakers. Every so often they come outside for walkies with their doggies. They seem kind: a balding man of around sixty, and his wife of the same age although looking much better to show for it. The dog's name is Lucy and she gets frightened easily, so she barks at everyone. I can hear her now.

I've rewritten my first chapter again, trying to make the action more immediate. I've ended up adding a new character and pretty much totally reconstructing the pace of the novel. I decided that starting off in such a state of "normalcy" for my characters wasn't really interesting. It would be much better if the characters were already "uncomfortable" at the beginning, and that sense of initial normalcy in the relationship between the two leads can still be maintained.

I've written enough poetry to feel like I can read over my old work and recognize that it might not be good, but it's "finished", if that makes sense. However, I can't stop reading what I've done so far in my novel and changing it over and over again. It's such a different mentality. There's so many different voices in fiction and it's hard to keep them uniform when you want them uniform and even harder to make them unique when they need to be unique. I read "The Great Gatsby" again, and it's so perfectly simple and awe-inspiring that it's inspirational and discouraging at the same time.

I went through my notebook and found a poem I'd written the day after Marie Carpenter passed away. I thought about reading it at her funeral, but decided against it. It probably would have felt out of place. I put it on the blog. I had a dream last night where I couldn't determine which of my friends were dead and which were alive.

I feel like the longer I stay in Chattanooga, the stupider life gets, like a tv show that's run out of ideas.