I’ve got sore spots on my elbows and wrists from the writing, but I’ve also got 32,6oo words done on my novel in progress.

For those who don’t know, this past week and the one before I dedicated to writing 4-6 hours a day on my NIP. Here’s what week two looked like:

• Monday: Learned to hide the clock on my computer. Big advance. Four hours, forty-five minutes and it all felt good
• Tuesday: A crappy morning but a good afternoon. A shade over four hours.
• Wednesday: A creepily exact four hours. On a roll, but life is intruding.
• Thursday: Again, just a hair over four hours.
• Friday: Only a little over three hours today. Burnt out.

Mondays prove my best days and Fridays my worst. I’m taking the coming week off, and then will be diving back into a modified round two. It doesn’t look like I’ll get close to six hours, though I’m keeping the upper limit on my goals. It’s good to aim high. I now know I can make it mentally (I had thought four hours impossible, but that’s happening regularly now), but I also realize life is not going to give me that much time off every day. Sometimes, as the theme song to How to Make it In America says: I need a dollar.

I could take two weeks off but despite the sore spots… this is kind of fun.

Week one = survived. Here’s what it looked like:

• Monday: About three hours. Feel very good.
• Tuesday: Four and a half hours. Physically exhausted. My body hurt everywhere.
• Wednesday: Nearly five hours. Phone calls killed it just shy of the five hour mark.
• Thursday: A hair under four hours. Complete mental fatigue. No idea what I wrote. Hopefully it was in English.
• Friday: Less than three hours. Too much world intruding, causing a serious difficulty focusing. Had to hide under a pillow for awhile.

Total: 13,600 words. Hopefully this week will prove equally successful/survivable. After that I plan to take a week off to host Doug, do some work that pays bills, and break some concrete. Possibly over my head.

Nobody throws away books. We give away books to friends or family, donate them to libraries or prisons, sell them at yard sales or book stores, but we don’t trash them.

I’ve been conned into more than one moving “party.” Usually I show up ready to move a box or two and enjoy the promised pizza before we all head to the bar. I should know better. I’m just so damn optimistic. What really happens is I end up sweating for hours, hefting a sofa down a spiral staircase with someone’s ill-tempered father-in-law while the friend I came to aid lounges in an air conditioned and emptying apartment packing and repacking picture frames.

By the end of these “parties” everyone is so frustrated that they begin to grab  trashbags. The carefully cared for picture frames, the old sports equipment, items galore fly into big bags or are heaved out onto the curb for the trash men. Clothes, VHS, chairs, toys, old radios, cans of white beans, haircare products, stained rugs, warped shelves, house plants, old shoes, watering cans, everything. Except books.

“Don’t throw those away,” someone says. Someone always volunteers to take them, or to take them to a book drop. No matter how sweaty, tired, and fed up the group is, they stop short of trashing books. In the worst case scenario, the books are neatly stacked next to the dust bunnies and left for the next occupant.

Where does this reverence come from? In a literary geek like myself it’s natural, but most people are not like me (Woe is them, I know.) Most of us own stacks of books whose plots we cannot remember or ones we’ve never even read and never will. These objects don’t mean anything to us on a personal level, yet there’s still a sort of reverence for the book as an object. Even the pulpiest trash novels are treated better than objects worth far more than the novels’ $6.95 price tag.

In their physical form books becomes more than collections of words or thoughts, they become symbols, totems, of thought itself. Books are solid hunks of civilization. They are physical handles we can grasp when everything else about civilization seems to amount to noise pollution, bottles of chemicals, or just more pounds to be carried down spiral staircases. So we save them, pass them on, and recycle them. Yes, books are godawful heavy, but like thought itself, we’re not quite ready to throw them out.

p.s. I’ve actually finished the book in my “What I’m Reading” list, All My Friends Are Superheroes,  but I wanted to put it up because it was so good. It is very short (it only took me two hours to read) but I recommend it to anyone who can handle the speculative nature of a story about a guy whose friends are, in fact, all superheroes.

This weekend is the wedding,  so once again I’m a bit absent. However, I leave you with this: All my favorite things together in one place.

I have just sent the text I read recently out to my email list. Now I shall disappear for a few days on a fishing trip/bachelor party. Beware, fish!

Have a great weekend.

I never realized my sense of style would become a barrier to my literary career. Woe! Woe! I shall plan to be less well dressed at future readings.

For those that missed it! I shall be sending the excerpt I read out over my email list. Your reading experience will be bereft of my elucidating intonation but on the plus side, you will not be distracted by my wardrobe.

I won’t be posting the excerpt on my blog, so if you want to read it, you’d better be sure you’re on the list. And how do you do that? You subscribe. I have finally added a nice auto-subscribe form here. Simply fill out your name and email address.

I shall be adding a couple people to my list myself over the next day or two, and will plan to send the excerpt sometime later this week.

I’ll be at the Baltimore Hostel tonight along with a group of other literary worthies. You ought to check it out, for reals. They have AC!

7pm.

I’ve finally reached the end of A Room of One’s Own. I found it considerably harder to get through than “How Should One Read a Book?”

A Room suffers from the fact that women have progressed so very far. Though sadly it is probably still pertinent to much of the world, in the United States at least women have escaped most of the chains of social impoverishment. (Of course Kristan was right in the comments section. Woolf: philosophies great, style hard. Woolf herself was so impoverished she couldn’t afford to indent. Seriously! Paragraphs three pages long.)

In holding with Woolf’s philosophies I’ve finally commandeered a room of my own and turned it into an office. I took one entire wall and painted it as a chalkboard and it is pretty splendid. I’ve set up all my toys and so far the inspiration has flowed. As Woolf says in “How One Should Read a Book,” we cannot suppress our own idiosyncrasy without impoverishing it.

Woolf was not talking about writing, though I think the sentiment fits, but about reading, and about how crucial it is for us to develop our own ability to read critically.

And if everyone’s predictions are correct about the coming e-book universe, reading critically will be ever more important, for there shall be quite a bit to wade through, and we’ll have to learn the skill of throwing books aside in anger (or deleting them with stern keystrokes, at least).

All change is not sky falling, however, as a perusal of the amazing world of the Kindle boards will soon reveal. The boards are a glimpse at a vibrant and vigorous reading world of tomorrow, one that fits so nicely Woolf’s reasons why we should read well:

If behind the erratic gunfire of the press the author felt that there was another kind of criticism, the opinion of people reading for the love of reading, slowly and unprofessionally, and judging with great sympathy and yet with great severity, might this not improve the quality of his work? And if by our means books were to become stronger, richer, and more varied, that would be an end worth reaching.

In these days when the press’s gunfire grows ever more erratic, let’s embrace our own idiosyncrasy, enjoy our modern freedoms, and read and argue galore. It’s a good time to be writer or reader.

Lately, I’ve been working on a novel. It’s a novel about doctors. Specifically it’s a novel about doctors who figure that since they’re so good at fixing things, why don’t they start fixing broken hearts. Yep.

It’s  moving slowly towards completion, but if you want a glimpse, and I know you do, now’s your chance. I will be reading a tiny sliver of aforementioned novel-in-progress at Last Rites on July 25th.

If you remember, I was one of Last Rites’ very first readers. Despite this rocky start, the reading series has been going strong for a year now. Come celebrate with me. 7pm, at the Baltimore Hostel. They got beers.