Monthly Archives: March 2011

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I’m not saying we can’t have nice things

One of my neighbors apperently had a professional photograph their living-room mantlepiece, and has propped up a 3’x2′ print of the result on a stand in the lobby.

That could be my living room, but isn’t. Suddenly all my DVDs and IKEA shelves feel — I won’t say vulgar; careless? Unexamined? (Okay, the 40-inch television, in my tiny Edwardian apartment, feels a little vulgar.) It would be nice to grow into a space over years the way that one seems to have been grown into. It would be nice to reconcile that with the way that after three or four years in any one place I seem to need to put several time zones between that place and myself.

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Draft

This is the first draft of a novel. Parts of it are pretty good. A lot of it is a godawful mess, and there’s something essentially arbitrary about calling it done. But it’s got a beginning, a middle and an end, in 90,000-odd words, even if reading them straight through is a bit like a long drive in the dark over washed-out roads.

This is a box with the first draft of a novel in it. It’s a European box meant for A4 paper, but you can cram 8½″×11″ into it if you’re brisk.

This is the drawer the box goes in. I used to keep printer paper in there, but I’ve got a whole lot less of that than I did a couple of hours ago.

It’s going to stay the drawer for a bit, while I work on some other things. We’ll see what it looks like when I take it out again.