Failure of the Day: Who’s The Mark?

I’ve been crap lately at updating here; sorry. I’m a little distracted by things going on in my, y’know, life, and now that this draft of my novel is done, I’m taking the summer off from it and declared this the Summer! Of! Pilates!

I’m grooving on the pilates, by the way; I can’t believe it took so long for someone to invent an exercise that you can do lying down. It’s so obvious! I’m actually good at it too, since it’s all about strength and flexibility, which I have oodles of, but not about balance and grace, of which I am of course entirely bereft. Plus I really enjoy imagining the mean things I would say to the skinny white bitch in the leotard on the video who tells me that being overweight is just an outward sign that the mind and the body are out of balance. Really? I would say. “Out of balance” you say? Well that explains everything! I thought it was because of my INCURABLE NEUROLOGICAL DISEASE compounded by 6 years of paralysis and atrophy but if you say that’s not it…

Of course now that I am expressly not writing and especially not working on plugging the enormous holes in my novel’s narrative structure, my head is chock-a-block full of text, and not just things to make new age bitches cry, either. Between the novel I’m reading and my newly beloved Mountain Goats CDs, the valves are open and the lines are coming, no waiting. I jot them down longhand but do not open a Word doc, I do not open a Word doc, I do not open a Word doc. Because this is the Summer of Pilates, not the Summer of Starting Draft 3. And as long as I believe that it, seems clear that this little intellectual bait and switch will keep paying off.

From a Martin Amis interview: “I believe that everyone has a novel in them. The difference between the writer and the nonwriter is that the writer finishes the thing.”