Yesterday, I was in love with my novel. I woke up as I had for the past eight weeks -- happy to have nothing to do all day but write, delighted to be spending six or seven hours in my 1920s speakeasy (with a break for lunch and What Not to Wear), spilling over with ideas and enthusiasm and general well-being.
Today, I hate my novel. It took ten hours to squeeze out a thousand words. True, I kept stopping to read about the divorce of Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes, but if Katie hadn't filed those papers on Friday, I would have kept stopping to do something else --something just as unproductive and wholly unconnected to writing a novel.
I want my other job back. The one where I get to leave the house and talk to actual people in the real world instead of sitting around noticing plot holes in a bunch of made-up stuff. (Oh my god!! I wonder if Katie Holmes thought the same thing when she filed the papers??)
On the bright side, I started reading A Sense of Direction, a book about pilgrimages by Gideon Lewis-Kraus. Even though it is non-fiction and has nothing to do with speakeasies, it is so elegantly written (and so funny) that I think it might save my marriage to the novel. Or at least to the written word. At the very least, it is keeping me off TMZ.
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