Murnau, Nooteboom, Billy Joel, Lentils, Grimm.

Since I am, at least in terms of how I spend my hours, living for the first time as a full-time writer, I'm left to wonder how work gets done. Admittedly, my output is substantially greater than when I was driving the truck, but labors of various sorts come to us like magnets.

Take today, for example.

I'm done ripping the collection. I was woken up before six by a combination of splitting back pain and tender-hearted animals. I edited a few pages, flipped through Cees Nooteboom. Wrote a little. Then, I got up and made the Dufflebag a cheese and eggs scramble for breakfast. I drove him to school, came back, put the dishes from yesterday away, and worked for two solid hours.

I broke to go to the grocery store, where I picked up lentils and other ingredients for tonight's dinner. When I got home, one of the cats had smashed our new cactus. It seemed to have exploded, and I found soil and pottery shards all the way on the other side of the room. I did the dishes, cleaned the floors, lit the fireplace, and struggled to get the dough to rise on a stubborn wheat bread.

Big D, one of the cats, threw up a foamy liquid vomit. Back to the floors.

Time to pick up the Dufflebag, give him his snack, and send him upstairs while I mopped the kitchen with a cranky, resistant device. It didn't work well, so I took an old tee-shirt and started using that.

Soon, it will be time to start the lentil soup.

So, in ten hour's time, I did about two and a half hours of work. I was happy with what I did, but it seems a meager justification. I read about five pages of a short story. In that time, I had a time for a quick lunch of sour cream and herring, but not enough time to shower. That comes after dinner.

This isn't a complain, but an article of wonderment. When you work at home, how do you work on the work rather than the home?

I'm finding my way.

*

All that having been said, I've added about thirty pages to the MS over the past week, just in minor edits. It's exciting to watch it continue to take shape. It is as they say: at a certain point, the book writes itself because certain things need to go in certain places. In others, have I have to step back and figure out the transitions in my head.

*

Ha! I have my ipod on shuffle. There are so many songs there are some I will no doubt never hear. But I wonder at how many big songs make it through. "Piano Man."

In the context of whatever went before or after, it sounds damn good to me. I don't care if you've heard it too often and it's now annoying. To me, it remains evocative. The sun is setting. The song ends. Hank Williams plays, "Ramblin' Man." We continue.

*

Jess and I rewatched the last half hour of Murnau's excellent Sunrise last night. I wrote before about an element in the film that seemed magical, and I tried to suggest that this came from the backgrounds, the setting. I considered this. It is one thing to be in love, and another to be in love in the Alps, or in Paris, or in a cave, or on the moon. Since it is a silent film, the environments do best when they lend an air of rich suggestiveness. Murnau takes this to such a peak, I can only describe it as analagous to Grimm's fairy tales painted on layered glass plates. The constricted, cramped quality only adds to the visual, multidimensional power, be it waves or woods that the characters move among.

I would like to talk about the ending, but to know it beforehand truly would rob you of the pleasure of experiencing it for yourself. And I wouldn't do that to you. Not this time.