News of the Week In Review

The Beave is back! Yes, the DEC can’t keep a good beave down. He’s merrily at work, building a dam even better strategically placed to flood the road at the first good rain, a moral object lesson to us all on the virtues of impudence, optimism and industry.

Not that it's likely to rain any time soon. Landscape hereabouts is now as parched as any I’ve ever seen in California, in much less time too – these plants are not designed for drought. The grass has stopped growing. Only the thistles show any signs of thriving, lined up like helmeted soldiers against the wild greenswards. When does Oklahoma start having dust storms, I wonder?

I worked on the Novel diligently all day yesterday, writing myself into kind of a corner. This is the first novel where I sat down and wrote what I suppose is the equivalent of a Hollywood treatment before I wrote a word of prose. Plotting is my downfall, so I spent an entire month plotting this damn thing. Sadly Chapter 3, Scene 3 and Chapter 3, Scene 5 are virtually identical in Information Flow and Action, plus the chronology seems off: Scenes 1 through 5 take place on February 27, 1932; Scene 6 takes place on February 28, 1932 while Chapter 4 begins on March 2. Seems if you’re throwing a lot of action into one day, you really have to throw a lot of action into the subsequent days or you’re stuck with the really awkward segue, “A few days later…”

I think I have to add a scene. More action. But what?

In one of those moves that characters sometimes make no matter how tightly you plot things beforehand, Steinbeck seems to have fallen in love with the Shenti, my little supernatural introject (cue Twilight Zone theme), the girl in the older woman’s dreams of her girlhood who appears whenever the older woman smokes opium. The Shenti has only made two enigmatic appearances as yet, so I probably need to add a scene fleshing out the life in the doomed Chinese fishing village. I’m frightened this throws the rest of the plot out of balance in some as yet undetermined way, picking the daisy in the Pleistocene etcetera.

Today, I must do work for pay. I really, really, really don’t want to. I wish I could find a patron who would support me so I could throw myself into this novel. I could finish it in a month. I really don't want to do anything but sink down into it.

Else?

Jeanna, my sister, New Mexico’s drive-in queen, has been approached about taking over another drive-in. I won’t name the town.

“Three screens!” she told me on the phone. “Someone can make a mint.”

“So do it!” I said.

“I wasn’t thinking me. I was thinking you.”

“Jeanna. I don’t know the first thing about running a drive-in movie theater.”

“Come here in August for a few weeks and I’ll show you.”

So now that’s in the hopper.

Oh, yes, I would definitely do it if I thought it might work. Why? Because I’m nutty and rootless. Because I really don’t want to go through another winter here – and even with all the blistering temperatures over the last few days, the refrain in my mind is, In five months, it will be Christmas. Winter will have come.

My main concern is not leaving Robin actually. I love the kid – I have to, I gave birth to him. But at this point the maternal guilt thing is over. I’m not really doing much for him in the maternal role, and I’m doing nothing for myself. No, my main concern is the dogs – who would take care of them? Ben won’t take them. I can't take them with me. And they’re nice dogs, they don’t deserve to be abandoned.

Also I met a man I like. Maybe “like” is too strong: I could like. He’s very smart and very rich. That last is kind of a problem in that I’m so-o marginal: Who, I wonder, could possibly be interested in me? But we click on some level, and I know he recognizes that. The question is how important is “clicking” to him? We are, after all, in our sixties – well. I’m not quite yet, but I might as well be. Isn’t “clicking” something that happens to 30 year olds?

Also, finally watched HBO’s Game of Thrones. Liked it so much that I’m starting the novels. I’ve always known George R.R. Martin is a terrific writer: The Pear Shaped Man is one of my two favorite horror short stories. (Michael Chabon's Lovecraft homage, In the Black Mill is the other.) Cheese doodles as the ultimate instrument of horror! Brilliant. Don’t know why I’ve avoided Song of Ice and Fire all these years – probably because I may be the only person on the planet who absolutely loathes Lord of the Rings, thought it was an epic bore. So “Lord of the Rings with full frontal nudity” was never much of a recommendation.

When I leave Ithaca, I will miss my daily hike to Fall Creek and points beyond. It has a really otherworldly quality to it.