Buffalo

[mallorys_camera]

I've always believed the way you spend New Years Day is a microcosm for how you will be spending the rest of the year. I spent yesterday writing, drawing, reading, walking on the beach, companionably ignoring Ben and watching bad television – A&E has a particularly bizarre series, Dog: the Bounty Hunter which for various reasons that no doubt a psychoanalyst could uncover if I could only afford one, I find quite fascinating; they did a marathon yesterday.

"What's that?" said Ben, peering at the watercolor above. "Buffalo? Umbrellas on the beach?"

"The latter," I said. "But maybe it would be more interesting if it was the former."

I wrote a new beginning for Mallory's Camera (the novel, not the LJ.) A rewrite is a bit premature for something that's only 20,000 words long, but the beginning was so glaringly off that it threw me out every time I sat down to work on it. Also discovered that in archiving all the 2004 scut and cleaning the garbage off my hard drive, I had throw away all my plot notes for Mallory's Camera! Decided to see this as a mandate for a fresh approach from the Big Writer Guy In the Sky – la-la-la! – rather than an occasion for anxiety attacks and Norton Utilities.

It is pouring rain today and savvy businesswoman that I am, I forsee the demand for hot sauce will be somewhat dampened. So I'll bring the laptop into the store and see if I can pound off 1000 words or so.

Before yesterday, I hadn't worked on this novel for about a year. When I read it over, I had the experience of being utterly intimidated by the writer's brilliance and I knew I'd never be able to write something as brilliant. It didn't seem to matter that the writer was me. Do other writers have this problem, I wonder?