mosley + brown = blue

lexie left yesterday. back to texas. she expressed many times how grateful she is to us for having her here this past week. she lives in a small town where everyone knows her business, and at the moment she is dealing with some very personal horror there. we offered her a week's respite, and she was glad to have it, but now it's over. i wish there was more we could do for her, but i don't think there it is. it's one of those things only time mends.

not to say, on the other hand, that i'm not glad to have my house back. my bed! it would be great if lexie lived in this town and we could see her all the time ... but i am glad we have the house to ourselves again. is that terrible?

day off today. going to have some coffee and probably finish this nicholas mosley book i'm reading. i think this guy is just about the best. his dialogue is fantastic. he writes these intensely intelligent philosophical novels and i don't know how else to describe. i get into them.

next on the book-reading agenda will i think be the new murakami paperback, and that should be a treat too.

so, a little reading, a little coffee. grocery, etc, shopping. back home for lunch and an afternoon of writing. today is the day. kara works until 5:30 and i will start writing the second draft of "nocturnal dyspnea." lexie read the first draft while she was here and she really took to it. she liked the rapid pace, likening it to of all things to the da vinci code. (you can't get much farther from mosley than this.) i thought that was a fun ride, sure, and i've read a couple others of his and they were also a lot of fun. i won't get into the absurdity of the brouhaha surrounding the book, but the point it, lexie liked the "dysnpea" ride. which of course was great to hear.

it's a hair over 50,000 words now and i am told that to make it relatively mainstream publishable it should be closer to the neighborhood of 100,000 words. questions now abound. how to stretch the thing without losing the breakneck pace lexie enjoyed? possible answer: subplots. keep the reader dashing from one thrill ride to another. faithful (no pun intended) mr brown does that, or rather i suppose he weaves strings of the same plot, following individual characters on their thrill rides (i'm thinking currently of deception point, the one of his i read most recently). anyway. so i suppose i have some thinking and planning to do. of course, i don't want to overplan as that would kill the fun of writing. the fun of writing is finding out what happens next, as well as playing with language.

gosh but it would be nice to write like nicholas mosley does. there are lots of aspects of writing i would steal from him. structure, dialogue, theme. the intellect, the thoughtfulness, the apparent ease of the flow of words.

anyway. day one of writing is today. first, though, i think i need to see what's wrong with our washing machine. i think lexie must have mucked it up.