Saturday, September 10, 2011

New Love


I love this stage of something new. Everything is pure and exciting. The entire world is a full sack of possibility. Every tree, every cloud looks extra sharp and pretty. Everything is possible. Everything is perfect and just how I want it to be.

I have not yet written a word.

I love myself when I am with a new project. As the writer of this book, I am thirty pounds lighter with muscled arms and a flat stomach. I wear black tank tops over loose trousers. My hair is long and perfectly white. I look smart on my book jacket.

My time is my own.

I give witty interviews to Terri Gross on NPR. I rule book signings in my old neighborhoods with a beatific smile. My 25th high school reunion will be the bomb. “I saw you on the Morning Show,” everyone will say, sorry they didn’t invite me to snort cocaine with them in junior year (I would have said no anyway).

The climactic scene in the desert is perfect. The imagery and the metaphor are perfectly interwoven to create a pathos that is not too pathetic, just perfect. When people ask about it I lower my eyes and say it just came out of me that way like an egg just perfect.

Other writers will wish they were me.

I’ll get a letter from an unsuccessful writer: I have written six novels, and no agents want me. I’m overworked in a stressful job that I need to pay my bills. All I want to do is write. All I do in my spare time is write. What can I do?

In my bare feet I will walk across the hardwood floors of the million dollar Berkeley home I just bought with my latest Hollywood movie option dough. I will look out the window at the Bay. I will send a message through the wire.

Keep writing, I will say. As if you could stop.

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