You said you'd stand by me in the middle of chapter three, but you were up to your old tricks in chapters four, five, and six.

So, one of the reasons I decided to try to regularly blahhhhhg is to dust off the cobwebs from my Not Work writing. Like approximately 97.8% of the population, I am convinced that I have the Great American Novel "up here" [imagine me tapping my forehead]. In my case, I have multiple scenes imagined, a general plot outline thought out, some characters and descriptions, and a beginning section of four or five pages written on college-ruled notebook paper when Bill Clinton was president.


Given my desire to rub shoulders at exclusive literary cocktail parties with prestigious authors like Sidney Sheldon and J.D. Salinger, and to eat bon-bons from the belly-button of Jhumpa Lahiri,* this is an intolerable situation. And no matter how many old lamps I rub, my wish of having a neatly-typed manuscript of my mentally-stored novel appearing on my desk remains unfulfilled.

Accordingly, I have decided that, on occasion, I will actually type a scene, and will post it for public scorn, ridicule, or praise. And, by telling my readers (all three of you) about this plan, I will force myself (maybe) to actually follow through on this. At any rate, I have been thinking about one scene in particular lately because I saw a woman on the subway the other day who looks like my mental image of one of the characters. Let's see what happens.

*No, I haven't read her new book, but from her picture, she looks like someone from whose navel I would like to nibble. I know, I know -- I'm a looksist.