The Day

I have to be here for the HVAC guy this afternoon, but I have the whole morning to go to the post office and the park.

I should get started, but I’m kind of relishing just sitting here anticipating going to the park.

I’m feeling better, in all ways–less snotty, less down on my skills as a writer. Hell Harry Crewes had for novels rejected, I just read, and he kicked butt. Also, I think my reworking of the end of the novel is better. In the old end, it was Sue who was seduced by Lee’s fake antebellum South and Ben had to rescue her, but in this one, it’s Ben who’s seduced by Lee’s claims of scientific spiritualism and Sue has to figure out how to save them.

I’ve been reading a lot of claims about how fiction shouldn’t have  point, shouldn’t have an agenda. But I can’t really write this novel like that. My book does have a moral, or at least a central claim. Maybe that’s why my writing sucks, I don’t know.

But I write with a point of view. And my point of view is that wanting what Lee wants and going to the lengths he goes to get it are not just damaging to his victims and his son, but they can’t ever actually satisfy him, because the thing he wants is gone and the thing he’s put in its place is a lie. And I want to be sure that’s clear, that even he, who wants so much to be the demi-god of his own magical antebellum plantation can only imagine one that bears only superficial resemblance to life as it was lived. He wants the fairytale and demands it be recognized as truth.

Anyway, it looks like rain, so I called the heating and cooling folks and said they should try to come early. Which means no park and that I have to get to the post office.