Crazy.

I am sitting here at work, trying not to go insane.

For the past few months I have been a camera lens, struggling in and out of focus every minute. I like to think that I'm moving daily toward the life I want, but I also know that I am lazier than I should be.

How do you reconcile that?

Dunno.

I'm just walking around the office, trying to cajole the most busy people into pointless conversations. Sometimes it works, and I succeed in wasting time.

NaNoWriMo isn't loaning me a Neo this year, so I had to take matters into my own hands and try to get one from somewhere else. Seconds ago, I won a Dana on ebay, and I plan on juicing it up. Just how?, maybe you're asking yourself? Heh, heh. Details to come. But I will say, it involves fire engine red. Rrrooowwwwrrrr.

I am poking at the novel plot.

It's still not a plot, as such, just a loose list of characters that I plan on throwing into a soup. I'm not sure if it's going to fly, though. Namely, because you usually need a plot to get a novel off the ground.

So the question of the moment is: How do you take someone potentially reprehensible and make them sympathetic, or even, hilarous?

It's been done before, authors with more skill than myself. The example that calls to me most at the moment is A Confederacy of Dunces, the funniest book I have ever read. Just brilliant. Both Martin Amis and David Foster Wallace have managed to pull off humorous, intelligent ensemble pieces that were Lit Fic-cy, so there isn't a ton of action happening every minute. How do they do that?

I am reading greedily, but not for pleasure. Last night I had to slow myself down...after finishing The Autobiography of Red I tried to move straight on to Nabokov's Despair without a breath. I had to stop, dizzy, like I'd just been running down a hill too fast after eating too much. I feel like I'm cramming for exams, needing to take in as much good writing as possible before November 1st. My fingers itch to write right now, just to get back into the habit of slinging words together again, but I don't want to take a chance on writing something that might end up a part of the novel.

Because that's cheating.

Exams, indeed.

And why do I start every sentence with 'I'? That's not good form at all.

jules