18 November 2004

I've forgotten what it's like to say to myself, "What should I do now?" and not mean "Which of these many things should I do now?" I know there was a time when it meant, "Hey, I should come up with something to do now." And that part was never hard for me, but now it just never happens. Ever. Wandering around the house looking for inspiration for the evening's activity? Nope. I am, if anything, overinspired.

Isn't that the way of it.

I'm reading Anthony Price's The Labyrinth Makers now, and am sucked very thoroughly into it. I'm sorry that there's a bunch of other stuff I'm going to have to read before the next one, which DDB has already lent me. It's a spy novel. British. Cold War. Good timing. Like LeCarré should have been.

And I'm doing yoga and working on the book and trying to cut a story down to a market's length without cutting its flesh from its bones. Stuff.

I'm having a hard time putting journal entries high on my priority list right now. I think of things I want to talk about -- Paula made a comment that seemed like it might spark a pretty good journal entry this morning -- but I've left it in the inbox and may do a Paula-centric answer in e-mail instead. I'm just...I guess I'm not that much into shouting into the void right now. I'm doing enough of it professionally that adding an extra holler down that particular well doesn't seem like such a very fabulous idea, when I could be doing something else entirely. At the same time, I'm not really prepared to give up the idea of a journal. I think it may be good for me to keep shouting, regardless of what the void does or doesn't spit back out at me.

It's very strange: I'm not otherwise very out-of-sorts, but when it comes to the journal, yes, very. I am infinitely distractible from it. In fact, this very paragraph has already lost out to several pages of The Labyrinth Makers, a note in the paper journal, and three e-mails. And even typing that sentence, I immediately wanted to switch windows and start preparing a cover letter.

So I'm going to try something. I'm going to try biweekly updates for awhile instead of "roughly daily." I'm aiming at Sundays and Wednesdays. If I do that through the holidays, I should have some sense of whether it's the right amount, or whether it's too little, or whether it's still not going very smoothly and I maybe ought to consider stopping entirely.

I'm feeling emotionally pretty worn out, people. I don't feel like I can talk a lot about the things that are wearing, because they're not all my things, and they're ongoing things, and what can I say about them that isn't the same old synopsis? And we all know how I feel about synopses by now, I should think.

So instead I try to string together a few sentences about what I'm reading and how we're entirely out of butter, out of oleo, even. We had about a quarter-teaspoon more than we needed for dinner, only because it was sticking to the dish. This is how you can tell I've started the Christmas baking. The house smells like cloves and ginger and cinnamon and lemon zest and molasses, and the pepparkakor dough is chilling in the fridge to become pepparkakor tomorrow. To become, I will note, a heck of a lot of pepparkakor. And we're entirely out of butter and butter-imitating products for the first time since last October.

Do you care about the pepparkakor? Well, some of you will, because some of you get some of it. And the butter-shortage? Meh. But the point is that I'm having a hard time connecting caring about both pepparkakor and lack of butter with caring about putting a journal entry together about them. So we'll see how this twice a week thing goes.