Almost Fiction

Needed to make a run to town, but didn't, blew the day off. Read art history, some short stories. Made a nice tuna salad that I ate on saltines, some olives and cheese. One hand free for the book. Scanned through some New Yorker articles. Read a book about loneliness, as there was a discussion about it on the radio yesterday. I spend more time alone than anyone I know, but I'm rarely lonely. Reading a John Sandford novel, or one by Lee Child will always raise my spirits. I almost have to be alone to write, and it's not a pretty operation, bedeviled might be a better word. Read myself writing about Mississippi, in a file from the new-found drawer. Wish I had documented that experience the way I have life on the ridge. I always thought that book would be a fiction. "On Three", another of the manuscripts stolen, was completely non-fiction, unrelentingly. I understand that there's a dog-eared copy of one of the nine sections of that book, somewhere in Texas, that people are made to read at gunpoint. I hope to find a copy in the drawer. I wrote that book very fast, maybe a month, three or four completely edited pages a night, and a page, for me, is 42 lines, single-spaced. I write in 10 point Arial, it's a great font to work in, because everything is so clear, but I hate it as a book face. Always and still prefer old-style types for book work. I'm a serif guy, what can I say. Scotch Old-Style, or Garamond, some of the Caslons, they're beautiful faces. Arial sucks, actually, but it's extremely, what's the word, clear, uncluttered, and it aids me in my attempt at punctuation. Do all of us have those little smeared tracks of bug shit that look like commas? There are a couple of places on my screen where a period of bug shit, is perfectly willing to fill in for anything I might come up with. D could come up with an argument, about intent, but I actually chose to keep things as vague as possible, what you thought you meant is close enough.