May 4th 2012
What I don't get is why people in Russia are more interested in this blog than people in the USA, especially since my in-laws live here and are faithful to the cause.  As far as the folks in Britain go - shame on you. You're fading off my audience map!
This week I learned that my book will be published July, August or September of next year. My heart sank. I wanted to shout, "But what if the Mayans are right?" But no one was listening. I am corresponding with a black hole that has a voice which speaks sometimes.  It says (or did say this week) "Thou shalt have thy manuscript back with red marks next week." Unfortunately, or not so unfortunately for me, next week I will be trying to absorb John Steinbeck through my pores by travelling to Salinas and Monterey, California. I'm going to visit the house he was born in and grew up in and banged out some of his great books in. He wrote Tortilla Flat sitting at a table set up outside the front room (where he was born) while his mother died in there slowly. If that is not dramatic irony, it ought to be. At least, there should be a name for something that poignant and contradictory. Existential Irony.
I once visited the Bronte's house in Haworth, Yorkshire. I stood very close to the couch upon which Emily Bronte said, "I will see a doctor now," and then gave up the ghost. Only, I  fervently believe in ghosts - they follow me to the bathroom every night when I get up in the dark and try to be grown-up and above such things. But they come anyway. It was quite overwhelming being in Emily's house. She's the one I gravitate to the most. I see her standing by her windswept window for hours, I feel her vibrant heart. It was almost too much to stand by that couch, cordoned off, kept away from the living. And I am afraid it will be too much to stand outside Steinbeck's front room in the space where he captured whatever this thing is we call life and tied it down for us in words. I'm afraid I might weep.