I’ve been rather delinquent since finishing the Not-a-Werewolf Book, which still doesn’t have a real title. I’ve had that horrible impotent feeling: I want to write, and I don’t want substitutes, but when I sit down to make words, they just don’t feel exciting. This does not stop me from making words. I don’t do writer’s block. I do, however, crave like a drug the ultimate exultation of making words that are really good. Hence my excitement today: finally getting somewhere excellent with “Railway Guns of the Northern Rockies”, which has been kicking around my brain for a few months. I am going to love this story. Other stories in progress: “Forty-Nine Days in the Intermediate States, with Extracts from the Great Liberation by Hearing”: needs attention, but it makes me sad to work on it. I think I’ll get back to it next month. “Rush Lane”: Almost done, and shaping up nicely now that I know what the hell it’s actually about. “Seven Postcards from the Garden of Earthly Delights”: About to be razed to the ground and rebuilt from scratch with the same floor plan yet a totally different architectural style. “Sovereign Cure for Pneumonia”: Advances on this […]
In which I get sentimental over Heathrow
I began this morning reading an excerpt in Harper’s from Alain de Botton’s new book, A Week at the Airport, written about his stint as Heathrow’s poet laureate. I remember the concept making news at the time, and thinking how delighted I would be if I landed in a country and discovered that even its airport had its own poet. The book, if this section is anything to go by, will delight me just as much, and move me, too. I travel frequently and I find it such a strange intersection of pampering and deprivation. I can provide myself with a stack of magazines and an iPod playlist, my powder compact and Kiehl’s lip balm and a glass of wine, but I am powerless to reach my husband and my cats. I once sat in the departure lounge at LAX talking to my father on my cell phone and hearing the news that he’d had a hospital bed moved into the living room. I knew he wanted to die at home; I hadn’t known, until then, that it would be before the end of the month. Since I am a very privileged person, I could at least get myself a […]