Illustration by Peter Hannan

Thursday 4:00 a.m. Sat bolt upright in bed thinking: The novel stinks. Followed by the thought: You aren’t Poe, but you’re not Danielle Steele either.

Saturday Night 11:50 p.m.

Can’t sleep. Normal Heights Air Force continues reconnaissance mission overhead. Dullisharp hacking at the air droning of some constipated air leviathan. Searchlight fires my bedroom with white light every few minutes. Sirens along El Cajon Boulevard. Someone’s goin’ to emergency, someone’s goin’ to jail.

My stuff is packed. My agent needs first hundred pages to take to New York next week. Been completely unable to work in my apartment. Landlord is tearing up the concrete around the building to patch the foundation. Jackhammers all day. Neighbor kids with nowhere to go, screams Dopplering down the alley toward the Vietnamese guys with the chop shop they run day and night out of their garage.

Get up and turn on Saturday Night Live. It isn’t funny. It’s not just me; it isn’t funny. Watch it anyway until the helicopter splits. Relatively quiet now. Back to bed. Distant freeway sounds. Close the window. Suffocate. Eventually drift off dreaming someone has broken into my apartment, gone through my desk drawers, and left scathingly accurate criticisms of my novel in bright-red spray paint on the walls.

Gunshot wakes me. Look at clock. 3 a.m. It was a gunshot, not a car backfiring. A loud report followed by the ching crack of a bullet striking a surface. I lie awake waiting for voices, a second gunshot. I think about calling the cops. I’m tired of calling the cops. Nothing else happens. My heart is doing a rhumba. It’s probably four when I fall asleep and sleep badly.

Sunday Night 7 p.m.

Arrived in Julian Sunday afternoon, approximately 2 p.m. Near the junction of 78 and 79 was a line of traffic like the San Ysidro border crossing in the middle of summer. It is Apple Days or whatever. You cannot move in town. Lines stretch for two blocks in front of restaurants serving up apple pie and cider. Horse-drawn carriages are stalling traffic. No parking. An hour from one end of town to another. Whole thing begins to look like a bad idea.

The idea: holing up for five days with a fireplace and no phone to rewrite the first chunk of my recently orphaned novel. Found an ideal place with an ashtray as well as a fireplace. Cottage is located not far from the Pine Hills Lodge.

Got through town okay. Took 48 minutes and about $6 worth of gas. All the patience I got.

These next few days will be my main chance to make revisions suggested by my former editor at Doubleday nearly a year ago. They were good suggestions but were put off as strange and brutal firings, contract cancellations, and desperate changes following the merger of Bantam/Doubleday and Dell Books. The merger, in turn, followed in the wake of the largest publishing organization in the world — the German house Bertelsmann — purchasing what they believed was an American gold mine from Nelson Doubleday. Had Nelson artfully concealed from the Teutonic yuppies that the gold in his mine was provided by the New York Mets and not — hah! — books?

Before the bloodbath that left a fraction of the editorial staff and only half their authors’ list, I was given some solid suggestions on how to beef up book one of my two-book contract. I started to work on it and then heard rumblings in the distance, saw bad omens and portents in the air, and the ‘on acceptance’ money never arrived for my first draft. Presently (five months later), I was sent a sizable check and the divorce papers from Doubleday. Custody of the child was mine, exclusively. If I was going to send it out in the world to earn money for me, something still needed to be done with the birth defects in the first six chapters.

Tonight I had intended to review the suspect pages on the screen of the desk-top I had hauled up the mountain. I brought everything: dental floss, canned ravioli, beans, and beef stew (the latter being mountain-y kind of food; I figured the ravioli was a pacifier — weaning myself from the India Street). What I didn’t bring was a couple of adaptors to plug the keyboard and monitor into the walls. That’s okay. I brought a lap-top.

Too much coffee Only a few days to get mellow and literary. Sunday-traffic-on-route-8 nerve endings.

The fireplace just exploded. Everything is so dry up here. Those logs are like cherry bombs. Just tapped out smoldering cinders on the carpet using my cowboy boot like a fire axe. Relax. Relax. Open a bottle of beer.

God, listen to that. Nothing. Silence, breeze outside, the fire. Crickets.

What I was looking for, I suppose, was death. Hemingway wrote to Fitzgerald:

Summer is a discouraging time to write, you don't feel death in the air the way you do in the autumn when the boys really get their pens moving.

I know what he means. It’s hard to out-maneuver summer in San Diego, but it’s autumn here at least tonight The air is as sharp and piquant as a green apple that makes your jaw sting and your eyes squint with the first bite. The stars are irradiated salt on the Santa Ana night.

The cottage, or cabin, is a large one-bedroom. The walls are whitewashed pine, two big easy chairs by the fireplace, a comfortable king-sized bed. Recent New Yorkers and Harpers are on the coffee table along with some tourist information on Julian and a 1984 book of photographs and text called Julian Gold by Cliff Craig. On autumn up here, Cliff has this to say:

The chill fell air is crystal brittle like rock candy and as sweet. Break some off and take it home. Will it one day be packaged like spring water for captives of urban communities.... In the surrounding woods, a sign of fall is the crack of the hunter's rifle. Bright pumpkins in the fields and at road-side stands are piled high for pies and jack-o-lanterns. And the apples, ah, the apples, in cider, pies and crispy chewy in the mouth, are sweetly tart and juicy. Julian Gold in the fall is apples too.

I’ll have to pick some up tomorrow. They must be cheap here, and I’ll need some roughage after all that stew and chili. No rifle-cracking, though, for godsakes.

Brought no hard copy of the novel manuscript. Can’t even read it tonight. Brought along Hemingway’s and Chandler’s letters (not to each other, though I’d give much to see such things if they existed) and Michael Crichton’s new novel to review. It’s about dinosaurs. Heard he got a million or 1.5 for it.

Stoke up the fire. Try to read Hemingway. Letters to Pound, Maxwell Perkins, Archibald MacLeish, Fitzgerald. So much borrowing and lending of money to other writers, asking Perkins for advances, inquiring when payments would be forthcoming. I wonder why it is most writers are broke half the time; maybe it has something to do with the fact that if a writer is doing his job well the work seems effortless, and publishers — even if on a semiconscious level — are reluctant to pay for what appears to be so facilely done.

No? Okay, so you tell me.

Monday 7 a.m.

Woke up first light. Very unusual for me but have a lot of work to do, and I don’t want to miss the eastern slant of sunlight through the trees. The cottage smells of wood smoke and the vanilla-scented candle I read by last night. Fell asleep in the armchair by the fire thinking of an essay to be titled, “Writers and Money: Why Are They Seldom Seen Together?”

At 7:30 the sun crests the eastern ridge and I was right: leaves of emerald, amber, pale gold, rust, and brick seem to be fired from within. A towering, dry, possibly dying California live oak outside the bedroom window is strung with cobwebs and looks, in the sunlight, as if it is shimmering in and out of reality. Acorns fall on the roof and bounce onto the wooden deck. It takes me ten minutes to figure out what the sound is. A jay shrieks at me as I make coffee.

There is no death in the air, but vibrancy. The October light, the color of the earth and trees, winds through the leaves like distant applause, and the complaining rawk criiick of stellar and scrub jays all excite me I am eager to work.

5:15 p.m.

Went into town this morning and found the adaptors. Had some mediocre pancakes in a place with scriptural quotations on the place mats. In the bathroom, the toilet paper was hidden in a mini outhouse mounted on the wall with a little half-moon carved in the door.

Back at the cottage I see Maitland, who owns the place. She is in her 70s with a pretty face and lively blue eyes. She has piled me with books from her library: The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Adam Eve and the Serpent, and a novel by Mario Vargas Llosa. But the fourth one interests me most She says, “You’re a writer, you probably heard of my friend, Robert Wilder. He wrote 20 novels.” Really? His name sounded only vaguely familiar.

“Did he write some screenplays?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact”

I thought that’s where I might have seen his name. In darkened theaters as a kid or in the scrolling letters on the late-late show. She handed me Fruit of the Poppy written in 1965. It was inscribed to Maitland and her late husband. The novel is about drug smuggling and narcs along the Mexican border. It is not unrelated in subject matter to the novel I am writing, or rewriting — or de-writing. What disturbed me, though, was the mass of work he had produced; a couple of Broadway plays, four years of writing films in the ’40s, 20 published novels — and his name was only slightly familiar to me. I’ve scrutinized movie credits for days, been reading constantly since I was six years old, and have an almost encyclopedic memory for authors, titles, publishers. This guy sounds like the Richard Price of his day. Who is Richard Price, you may ask?

Reading through the first two chapters of my own novel, I see that it is not bad. I had actually done more piecemeal revision on this than I’d thought. Quickly became caught up in the story again and learned something useful: my character seems to survive sitting on the shelf for months at a time My eye keeps falling to Fruit of the Poppy. I pick it up and leaf through it, reading at random. I am heartened to find I'd rather read my own work.

The largest hurdle to overcome with my new novel has been these opening pages. It’s a sequel to another novel, but I wanted it to stand on its own. I have rewritten the beginning of this book four times now. Always I have felt that an indigestible mass of information confronts the reader upon entering the story, and the trick is to minimize that sense with a little misdirection and teasing. The reader must be hungry for that information, be willing to swallow largish portions of it quickly. He or she will then be rewarded with drama, tension, mayhem, sex — as well as social pithiness and uplifted sensibilities, naturally.

More to the point is that I must get an editor to swallow large portions of a disguised synopsis. Problems of the craft. I have three things going for me: 1. The character is realistic, engaging, companionable, you don’t mind listening to him; 2. The events he recounts are dramatic, unfold quickly and have an internal logic that holds together. 3. I am motivated to do well at this task. I am inspired by the need to pay insurance on my leased car or they’re going to repo the thing, and they may turn my phone off before the first of the year unless I come up with $200.

A squirrel outside is making a surprising repertoire of sounds: a baby doll, a rusty door hinge, a bicycle hom, castanets. It is now almost six o’clock. The eastern mountain ridge is smeared with a blush wine watercolor. The temperature is dropping. Dogs bark in the distance, and there is the lowing of cattle somewhere, like an erratic fog hom. A single ant runs over the table I have taken as a desk.

I walked this afternoon, along Pine Ridge Avenue, past snugly set homes nearly invisible from the road. “The La Jolla of Julian,” Maitland called the area. I heard John and Jim Belushi’s father lives around here somewhere. The air is so dry my nose is bleeding and my lips are chapped. Writing with an unstoppable nosebleed might be worth a one-act play. No. Never mind.

The woods smell like old paper, Army blankets, and fallen apples fermenting in the sun. Squirrels and jays are surviving drought well enough, it appears. I see a pair of orioles or possibly tanagers. Orioles make me think of baseball. The World Series. Oakland and Cleveland (isn’t that near Baltimore?). Ah well. Thinking about baseball makes me think of sex, a kind of reverse programming; a priest once told me to think of baseball when I had impure thoughts. Now it works the other way around. Baseball has become sexy. Could be a screen treatment in there. No. It’s been done.

Walking through a large, undeveloped lot, I catch a glimpse of some odd-shaped person running gracefully through the foliage not 20 yards from me. It’s a deer. I am surprised at the presence of the animal. It stops and looks at me, unafraid. A second deer approaches and again a sense of presence as if a man or woman had entered some undefined, critical space near me. We stare at each other, blink. The deer become bored before I do and walk off slowly. I quickly write this down in my notebook as if I’ll forget it. “Two deers, very close.” And then, as if to make myself sound less stupid, as if I'm making a less prosaic observation, playing park ranger or naturalist: “Someone must be feeding them, providing water.” Wendy, a neighbor, tells me they have come for the apples and the pears and that they’ll be followed by coyotes.

Later, I drove around, stopped, and bought some apples and a half-gallon of cider. The countryside was gold and sepia and dusty green, very beautiful. I was wearing some sunglasses I bought in the West Village last year on a trip to New York. I took them off, and the tint of the world reverted to butter white and pale blue. The beauty remained.

Tuesday Night 5:30 p.m.

The quiet of this place has had its effect. Downshifting a couple of gears. In 48 hours, I sense a certain grace from the quiet or the beauty. Or is it simply the absence of whatever might be the opposite of grace? Already I am dreading my return.

Work on the novel went well today, I think. Re-reading this mornings stuff, it seems I have written what I had intended to write in the first place Much of the work involved unwriting, I suppose.

I miss the sensual pleasure of a typewriter, the physical gratification of punching keys as if you mean every letter, the primal satisfaction of tearing a sheet of wrong-headed-look-Ma-I’m-writing out of the platen and tossing it across the room. To gently but firmly depress the DELETE key lacks catharsis.

Walking in the woods this afternoon, I found that I am immersed in the events of the story. On some level I am living in what John Gardner called the "vivid and continuous dream” a work of fiction must become. The tone is somewhat different from the previous novel with the same character. York seems tired, a euphemism for depressed. He is, as Chandler described Marlowe “puzzled, but never quite defeated." But I wonder if York is not also defeated on a truer level and acting in spite of it, because the alternative is just not possible for him. I find I don’t know. More interestingly, I find that I don’t care. I am not overly curious about my character’s personal baggage, issues, demons. That he has them is enough. He is a Byronic antihero in a sense; a dark man with a past, and I really don't want to know too much about it. Any detail about where he came from shuts down the number of possibilities in the reader’s mind. The idea of analyzing York — as one critic of my first novel suggested I do, to look more closely into why he “accepts a certain shabbiness as a lifestyle" to get at his “alienation and rootlessness” — instinctively repels me.

... the man who wishes to wrest something from Destiny must venture into that perilous margin-country where the norms of society count for nothing and the demands and guarantees of the group are no longer valid. He must travel to where the police have no sway, to the limits of physical resistance and the far-point of physical and moral suffering. Once in this unpredictable borderland a man may vanish, never to return; or he may acquire for himself... some personal provision of power.

That’s what I am writing about. To examine why I must write is to pick scabs, open a can of cliches, examine gift horses, contemplate one's navel, and bring more light to the thing than any magic might bear.

Of course, there’s the money.

Maybe I write to extend my trace in the world a little past my death. Maybe I write to clock, catalogue, validate my own existence. Maybe I do it to make my mother love me (I don’t know — I'm sure she does pretty much anyway.) If that were it, I could knock off, go to the bar in town, and just talk about writing.

Maybe there is a short story in picking scabs. It could be cobbled into a very literary metaphor. No, I’ve wandered into Ann Beattie’s kitchen.

"Novelists begin life as liars,” Wilfrid Sheed says, “... but by their maturity they don’t need to lie anymore. The truth itself is a trick.”

Returning from mv walk, maybe five miles. I’d become completely caught up in events that never happened. Mexican policemen who don’t exist, doomed characters who never breathed except, I hope, on the page. As I turned the key in my cottage door, I was thinking of dividing the long second chapter into two chapters and found myself looking around the room at the familiar computer, some books and clothes. I was scanning the room for something. It took a moment to realize I was looking for the blinking light on an answering machine.

Acorns continue to fall from the oak onto my roof. Knocking, rolling, tapping their way down to the deck where they tap again before resting. I keep thinking someone is at the door. The nearest neighbor has a husky or malamute I’m not sure which, with blue ice-chip eyes and a mewling bark that has now become an articulate croon as he howls to the pewter arc of a moon.

It was hot, so very dry today. The air cools quickly. The manuscript waits, and I prolong the anticipation before I electronically lift her skirt to manipulate her. I make a drink with apple cider and rum. Light a cigarette. Quite possibly I am happy.

10:00 p.m.

I've made a dinner of bean soup, grilled cheese, and bacon. I wash this down with a glass of cider wanned by the fire. I should smoke a pipe. I suddenly have the desire to putter in a rose garden, though there is no such thing here or where I live, and I probably couldn’t putter roses to life with a gun to my head.

Thinking of guns, I scroll through the green letters on my screen. A novel of paranoia as well as survival. I want to give this story a morally ambiguous yet satisfying ending, resonant with existential paralysis, still vital with Nietzschean action, accessible but ponderable, cathartic and clean, while leaving the reader with a desire to wash — blonde, yet somehow brunette.

Another Hemingway letter to Fitzgerald. Hemingway sounds sillier to me as the years go by, but it is more in the tone he strikes than what he says.

Scott for gods sake write and write truly no matter who or what it hurts but do not make these silly compromises.... We are like lousy damned acrobats but we make some mighty fine jumps, bo, and they have all these other acrobats that won't jump.

For Christ sake write and don’t worry about what the boys will say nor whether it will be a masterpiece nor what I write one page of masterpiece to 91 pages of shit. I try to put the shit in the wastebasket....

Forget your personal tragedy. We are all bitched from the start and you especially have to be hurt like hell before you can write seriously. But when you get the damned hurt use it — don't cheat with it. Be as faithful to it as a scientist — but don’t think anything is of any importance because it happens to you or anyone belonging to you.

Closing my eyes to rest them. The fire warms me, and I begin to dream. I see Hemingway and Fitzgerald in a circus ring shouting drunken encouragement to each other as they begin to awkwardly skip rope with Hula Hoops.

Wednesday 10:00 p.m.

Bugs everywhere. Gnats, mites, mosquitos, flies. Whatever they are. I am constantly batting at my ears and eyes, launching my glasses across the table.

Wrote only three pages today. I was overcome with a familiar feeling that it is not so much bad as it just doesn’t matter. Writing novels is a trivial activity for the bored leisure class. Shouldn’t be sitting up in a cabin in Julian writing some epic of the wisecrack, I should be looking for a job, honest work, or I should go back to school, get a degree of some kind. Real estate. Law. I should be cutting firewood like Dennis, Maitland’s Indian groundskeeper.

When this feeling comes over me, I can either sit and force myself to work anyway (which usually produces a trickle of mediocre material) or I can just wait it out and hope it will pass soon. I did a little of both today.

Between nine and noon I wrote what is basically a transition scene from one part of the story to another. I have the feeling this could all be boiled down to a couple of sentences.

At noon, I went into town for lunch and was surprised and disappointed that Julian is so thoroughly tourist-infested in the middle of the week. Refusing to wait in line for a restaurant, I asked a local man, whom I'd seen standing in front of the Town Hall every time I passed, where I could get a quick bite. He was a fat man in denim-bib overalls with a glass eye. He seemed delighted to have a conversation companion and started talking about everything except what I had asked him. He seemed harmless, but the word daft came to mind.

Julian is still the real thing, more or less. The town has a genuine turn-of-the-century feel, not contrived like San Diego’s Gaslamp Quarter. Still, it is poised on the brink of self-consciousness, a cute parody of itself. Julian is not yet Seaport Village/Disney, but within a few years it seems inevitable that it will become a kind of gold rush/apple pie theme park, a monument to some Americana of the mind that probably never existed.

Drove east for a while to the desert, pulled the car to the side of the road at random, ducked under a barbed-wire fence, and walked northeast until I couldn’t see the car or highway. I sat down on a rock near some cholla cactus and desiccated scrub. Watched a pair of buzzards wheel high overhead and descend slowly toward me until I waved my middle finger at them.

Communing with nature; I asked of myself and the desert, what am I doing? and the answer “trespassing" came to me with calm precision.

I sat for half an hour wondering why I woke up feeling so contrary. Poe called it “The Imp of the Perverse.” It was gratifying to compare myself to Poe for a while. What is so hard about writing a novel? I think of an old Tim (Batman) Burton animated feature called Vincent, where a small boy takes on Vincent Price as a role model.... The kid refuses to go out and play with the other kids, telling his mother, “I can’t. I’m too tormented and insane.” On my way back to the car, I thought that anyone seeing me walking in from the desert, cackling to myself, bloody nose, four days’ growth of beard, would probably have slammed the gas pedal.

Walked through the hiking trails of Camp Marston and Raintree Ranch for a while. Got back to the cottage and read Sheed’s The Good Word, a collection of essays.

Barbecued steaks with Dennis, Wendy, and another woodcutter named Sean (Shawn?). Nice people. Good food. Had the feeling I was talking too much. These people are used to long silences. Played Maitland’s piano for a while just to keep myself from gibbering on.

Went to bed at ten. Dreamed of walking along a wooded path. I found a tattered paperback book, water and sun damaged, which had been lying in the leaves. (I actually found a Larry McMurtry novel like that the other day.) In the dream, when I picked up the book and tried to read the words on the page, I couldn't make sense of it. The words seemed artfully composed but with no meaning.

Thursday 4:00 a.m.

Sat bolt upright in bed thinking: The novel stinks. It was a moment of pure, paranoid certainty, followed by the thought: It is neither as bad as you are afraid it is nor as brilliant as you secretly suspect. You aren’t Poe, but you’re not Danielle Steele either. It’s okay. The thing is what it is. Good, bad. Give me a break. I reason myself past a bad wave of blackness, but I’m awake now.

What was it Sheed said, something like, “For completely missing the point there’s nothing like an authors evaluation of his own work.” But you gotta know, I’ve gotta know I can’t even pick up the pages, the bulk of the manuscript, and reassure myself with its sheer weight. I like to heft the thing now and then, flip through the sheets to see that there are words there, but everything is on disk. I have no printer here. No physical evidence of the work I have done, just ghostly green letters that might be what I want them to be.

Fire up the computer. Page 1. Line 1. “If one man wants another man dead badly enough, hell find a way to kill him.”

This opening line sounds as if it could be Mickey Spillane something from True Detective or even The Marine Corps Training Manual. Is it good? Is it bad? Objection! Irrelevant, Your Honor. I respectfully submit that the Court decide simply, does this compel the reader, the jury, to read the next sentence?

The defense picks up a copy of Raymond Chandler’s Lady in the Lake and reads the first line “The Treloar Building was, and is, on Olive Street, near Sixth, on the west side.” The defense rests. The prosecution points out that Chandler had no need to resort to cheap theatrics and comic book devices to fraudulently ensnare...

Forget it. Turn on the lights. Here’s the New Yorker, August 6,1990. Okay this mag is full of GOOD STUFF. Ask anyone. Flip it open. Hey, John Cheever’s journals. Quick scan looking for the words booze, sex, martini, or thigh. What catches my eye is the phrase “As I approach my 40th birthday....” I read on as the alarm clock I brought with me is even now ticking its way toward my own 40th.

... without having accomplished any one of the things I intended to accomplish — without ever having achieved the deep creativity that I have worked toward for all this time — I feel that I take a minor, an obscure, a dim position that is not my destiny but that is my fault, as if I had lacked the wit and courage.... that is not what is frightening. It is that they [the stories and novels] are dull annals.... It does not matter. It does not matter....

Terrific. Throw the New Yorker onto the pile of Robert Wilder, Hemingway, Sheed, Chandler, and the paperback copy of my first book that I am working from. Load chapter six and make some coffee. Sun should be up any hour now.

Thursday 10:00 p.m.

Wrote most of the day. Did a scene I like where York steals a dead body out of a Mexican police station and smuggles it across the border back to the U.S. The mood of the day has been completely altered by the act of writing.

Doing suspense is gratifying if you pull it off. It’s a high-wire thing between keeping the reader focused on every word written for as long as possible and having him skip ahead, saying to himself, "Oh, for Chrissakes, c’mon!” The key is in detail. A handful of detail in sharp focus, an event, something happens, more detail, something else happens, another detail. The reader is afraid to skip any single detail that might be telling. And he might miss two words that describe something actually happening.

During a lecture once, Vonnegut apologized for what he prefaced as “hack advice” for a fiction writer, but it holds up well. He said that successful fiction has only two moving parts. You must advance the action and reveal character. If anything you are writing does not do one of those two things, it probably is expendable. Largely, what I have been doing the past few days is to make everything in the story unexpendable.

Averaged more pages per day in the past four days than I thought possible. Threw myself into the sixth and seventh chapter to avoid the less comfortable aspects of solitude. An odd feeling — one I remember from living in Mexico for months — that I only exist by virtue of the work. The woods, the ravens and crows and buzzards and hawks, the coons and possums cannot validate my presence here. Only the cluster of green letters on a screen.

Typing away, humming Hendrix’s “I Don’t Live Today.” Bass and guitar lines. Maybe tomorrow, girl, I just can’t say.

Broke at 11:00 to walk up to Artist’s Bed & Breakfast where Chuck and Nan Kimball have carved out a retreat and photographic studio for themselves. We sat on their deck looking out at the mountains. (Mt Helix, El Cajon, even the Coronado islands floating in a brown layer of smog that reached well out to sea. Stage 1 alert.) The Kimballs’ company is reassuring, without surface tension. They seem to work well, steadily, and more or less happily up here, going into San Diego once a week where their work is shown and sold.

Maybe I could just get a fax machine and....

Very hot today. Autumn has fled, leaving only its signature of paper-bag-colored leaves. The Santa Anas draw moisture out of everything. I alternate cigarettes with bottled water as I work. Vaseline in my nose.

Sometimes writing seems like Hell, or at least Purgatory. I worry that the work is lacking, I’m afraid the work isn’t good, it freezes me with horror that the work sucks. The romantic notion of it that drew me to the thing in the first place is gone and has been for several years. Can’t summon it anymore.

Image of my father wreathed in pipe smoke banging out articles and short stories for the Catholic press to pay parochial tuition for eight kids and their little uniforms.... Hammett with tuberculosis and a bottle, the Remington Rand typer. Crank it out. Chandler’s misguided romanticism and misogyny, Hemingway and his shotgun. The gin. Flaubert masturbating. (“A writer’s life,” he said, "is a dog’s life, but it is the only life.") The portraits of Charles Dickens and Joseph Conrad in those Signet Classics we had to buy in high school. The romance of it is, of course, a cheat. But not to do it... I don’t know. I would have to learn how not to write and it would take much longer than whatever I have learned about doing it.

As a fiction writer, you’re like a spooky, too-smart kid in a chilly nursery moving imaginary playmates around on paper. Selling fiction, turning to the pursuit out of necessity, has become, as Sheed puts it “the vicious joy of finding a regular grown-up profession that caters to one’s vice: it’s like being paid to pick your nose or steal candy the rest of your life”

Right.

Have to pack up and go back tomorrow after breakfast with the Kimballs. I am neither eager nor reluctant to leave I did what I came to do. How well, I can’t know. I learned some things and relearned a few. I now know the difference between ravens and crows (ravens are larger and have wedge- or spade-shaped tails), black oak and live oak, coulter and true fir. How can you write anything if you don’t know the names of trees? someone asked. I thought they were nuts, but I kept thinking about it.

I’ve relearned that decent stretches of creativity have very little to do with rapture or inspiration but more to do with a stationary spine. I’ve also learned that what I do has some measure of endurance. I’m not talking about immortality, art, (please) the novel, but what I do. The need to trace hen scratchings on a page for someone to interpret as a fairly complex series of thoughts, events, and images is something that will likely last as long as I do. I'm writing this down, like I’ll forget.

Driving back through Ramona. Take a break from writing for a few days. Won’t think about it. Gotta deal with bills anyway. See if I can get a cheaper lease on a different car. Give the phone company $20. Nice countryside up there, Julian. Come back when there’s snow. See Dennis and Maitland. Wonder what it was like, say a 150 years ago. Must have been a very small, very rugged community of flakes. Gold miners. Won’t even think about writing for three days. Rent some movies. What kind of people were they? Prospectors. So this is Santee. Nice turn signal, putz. Finger. Freeway signs: Oceanside, El Cajon. You mind I get in this lane? Could be a novella, novel, no — a screenplay, why not? Gold miners freezing their asses off in winter up there, like the Donner Party meets It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World. Cannibalism and greed. Indians protecting a burial ground. Mysticism. Better give some thought to teaching or pick up a couple of shifts behind a bar somewhere. Drive a cab? I don’t know. Haven’t read anything about the Indian reservations up there lately. Campo, Los Coyotes, Santa Ysabel, how do those people live? Where was I? Need an opening sentence on that historical winter in Julian thing. Get a handle. Chapter eight. The novel... maybe have York crack up, lose it completely, find it again.... Smog is bad. Really bad. You wanna pick a lane, dick? First I take a little break. Don’t even think about writing.... York needs money, he needs to eat, he needs to get laid. These things must be accounted for. If, say, I were to think about it…