This Is Going To Be A Slow Day

Because I have been so often referring to the novel I am writing, a reader recently asked me, "What is your novel about?"

I prefer not to discuss the specifics, but, in general, the story reflects the question...

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

And yes I am being intentionally circumspect.

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This morning, as I do every morning, I read the brief daily offering from The Writer's Almanac and discovered the following interesting item:

When Tom Robbins writes, he has breakfast and lights up a cigar, and then he works on a sentence until he considers it absolutely perfect.Sometimes that takes a whole day. Once he decides that it's perfect, he moves on, and once he has a page finished, he won't rewrite it. He said, "I like painting myself in corners and seeing if I can get out."

That's one method that some authors employ, I've heard. It does seem to me that doing this would be prohibitively time consuming.

But, whatever works . . . right?

. . .

Just after the sun rose over the Santa Catalina mountains I marveled at the shifting play of light that painted each mountain peak with contrasting colors and subtle light-to-dark graduations evoked by the movement of denser and denser clouds drifting across the often-bleak mounainscape.

I snapped a boatload of pictures but none of them accurately depicted the actual gradations that my brain registered from the impulses transmitted from my eyes.

Five of them came close, so I am including them below:

1.

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2.

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3.

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4.

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5.

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The clouded sky and mountain scape below it seem to echo the changing intensities of my alternately darkening and lightening moods this morning.

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Now I'm off to check my Powerball lottery ticket selections with the posted winning numbers.

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