Sunday Afternoon, on a Sunday.

How is writing a letter like a conversation?  If you make journals into letter writing, does that make them just letters to your future self?  If no one reads your journal entries, what are they then?

Am I any good at this?  Probably not.

And the more and more you start to wonder how much beside the point that is.  To be "good" at a thing.  Goodness doesn't matter.

But those things.  On my to do list.  What happens if I *do* finish all of them?  Like, what happens if I wrote down things that are entirely *finishable* for today?

That's never happened before.  Am I growing up?

I lunched with a friend today.  He's seriously pursuing writing.  He's got some 9,000* words of himself that he's readying to send to publishers, to editors.  To be read and parsed and edited and, hopefully, published.  I'm really excited for him.  I want to be able to make it happen, but I can't make things happen for people.  I have enough trouble making things happen for myself.

We talked about books, what makes a bad one, and writing and working and recognition.  Is it enough to be recognized as a writer?  How much of recognition is titles and raises and more stock option grants, and how much of it is something simple like deference of questions and latitude and being given a team or someone to mentor.  I wonder about these things.

Two quick story ideas :
- A survey of bacon sides at brunch establishments.  Based on meatiness (thickness), crunch, flavor (mesquite?), hot or cold when it arrived?, quantity provided. fat to meat ratio, appearance/plating, slice width, price, weight of the portion (note to self: bring your electronic scale).
- Scathing review of Jonathan Franzen's book (and the book that he reviewed and you subsequently read, A Hundred Brothers).  A double review?  A review of a review?  Like the meta book review, that both investigates how we, as book consumers find and appreciate books, and lambasting J Franzen for not only his terrible taste, but also replicating that terrible taste into a short book of memoirs.


I leave you with this poem:

I
I am terrible.
I am also drunk.
Caffeine is a wonder drug.

This martini has sugar in it.



* 9,000 words?  Dear god. Nine thousand words!**

** Before*** this comment, this blog post was 388 words.

*** Including this comment, this blog post is 408 words.