Just about every time my father-in-law (above) and I talked on the phone, we began by filling each other in on whatever progress we’d made with the books we were writing. I don’t remember exactly when he decided to start working on a study of Macbeth, but I remember his interest developing and his arguments germinating, and I remember clinking glasses with him in many different living rooms as he told Max and me about new developments in his research.

I guess I always believed that Larry and I would finish our projects at about the same time. But in June he died, just a few chapters short of a completed manuscript. At his side were the copy of Memento Mori I’d sent him and Joseph’s most recent essay, which Larry had marked up with question marks and check marks and one “very good.” A teacher to the end.

Like me, Larry was a beginning-obsessed writer. He perfected the start, moved forward incrementally, and backed up again whenever he identified a problem with structure or a hole in his logic. Unlike me, he was remarkably learned and quite conservative. We often disagreed, about literature, about politics, and especially about religion, but I never doubted that he respected me and wanted to hear my opinions. In this regard, and in many others, he differed markedly from my own parents, and I don’t think I realized until his death how much I’d come to think of him as a kind of replacement father. My actual dad and I don’t speak.

When your spouse’s parent dies, grieving is complicated. There is the grief you feel for yourself, for the loss of a person you (if you’re lucky) loved, and there is the grief you feel at seeing the person closest to you dealing with a nearly unfathomable loss. At times the sorrow is literally almost suffocating. These are clichés, but they are also realities, as is the fact that the passing of someone important to you causes you to think about the way you’re spending your own life.

Almost two months after Larry’s death, it’s still very hard to write about him. (Or to think about his book, which Max, Joseph, and I promised him we would finish. We have a lot of reading to do.) And it’s impossible to imagine ever returning to a life in which I treat my writing like a frivolous hobby or prioritize writing about other people’s novels over working on my own.

I’m genuinely sorry for leaving the site dormant without explanation all this time; I honestly haven’t been able to figure out how to say any of this. Things will continue to be relatively quiet here until I’m feeling better and my novel is done. I hope that will be soon, but it won’t be next week or next month, barring some sort of miracle. The good thing about Internet time is that it only seems interminable when it’s happening.

As you can see, I have the best in-laws. That’s Larry on the left, and Jane on the right, and though they divorced years ago — long before I met them — they’re both still this fun and campy.

Right now I’m reading Old Mortality, a gift from Larry. He figured I would appreciate Sir Walter Scott’s meditation on fanaticism, violence, and repression, and I do, very much, even though it’s subtly weighted toward the Tories.

It’s not any sexier than the first, I’m afraid, but if you’re craving more usage pedantry, solo drinking tips, or line-editing blow-by-blows, you won’t want to let this one pass you by.

Here’s one of the mouse-over notes:

After reading Brad Gooch’s biography of Flannery O’Connor last year, I internalized her (and Elizabeth Hardwick’s) prohibition against allowing the same word to appear twice on a page, and my prose strains in places as a result. I wonder: did O’Connor read Muriel Spark? If so, confronted with such hilarious and inarguably brilliant repetitions — see, e.g., the sticks* — how could she have continued to adhere to her rule? Also how did Spark reuse words so imaginatively? She built humor through the sameness but somehow made the descriptions fresh every time. I wish she could revise this scene I’m getting ready to work on now, the one with the dogs in the car.

Somewhat relatedly: as predicted, Caitlin Roper’s issue of The Paris Review was waiting in the mailbox on my return from Florida. I turned first to my friend Victor LaValle’s essay, which is just great, and then to the R. Crumb interview, which you won’t want to miss if you’re a fan, and then, fingers quivering with years of accumulated anticipation, I read the Katherine Dunn excerpt, which made me want to read more.
 

* Mouse-over note from the first installment: “By now there are passages I could almost quote from memory — especially the post-funeral scenes involving the writer with rheumatoid arthritis slouched over ‘two sticks,’ making his way among the funeral flowers as the other elderly characters goggle at him. The novelty of the Scottishism (’sticks’ rather than ‘canes’) tickles me, of course, but it’s the perfect, deadly repetition of the word — all the glimpses of the ‘clever little man doubled over his sticks’ — that makes this section so funny.”

The first part of my Culture Diary — chronicling things I read, watched, and did the week before last — is up at The Paris Review Daily. Featured: Muriel Spark, Kingsley Amis, Sam Lipsyte, Damages, Jenny Diski, Jimmy Buffett, Rebecca West, Panir Sabzee, Jonathan Franzen, alcoholic beverages…

The silence around here may continue for a little while. I’m unexpectedly in Florida with Max and A.; we’re visiting my father-in-law, who’s in poor health. Here he is (pictured), reading aloud the entry on “alright” (“all wrong”) from my copy of Kingsley Amis’ The King’s English. Not long after this usage bonding moment, he presented me with his pristine abridged copy of Fowler’s 1908 book of the same name.

The next issue of The Paris Review, edited by Caitlin Roper and probably waiting in my mailbox back in Brooklyn, features an interview with R. Crumb, an essay by Victor LaValle, and long-awaited new fiction from Geek Love author Katherine Dunn.

Oxford American’s fifth annual Best of the South issue includes my ode to Miami’s Biltmore Hotel, which I grew up thinking was haunted. Here’s an excerpt:

By day, the hotel was a dingy institutional white, its roof stained with age and half its windows blocked up, but when I first saw it lit against the night sky, barred minaret gleaming from within, I half-expected the whole thing to vanish. It looked, to my six-year-old eyes, like an apparition, an enchanted castle with a single turret. My mother walked me to our crumbling slab of a dock for a better view.

We’d moved into a house along the Coral Gables Waterway, a limestone channel dug during the ’20s land boom. The air smelled of muck and salty reeds with subtle notes of motor oil. Young peacock bass — quicksilver in the dim light — leapt out of the water and dropped almost soundlessly back. At the canal’s head, a half-mile away, rose the vacant hotel. In a land of strip malls, the mouldering Jazz Age relic was the most beautiful building I’d ever seen.

You’ll have to track down the rest to read the part about gangsters, ghosts, and thwarted attraction.

Obviously that’s the hotel, above, and here’s another old South Florida postcard showing a view of the canal. My childhood wasn’t all long afternoons of slow-flowing water and grand limestone sea-walls, but despite everything, I’ll always miss that house.

Fingers crossed, my copy of the magazine will be waiting when I get home tonight, and not just because I have a piece in it. I look forward to this issue every year. My personal favorite best-of essay so far is Sean Rowe’s 2008 “Insider’s Guide to Jailhouse Cuisine.” I’m also partial to Karen Russell’s, on a field trip to the Coral Castle.

The 2010 contributors listed on the magazine’s website are great, but they’re only part of the picture. Facebook tells me that something by Josh Weil was also included, and I know from experience that work from other writers I like will have been, too. Once I have the full table of contents in front of me, I’ll do a giveaway.

Organization, as you may recall, is not a virtue I possess in excess. And it depresses me when plans are drawn up and fail. So I hadn’t attempted to outline my novel draft in a couple of years. Now that the project has changed so fundamentally, though, I decided to spend a couple hours this weekend mapping out the story on my iPad.

The easiest thing would’ve been to type it all up in Pages, or to forgo technology altogether and plot everything out in my notebook (for some reason, I take comfort in keeping provisional things handwritten). Instead, I downloaded a new app and spent a little time teaching myself to draw letters with my index finger. (See practice effort, above.) Then I put together an outline. At the time this seemed, if not sensible, like a reasonable way to spend the morning. Later, less so.

But now I have the whole scheme in a handwritten PDF that, after many more hours’ work on the book, I’ve updated twice, once from home and once from my office. Maybe the effort wasn’t a complete boondoggle, after all.
 

See also Kitty Burns Florey’s Script and Scribble, on the death of cursive.

As someone prone to equal parts self-loathing and self-absorption, and raised in a constant state of Rapture-readiness, I can’t say I’d be surprised.

Either way, and I hope you’ll indulge me in this drama-queen moment: I hereby declare the next twelve months my shit-or-get-off-the-pot year. When May 21 rolls around again, I will have completed a full draft of this (first) godforsaken book I’m writing, or I’ll do something else with my life.

There’s been a lot of brouhaha lately about the impossibility of writing books in the Internet era, so, to be clear: I attribute my slowness not to the supposedly-ADD-inducing properties of the online world but to my own limitations and lack of discipline (and day job).

Colson Whitehead said it best back in February: “Sure am glad Shakespeare found that wifi-less cafe! Or no Hamlet!” He went on: “I dig the need to kickstart things every once in a while, but don’t blame the internet for your crappy work habits.” One of these days I’m going to turn those tweets into a needlepoint wall hanging. One of these days after I finish the draft, that is.

Kelsey Newman, the narrator of Scarlett Thomas’ forthcoming Our Tragic Universe, aspires to literary greatness but actually ghostwrites YA thrillers. Her descriptions of the ever-evolving Serious Novel she’s been writing for years remind me so much of my own experience, laughing at them feels like an admission that I have no idea what I’m doing.

“I realised a while ago that I was always trying to make the novel catch up with my life,” Kelsey says, after describing, in hilarious detail that I probably shouldn’t quote from a galley, its transformation.
 

My own plan has been to write one novel* and then turn my attentions to something else: researching a literary biography, writing an accessible book on tax policy (don’t laugh!), going undercover to investigate extreme manifestations of fundamentalism, becoming a private investigator…

Many writers who take their own experiences and twist them into fiction only have one story in them but publish many more, of ever-diminishing worth, after their first book appears. I’m deeply afraid of becoming that kind of literary natterer-on.

The trouble is, though, if you decide you’re only going to write one novel, you will want that book to be the best it can possibly be — not just for right now, but for all time. Down this particular obsessive-compulsive road lie many interesting developments. A completed manuscript is not one of them.
 

Recently I’ve been hacking away at my novel draft, and last week I finally admitted to myself that what I’ve been writing as one book for the past six years is two different stories.

The prospect of wrangling them separately fills me with nearly as much dread as relief, but part of being a writer is tricking yourself, again and again, into investing in each new epiphany. So I’ve given myself a deadline to finish the first book. We’ll see how it goes.

The photo above is of Scarlett Thomas’ contribution to the Significant Objects project, which I won in the third round of auctions (benefitting Girls Write Now).** The object itself was chosen by Paola Antonelli, and you can read Thomas’ brief story about it here. (A copy of Kate Bingaman-Burt’s 20×200 print depicting the candles and other recent Significant Objects is for sale here; proceeds, again, benefit GWN.)

When I do complete the draft, I’m going to open a bottle of champagne and light the candles. Even though I’ve only read forty pages of Our Tragic Universe so far, I have a feeling Kelsey Newman would approve.

* You can read an excerpt from the beginning in Narrative Magazine.

** I contributed my own story to Significant Objects, and I sit on Girls Write Now’s Board of Directors.

This month marks eight years since I started blogging. When I began, not long before this photo was taken, I figured the whole endeavor would quickly and unceremoniously go the way of my first website, which I set up in 1995, decorated with little New Yorker drawings, and abandoned to disappear along with everything else on the Alachua Freenet.

If you’d told me in 2002 that I would keep at it for so long or that so many people would know about this site or care what I had to say, I probably would’ve reacted the way I did to two boys in elementary school who said I was pretty: decided you were mocking me and head-butted you to the ground, shouting, “Why do you have to be such a jerk?”
 

I’m grateful to all of you who’ve visited this site through its many permutations. Even now, every six months or so, I find myself re-evaluating and changing what I do here.

This year I’ve posted more sporadically, read fewer new books, and written far less book criticism, so as to finish the novel that, as the Times notes, has yet to materialize. (The list compilers were very kind about the delay, actually. I wonder sometimes: John Steinbeck aside, has anyone in the history of letters ever whinged so publicly and at such length about writing a book that does not even exist?)
 

I find myself focusing — here, at Twitter, and elsewhere — ever more unapologetically on the strange assortment of writers and cultural phenomena that interest me. In the last six months, I’ve obsessed over Muriel Spark and day jobs, started an intermittent column on Christian fundamentalism, tried to explain my reasons for writing a novel rather than a memoir, outed myself — at NPR, no less — as a hypochondriac with a disorder of the humors, and discovered that the archives of my great-great aunt (and self-given namesake) are held by the State of Mississippi.

Which is to say: If my perspective and voice are the strengths of this site, they are also its limitations.
 

The truth is that, nowadays, there are so many excellent sites keeping up with book news, interviewing authors, reviewing novels, and commenting on publishing, my own appetite for participating in generalized literary talk has dwindled. I read other sites as widely as ever, though, and I’ve been interested to observe the evolution of book blogs.

Whether you’re just stopping by or are a regular reader, I’d like to direct you to some other bookish venues that you might enjoy (and want to send copies of your books to, since I, as only one person, can really only get to so much).
 

Surely by now anyone who’s even occasionally dipped into book and culture sites over the past decade knows about Bookslut, The Elegant Variation, The Literary Saloon, About Last Night, and the other early blogs that tend to be driven by one (or two, or three) perspectives. I know all of the people behind these sites — some are good friends — but I followed them daily long before I met them in person, and I still do.

Among the many smart, independent group sites that have sprung up more recently, I suggest updating your RSS feeds to include one or more of: The Second Pass (run by John Williams; I’m a contributor alongside Emma Garman, Alexander Nazaryan, Daniel Menaker, Carlene Bauer, Jessica Ferri, and others), The Millions (run by C. Max Magee, and featuring Emily St. John Mandel and Sonya Chung, and most recently Lizzie Skurnick), The Rumpus (run by Stephen Elliott, and featuring Seth Fischer, Rozalia Jovanovic, and Elissa Bassist), HTML Giant (run by Justin Taylor and featuring Nick Antosca, Jimmy Chen, and Blake Butler), Words Without Borders (whose blog is edited by the inimitable Bud Parr), and Open Letters Monthly.

The LA Times’ talented and tireless Carolyn Kellogg sets the tone for the newspaper’s Jacket Copy blog with a nice mix of industry and literary reporting. I miss (my friend and former editor) Dwight Garner at The New York Times’ Paper Cuts, but Gregory Cowles and some of the other contributors do a great job there.

The LRB, Bookforum, and The New York Review of Books all have blogs now. Laura Miller, Salon’s first-rate book critic, has rearranged the books section to allow for bloggy entries. Thessaly LaForce, mastermind, with Macy Halford, of The New Yorker’s Book Bench has moved to The Paris Review, which suggests that the venerable literary magazine could join Granta, Tin House, A Public Space, and VQR in blogging or publishing online-only work.

As for writers (not already mentioned above), I recommend Alison Bechdel, James Hynes, Amitava Kumar, Alexander Chee, Stephany Aulenback, Laila Lalami, Marie Mockett, Marlon James, D.E. Rasso, Kevin Kinsella, Gabrielle Bell, Levi Stahl, and George Murray. Also, if you’ve lost track of Lizzie Skurnick, she writes regularly for The Daily Beast and Politics Daily. And Betsy Lerner is a writer and an agent whose blog is both hilarious and informative, so you can almost convince yourself you’re getting work done while hitting reload there.

Galleycat, Sarah Weinman, and of course Publishers Weekly do quick, smart industry reporting.

At The Awl, Alex Balk and Choire Sicha have published my thoughts on Sarah Palin and militia groups, and you can find the two of them writing there on a wide range of cultural topics, alongside Chris Lehmann, Ana Marie Cox, Lindsay Robertson, Maura Johnston, Maria Bustillos, and Tom Scocca, among others.

More blogs, some of which I’ll kick myself for forgetting to mention, are listed on my links page. I’m also following good people at Twitter.

From now on, when people inquire how I feel about working a day job, I think I’ll defer to Philip Larkin. Asked about his life as a University of Hull librarian, the poet replied:

Taking it all in all, work and I get on fairly well, I think. There are just these occasions when one would like to prove it by not working for a bit.

And to feel that you’re spending your life on the one rather than the other I think is perhaps the most depressing thought that work can bring you — that when I bind up library committee minutes at the end of five years it makes a big fat volume, but it’s not the same as a volume of poetry. They are very good minutes — but the minute as an art form has its limitations.

You can also hear Larkin read “Aubade,” which rightly tops Alex Balk’s Listicle without Commentary: The 94 Best Philip Larkin Poems, In Order. “This is a special way of being afraid/ No trick dispels. Religion used to try, / That vast, moth-eaten musical brocade/ Created to pretend we never die.”

I know, I always get so dramatic when my birthday is approaching.

Muriel Spark’s 1992 autobiography has been characterized as purse-lipped, sterile, and withholding, a manipulative account designed to settle scores and divert attention from anything unflattering.

Curriculum Vitae may be more factual than confessional, but judged on its own terms rather than by the standards of the contemporary tell-all, the book is a charming, idiosyncratic, and closely observed personal history, one that manages to surprise even as it turns out to be almost exactly what you’d expect the author of Memento Mori, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, The Comforters, and The Girls of Slender Means to offer up.
 

In an early passage, Spark explains the way children made tea in 1930s Edinburgh.

Sixty years ago is a short time in history. As recently as that I made at least one pot of tea for the family every day. It was delicious tea. Every schoolgirl, every schoolboy, knew how to make that exquisite pot of tea.

You boiled the kettle, and just before it came to the boil, you half-filled the teapot to warm it. When the kettle came to the boil, you kept it simmering while you threw out the water in the teapot and then put in a level spoonful of tea for each person and one for the pot. Up to four spoonfuls of tea from that sweetly odorous tea-caddy would make the perfect pot. The caddy spoon was a special shape, like a small silver shovel. You never took the kettle to the teapot; always the pot to the kettle, where you filled it, but never to the brim.

You let it stand, to ‘draw’, for three minutes.

The tea had to be drunk out of china, as thin at the rim as you could afford. Otherwise you lost the taste of the tea.

You put in milk sufficient to cloud the clear liquid, and sugar if you had a sweet tooth. Sugar or not was the only personal choice allowed.

Everyone who came to the house was offered a cup of tea, as in Dostoyevsky. What his method of making tea was I don’t know. (Tea from samovars must have been different, certainly without milk, and served in a glass set in a brass or silver holder.)

Tea at five o’clock was an occasion for visitors. One ate bread and butter first, graduating to cakes and biscuits. Five o’clock tea was something you ‘took’. If you had it as six you ‘ate’ your tea.

Tea at half-past six was high tea, a full meal which resembled breakfast. You had kippers, smoked haddock (smokies), ham, eggs or sausages for high tea. Potatoes did not accompany this meal. But a pot of tea, with bread, butter and jam, was always part of it.

In my continuing quest to set the world record for dullness, tonight I’m picking up some sausages on the way home and following Spark’s instructions with the pretty tea set (above) that Lizzie gave me for Christmas. Too bad I don’t have any darning to do. Afterward, naturally, I’ll go out on the balcony and water my plants.

Mark Twain, who died a hundred years ago today, entered the world and left with Halley’s Comet. His essays have a permanent place on my bedside table; I read them whenever my own writing stalls. Those perfect verbs, those unexpected but accurate nouns, that distinctive sense of the absurd and limitless ability to evoke it…

We’ve had our difficulties, Twain and I, but no writer, living or dead, is as important to me, the young William Faulkner be damned.

Tonight WFMU offers a musical tribute centered around “the 19th century author’s seemingly contradictory relationship with the keyboard. Twain often publicly claimed a distaste for the piano, yet privately had a particular affection for it and was involved with the instrument and its players his entire life. The [program features] nine piano works connected to Twain, interspersed with readings of Twain’s sardonic observations about the instrument.” (Thanks to Sean and Min Jin; past Twain idolatry resides here.)

At night, when I get home from work, or from whatever I’ve done after work, I open packages from publishers. Then I stack most of the books* along this wall, behind the dining room table and next to the liquor credenza. Classy, I know. But it’s an improvement.

At our old place, when the galleys piled up, Max and I had trouble getting to the pots and pans. The tower quickly grew into a fat square structure taller than our kitchen table that the cats enjoyed sunning on. We needed to rent or borrow a van before inviting guests over for dinner. Or, really, before inviting guests over at all.
 

When we fled Greenpoint rents and cramped quarters and bought a co-op two years ago, we chose a building with a part-time doorman, as a concession to the galley tidal wave. (Someone has to be around to sign for books while we do the things that actually pay the bills.) Luckily this apartment is huge** by New York standards, so it would take at least a year’s worth of accumulation to impede our meals or the preparation thereof. Friends can eat sitting down and stand to put on their coats afterward even if we let the stacks grow, as we have recently, for a couple of months.

Evidently the old place is still getting slammed, too. Someone recently wrote to say: “I wanted to let you know that tons and tons and tons of packages come to our building every week, and piles of it collect.” For the sake of those who who now live at my former address — and trust me, they need our sympathy for many reasons — let it be known far and wide that I no longer reside on Dupont Street.
 

See the glowing screen at left of the photo at the top of this post? It’s a (poorly-lit) shot of my new iPad. I’m hoping to reduce some of the tsuris by going galley-digital.

I know many reviewers want to receive everything in hard copy, and under different circumstances I might prefer that, too, but it would be a great help if publishers could send me ebooks whenever possible from now on. Sometimes I might want a physical book, for one reason or another. But if I do, I can ask for it.

For the record, the Maud household has plenty of shelved volumes, too.

* The fact that a book is haphazardly shoved against the wall does not mean I have not read or will not read it.

** And has a terrace! If you’re willing to move this far out, the living is easy.

A couple months ago I saw a girl press onto the subway, give the boy next to her a once-over, and casually tilt her iPhone — accidentally on purpose — so he could see what she was listening to. After a couple tries, it worked. By the time we reached Jay Street, they were talking about music.

As I told Motoko Rich when we spoke last week about book covers in an electronic world, I figure the same kind of thing will be possible with ebooks eventually. The gadgets will develop so that readers can signal their preferences to strangers, or people will find workarounds. True, nowadays I don’t particularly care whether strangers around me know what I’m reading* — this site more than satisfies whatever urge I have to broadcast my literary preferences — but to my college-era self, lurking near boys in coffee shops, it would have been important.

In today’s New York Times, you can read Rich’s consideration of what ebooks mean for cover art and for the social aspects of reading.
 

* Although I admit I’m just as happy not to have fellow subway passengers know when I’m reading Sarah Palin or extreme Christian fundamentalists on my iPhone.

The Awl has published my examination of Sarah Palin’s fundamentalist background — a background not entirely dissimilar to my own. I have a hunch about what she’s up to with her new reality show, and it scares the hell of out me.

When Sarah Palin began shopping around a “Planet Earth-type” reality series based in Alaska earlier this month, the media responded with its usual gleeful incredulity: Caribou Barbie on a fishing boat! The former governor is reportedly seeking upwards of $1 million per episode, and, with Discovery and A&E interested in the project, she just might get it. Not only are her antics the best thing for Internet page views since Paris Hilton invented the no-panties dismount, they’re TV ratings gold. Jimmy Fallon said it best, “Any reality show about Sarah Palin will have to compete with that other reality show about Sarah Palin: the news.”

If you’re among those speculating about Palin’s intentions, I’m here to help. As a casualty of a tongues-speaking, faith-healing, demon-battling storefront church childhood, I keep track of Pentecostals and Charismatics the way some people stalk abusive exes, and I have a sick feeling that I can decode this new iteration of her mission for you.

It’s long. If you’re going to read the whole thing, you’ll want to get yourself a cup of coffee or crack open a beer first.

Recently I was diagnosed with a disorder of the humors.* By a licensed gastroenterologist and everything.

The bile thinners notwithstanding, I honestly can’t think of a verdict that would’ve pleased me more. So Aristotelian, so Elizabethan, so hypochondriacal and tied in with my mother’s weird religious ordering of the world.

“I’m surprised they didn’t find fire and brimstone in there,” my friend Carrie joked. Oh my God, me too.

I need to visit the Folger Shakespeare Library for a close-up look at The Optike Glasse of Humours, “a guide to the system underlying science and psychology in Renaissance Europe. According to the theory of humours, the human mind and body are intricately connected to the physical universe.”
 

* Translation: I am bilious.

Every time I pass this Carnegie Hall ad campaign, I think these happy people are praising God at an Oral Roberts revival.

Roberto Bolaño, for instance, wanted to be a spy, Kate Christensen a rock star, Joan Didion an actress. Chris Adrian went to medical school, and the seminary. Herman Melville was a sailor and Larry Brown a fireman. Faulkner did guv’ment work.

Jonathan Lethem once worked as a bookseller; if he weren’t a writer, he says he’d probably choose to be a film historian or curator.
 

Lately there’ve been layoffs at my day job. I seem to have escaped for now, but have been mulling over what to do if I get the axe. (I mean, apart from writing the things I want to write. I’ll always do that; I’ve always wanted to be a writer. But I also have to eat.)

Top of the list is is Grasso & Neutron, the private eye firm Dana and I keep saying we’re going to start up. (Laugh while you can, monkey boy. We know what you did last night.)

Apparently this is a common writers’ fantasy. Also, espionage. (See, e.g., Edward Gorey’s Mr. Earbrass, above, and the writer as detective.)

I’d probably be reasonably happy doing genealogical research, which is sort of the same thing as detective work, except everyone is dead. I have a feeling there’s not a big demand for this kind of service in a recession, though.
 

How about you? If you write, did you go right into it? If not, what’d you do first, or want to do? And if writing what you love doesn’t pay the bills, what does (up to and including “layoff lit“)?

I’m genuinely curious and opening up comments. Anecdotes about favorite authors are welcome.
 

* Courtesy Ms. Carrie Frye.

See also Peter Straub’s Twitter bio: “my profession obliges me to enjoy solitary confinement.”

I’ve been thinking about Saul Bellow’s notion that “art has something to do with the achievement of stillness in the midst of chaos.”

Coincidentally, Colson Whitehead has declared this ShThFuUpAnWoOnYrNo (Shut the fuck up and work on your novel) Month. And why not? It’s winter, you’re going to be miserable anyway. What better things do you have going on?

I’m sure I’ll be around, just not consistently.