Wednesday, March 26
Life
So life has been busy. Two weeks ago I was in Arizona for work (and some sneaking off to see baseball). And last weekend we took a great four-day, 1300-mile road trip down to south central New Mexico, with stops at the UFO museum in Roswell and the White Sands Film Festival in Alamogordo, where my son had a couple of movies being screened in the high school competition.And I thought I lived on the edge of nowhere. If that's true, then southern New Mexico might be the dead center of nowhere. We drove by a lot of beautiful, empty desert. It has been a few years since we went on a long car trip, which is something I love to do but is hard when the kids get older and less willing to endure what I think is a blast: driving across the huge empty areas of the west with the windows open and the radio blasting. So it was good to get out on the road, even with four teen-agers in tow. And to stand barefoot in sand, after a long, cold winter.
The point is I've been busy. I've been reading an Updike novel, set in the postwar future of 2020, recommended by friend Krell at our shop talk lunch earlier this month, and I'm learning some good things from it in regards to my story, some dos and don'ts about writing about the imagined future. And tonight I spent about an hour copy editing the novel, which is the first I've touched it in a few weeks. It always feels good to work on it, even if I'm at the daunting stage where it just seems too big and hopeless. But, you know, an hour here, three pages there, eventually, with luck and some -- a lot of -- effort, it'll get done.
