"And the stars will be your eyes, and the wind will be my hands."

[greygirlbeast]

Yesterday, I wrote 1,792 on Chapter Six of Cherry Bomb. A prolific day. And I spoke with my editor yesterday about the cover.

I received Liz Hand's very flattering introduction to the Centipede Press edition of The Drowning Girl: A Memoir.We were spared the 3"-6" of snow and got only a dusting, that and gale-force winds. Currently, here in

Comments

[setsuled]

Yeah, it reads like a first novel, but it reads like a first novel with a voice and with something to say.

I definitely agree.

Also, it occurred to me that if the book manages to stay in print just four more years, it will have remained in print, continuously, for twenty years (1998-2018), no small accomplishment.

It deserves it, it's a good book.

I've spent the winter with the lives of Diane Arbus and William Burroughs, and all their attendant strife and squalor, and I need now to be free of the minds of other artists for awhile.

There are a lot of books I very strongly associate with the times and places when I first read them. I was reading the collection from Burroughs' last journals called Last Words on September 11, 2001 and it's a very prominent part of my memory of that day.

[greygirlbeast]

I was reading the collection from Burroughs' last journals called Last Words on September 11, 2001 and it's a very prominent part of my memory of that day.

That's one I actually have yet to read,

[setsuled]

It's good, it gives the sense of the man's long, flat mood over a few years.

[martianmooncrab]

I finished Ted Morgan's weighty biography of Burroughs last night.

For some reason, I had been thinking you had meant ER Burroughs, not William all this time.. sigh...

The Leidy bio looks interesting, there are days when diving into a bio is the best thing ever. I have been debating on reading the Brautigan one vs the 2 I have On Wallis Warfield Simpson, but, in the end, they will all get read.

[greygirlbeast]

I am an avid reader of biographies. If only I could find the same zeal for fiction.

[martianmooncrab]

I have a nice stash of them in my TBR piles, I have been eyeing the ones on Archaeologists too..

[cliffs_end]

This dream of watery ends is reminiscent of the setting of those two early stories I was hoping you wouldn't abandon yesterday. I suppose it's too much to hope that your subconscious agrees?

[greygirlbeast]

I suppose it's too much to hope that your subconscious agrees?

I'll address this tomorrow.

[ulffriend]

I was in Chattanooga in 93, and that storm has become my touchstone for southern winter weather events.

I think that you managed to make "Silk" evocative of its time even without the storm, though. Perhaps it's the sum of the small references, but reading it can take me back to then very quickly. It may not be the book that you now would write, but it's a wonderful book.

There was a book that I took out many times from my elementary school library, "Lost Worlds" by Anne Terry White. It introduced me to Stephens, Carter, Schliemann. The methods now look rudimentary at best, grave-robbing at worst, but I found a love for archaeology and biography in that book. (It was around that time that I stumbled upon my first biography of Eve Curie as well.) I've never dared to try to find it again - there's no way that it could ever live up to what it kindled.

silk

[ieatdeadstars]

I cant tell if Silk reads as a first novel. Im just not as discerning. That you can bring anpositive words about it now makes me smile. I was fifteen when I found it, and every page validated the weight teachers gave to books, to creativity and writing. Fifteen and being bombarded with sterile classic works, and with autopsy like critical examinations. Silk brought back the desire to read that hasnt left me. Its setting is its own now, just like london for the victorian writers. Time has made it age, but cannot wash it away and leave embarassing ruins.

And your subsequent works dont leave me dissapointed. Every story and book delivers the dragon, and doesnt leave me a sallow junkie. Thank you.