Small road trip

I've been working on my book almost every weekday for the last two weeks; yesterday I managed to finish another chapter, and according to the outline, there are only five chapters left. Slowly I'm whittling them down.

This morning I skipped zazen and slept in. I then spent the morning puttering around the house and exercising; I've recently upped my daily mileage on the treadmill to at least four miles a day. So I didn't even get a chance to get down to work until mid-afternoon, and I found I could hardly even look at my notes, much less write anything. I packed up and went on a drive instead. I drove down highway 1 a little ways to Half Moon Bay. It had been two years since I last drove through Devils' Slide, a treacherous five miles of coastal road south of the city. The last time, I was driving with my friend Katia, and we nearly got creamed by a car coming the other way. The guy went into a curve too fast, came out of it and almost creamed us, lost control and got the guy 50 yards behind us instead. It wasn't a terribly serious accident for a head-on crash, but it was bad enough. I got out and stopped traffic and then ran to an emergency phone. As we resumed our drive back to the city, Katia said that the fact we'd avoided a crash meant that our new relationship wasn't going to be a metaphorical car wreck. I thought this was a very poetic way to look at it. Katia's a novelist.

Today's auto tour aside, I'm really working hard to finish this book. That means this blog is going to get kind of boring. About all I can say is, I went to zazen, I exercised, I worked on my book.

Oh, I know what happened. I got my first unemployment check today.

Sample notes:

Then I thought of bringing in Lucy. Bobby’s old girlfriend whom we spent parts of two chapters on several chapters ago. I had the idea a while back to actually bring her forth during the convention sequence in order to further humiliate Bobby. It will turn out that one of the things Bobby has to do for Frank (and thus for JFK) is to beard Lucy for JFK. In other words, Bobby has to accompany her to an event as her date but the real purpose is to provide a way for her to get past all the reporters and into a private clinch with JFK. (I haven’t answered the question of how Frank notices her or procures her for this purpose, but I’m not too worried about handling that.) Now I’m thinking it might work to bring her in now. Is it too early, or will it be effective to introduce her now and give Bobby a chance to react to the whole situation?

However, she couldn’t come as Giancana’s date, for the same reasons as Campbell couldn’t. Therefore if she’s going to be in 23d she has to come with Bobby, so he beards her on this occasion.

Q. What are the advantages of that?

A. It creates more tension in the scene, where now there is none; all I have now is to make it a farce. Also there’s no real reason for Bobby to even be present at the dinner, unless he serves some purpose for Frank and/or JFK. Thirdly, it creates tension for the reader to anticipate the convention.

5:00 pm -- I didn’t do that after all. I did rewrite the first part of 23d, but instead of having Bobby pick up Lucy, I had him pick up just an ordinary political groupie. This introduces the whole idea of bearding someone, so I can just have the Lucy thing happen in the next chapter (or wherever it comes) without any explanation. Also I put a few words into ch. 20 to prepare for it. Then I wrote 970 words for the first part of 23d, and had Sammy drop the bomb that Frank won’t let him get married to May Britt until after the election. This speaks volumes about the social politics of the time (and is also what actually happened). This lends the requisite tension to the scene and saves the Lucy bombshell for closer to the climax. So I feel satisfied with my two day’s work even though I haven’t made much progress. Tomorrow, back to it.