Tuesday, April 24, 2007

Clawing my way back

I've been back home for... what... about 36 hours now. I felt pretty good the first day, a little worse yesterday, and today I woke up with a headache. So all reports I'm entirely chipper and am not experiencing jet lag are probably exaggerations.

I sure can't complain about the weather. Yesterday was stunning here -- sunny, cool, just beautiful. The kind of day tourists curse because they thought it would be nice and warm in California, and they go out and buy cheap fleecewear with SAN FRANCISCO printed on it in a bad font.

The trip was excellent for my book. Not only did I answer most of the research questions I needed to investigate, but I was able to do some thinking about several problems, unrelated to setting, which I have been struggling with for most of the project -- things about character, motivation, structure. (You'd think that almost two and a half years into the project I would have figured that stuff out, but I'm unusually dumb about many of the basic conventions of literature. Maybe I should have gotten a lit degree instead of a film criticism degree.) Now what I need to do is continue the momentum. I'm going to work all day Saturday, assuming I'm coherent by then.

Thanks to all friends and readers who followed my posts, commented, linked, and generally supported me.

2 comments:

Debbie Ann said...

so glad the trip was good for you. and thank you so much for leaving behind all the great drugstore stuff that we can't find here!

Anonymous said...

Ah, film criticism degree. No wonder you walk out of movies.