Brief, Brilliant Thoughts

No, not mine, silly. My thoughts are usually neither brief nor brilliant, which causes no small difficulty in my life, as you can imagine. (Some of my closer friends out there don’t even have to imagine. They KNOW.)

No, I’m going to tell you where you can find brief, brilliant thoughts that are especially relevant to writers. It’s the Twitter feed of the Paris Review (@parisreview), which consists almost entirely of quotations excerpted from their long, venerable, valuable series of interviews with writers.

I’m deep into my novel, which means I’m in danger of losing sight of the big picture. What is the point of this novel? What is the point of any novel? What is the point of writing? Why did I even get out of bed today? That sort of thing. And like a little burst of smelling salts, here came two quotations that cleared my head, and with these, I shall leave you:

The first obligation of the writer—which I would also regard as his last obligation—is to be interesting.
— John Barth

Writers must describe the terrible.
— John Irving

How to Write in a World Where Beloved Has Already Been Written

A couple of days ago, when I was almost done reading Beloved, I made the following post to Facebook and Twitter: “The problem with being a writer is that I live in a world where books like Beloved have already been written. Earth-2 or bust!”

A Facebook friend of mine replied: “I hear ya. You think, why should I even bother?”

My reply to my friend: “Exactly. Yet for some reason, I bother.”

One day in the not-too-distant future I will write a longish blog post about why I write, i.e., what drives me to it, what the motivations are, what the reasons are. I’ve finally figured all that out. It was a question that bedeviled me for many years. I had a hard time answering it because I was using my writing to serve a number of different ends, some of which I was unaware of; some of which contradicted each other; and some of which represented goals that writing cannot accomplish. But today I want to talk about how I can even bring myself to write in a world where Beloved has already been written.

Beloved, in case you didn’t know, is a novel by American author Toni Morrison. It won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and deservedly so, in my opinion. It’s set in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1873, and it’s all about how slavery deformed people in this country — the enslaved and the enslavers. I just finished the book and I feel very full with it. I’ll be digesting this one for days, like a python that has devoured a dog. It wasn’t a perfect book, but that’s true of every novel. Some famous writer, I can’t remember who, once defined the word “novel” as “a narrative of a certain length that has something wrong with it.” Amen to that. Still, I feel so enriched by this book — enlarged by it.

I also feel intimidated by it. As a writer, I have to ask myself: Is my novel on this level? The answer, of course, is Certainly not. So then I have to wonder, well, why am I even writing? We’ve already got books that are far better than the one I’m writing. Why should I continue? As my friend said, why should I even bother?

It helps to remember that when Toni Morrison sat down to write Beloved, she had to do so in a world where For Whom the Bell Tolls had already been written. And when Hemingway sat down to write that one, he had to do it in a world where Absalom, Absalom! had already been written. And when Faulkner sat down to write that one, he had to do it in a world where The Great Gatsby had already been written. And Fitzgerald worked in the shadow of Henry James, and Henry James worked in the shadow of Jane Austen, and all the novelists have worked in the shadow of Cervantes. Cervantes himself worked in the shadow of Shakespeare. The regression keeps going backward as far as you want to look.

All great novels — and all the mediocre ones, and all the shitty ones — have been written in worlds where masterpieces already existed. Thank goodness Cervantes didn’t let the fact of Macbeth stop him from making his own run at the prize. And thank goodness that Morrison didn’t let the fact of For Whom the Bell Tolls stop her from giving us Beloved.

If you want to write, the proper response to greatness isn’t to say, Why bother? The proper response to greatness is described in the sage advice of author Richard Bausch, in his “Letter to a Young Writer”:

Say to yourself, “I accept failure as the condition of this life, this work. I freely accept it as my destiny.” Then go on and do the work. Never ask yourself anything beyond “Did I work today?” If the answer to that question is “yes,” then no other question is allowed.

My novel is no Beloved, but fortunately, it doesn’t have to be. Did I work today? Yes.

Life in the Bubble

Stop the presses: I finally finished Anna Karenina.

What’s that you say? I’m acting like I deserve a medal? Well yes, I think I do deserve a medal for finishing a book that’s almost 1,000 pages long and that contains long, didactic passages where characters act as mouthpieces for the author’s opinions about Russian society and culture in the 1870s.

What’s that you say? If I feel the need to gripe about it, why did I even read it? Because although the experience of reading this book had its chorelike aspects, it was also quite rewarding. The writing at the sentence level was always good and often exquisite — and sustaining that level of prose excellence over 976 pages is no mean feat. I think my favorite thing about the novel is its finely detailed, completely convincing depictions of human psychology. These characters were the most human, believable, alive characters I’ve ever read in the pages of a novel. You simply won’t find a more true-to-life portrayal of what it means to live a human life, to have the human experience. So, as a reader, I enjoyed the book, and as a writer, I learned a tremendous amount from it.

And there was another benefit to reading Anna Karenina — almost a side effect, but a very welcome one. I found that the act of reading it started to feel a little bit similar to the act of writing my novel. When I sat down at my computer, opened the Kindle app, and started reading where I’d left off, I felt the same sense of discipline and conscientiousness and duty that I feel when I sit down at my computer, open Scrivener, and start writing where I left off. The act of reading Anna Karenina started to feel as if it was part of the larger act of writing my novel.

As I would go through my day, I found that when I wasn’t thinking about my novel, I would often be thinking about Anna Karenina instead. My thoughts about Tolstoy’s novel started to swirl around and intermix with my thoughts about my own novel. I would read or see or do things during my day that had nothing to do with either novel, but I would relate those experiences back to one or the other or both novels.

And when I would get some spare time with nothing to do and no plans, my thoughts began naturally to turn to either my novel or Tolstoy’s. I became obsessed with them both. Still, writing my novel was more fun than reading Tolstoy’s, so in those crannies of spare time, I wrote more. I wrote more and more and more, and I still am — up to 100,000 words as of today.

In short, I had entered that state of concentrated creative productivity that choreographer Twyla Tharp calls “the Bubble.” I’ve written about Tharp’s Bubble before. She talks about it in her book The Creative Habit, which I highly recommend to anyone who wants to lead a more actively creative life. Here is the passage from her book where she defines the Bubble:

When I look back on my best work, it was inevitably created in what I call The Bubble. I eliminated every distraction, sacrificed almost everything that gave me pleasure, placed myself in a single-minded isolation chamber, and structured my life so that everything was not only feeding the work but subordinated to it. . . . Being in the bubble does not have to mean exiling yourself from people and the world. It is more a state of mind, a willingness to subtract anything that disconnects you from your work. . . . You can function out in the world (indeed, you have to), but wherever you go the bubble goes with you.

Now, I have not “eliminated every distraction” in my life or “sacrificed almost everything” that gives me pleasure. I still indulge in the occasional videogame, not to mention imbibing draft beer at my local purveyors of libations. But I do now feel that my life is structured so that everything in it is feeding the work. I do now feel that wherever I go, the bubble is going with me. There’s now a sense in which my head is always in the game. And I attribute that sense of pervasive commitment to the oddly totalizing effect that Anna Karenina had on me and my writing.

It’s kind of like getting in shape through physical exercise. You don’t always enjoy the act of exercising, but once you’re physically fit, you feel better all the time, whether you’re exercising or not. Anna Karenina helped get me in better shape as a writer. So the next time I’m knocking back a cold one, I’ll raise a glass to Mr. Tolstoy and another to Ms. Tharp.

Next up in the cavalcade of classic literature? Beloved. I have no idea how it’ll affect me or what it’ll teach me. I’ll let you know.

Leo Tolstoy, M.D.

No, Tolstoy wasn’t both a doctor and a writer. That was Anton Chekhov. Also William Carlos Williams. Tolstoy was just a damn good writer with a piercingly clear understanding of the human condition. Tolstoy was just the writer who wrote Anna Karenina, which William Faulkner said was the greatest novel ever written. Tolstoy is just the guy giving me fits right now, because I’m reading Anna Karenina, and I’m having a hard time finishing it.

It’s not that I don’t like the book; I do like it. The writing is phenomenal, and he’s got a way of making a character absolutely come to life on the page. But I don’t love it. There are many long passages devoted to social commentary on the cultural and political situation of Russia in the 1870s, and those parts are pretty boring. Also, the novel is very, very, very long, and when I’m in the middle of yet another disquisition on the status of the Russian peasant, it’s dispiriting to consider just how much I have left to read.

So why not just quit reading it? “Life is too short,” a friend of mine said to me. “Reading is supposed to be fun.” Well, yes and no. It depends on who you are. The reading of fiction is certainly supposed to be fun — or at least entertaining — for the general reader. But if you’re a writer, you have other reasons to read, in addition to the normal reasons. A writer reads to learn how it’s done, to see what works and what doesn’t, to find techniques to emulate and clichés to avoid. Even as you’re seeking out and enjoying the entertainment in the work, another part of your mind is cataloging, analyzing, assessing, judging. I think that’s part of why I’ve become such a picky reader lately. When I’m reading a book that I really love, that analytical part of my brain goes dormant, and I just read for the pleasure of it. That’s such a good feeling, and I experience it so rarely.

So I’m sticking with Anna Karenina because I’m reading to learn. I’m writing what will be my first novel, so I want to read a great novel and learn from it. And a big part of the challenge of writing this first novel is just finishing the damn thing, because I didn’t finish the last one I started. I have a psychological dragon to slay here, and that monster is going down. And just as it’s important for me to finish the novel I’m writing, I think it will be important for me to finish the novel I’m reading. Giving up on it would send my subconscious the wrong kind of message at exactly the wrong time. Right now I need to display stamina and constancy, not fickleness and fatigue.

So I’ll finish the novel, even though it feels like I’m taking my medicine. I never did like the taste of cough syrup; but it gets the job done. And right now I’m all about getting the job done.

You Load 50,000 Words, and What Do You Get?

Halfway through a novel is what you get! And by “halfway” I mean “halfway through a number of words arbitrarily chosen to represent the point at which the novel might be finished.” And by “arbitrarily chosen number” I mean “100,000.”

Now, I know that exactly four weeks ago I posted about being ¼ of the way through the novel. Have I really written another ¼ of the novel in just four weeks? Jeez, at this rate I’ll be finished by dinner! I’ll have an agent in time for cocktails, a book deal by breakfast on Saturday (mimosa brunch!), and a movie deal in time for a three-martini lunch. Being a writer is so fun!

But I jest. In reality I’m playing the game that many novelists play with themselves — oh, I just realized that I wrote “many novelists play with themselves.” Hello, sketchy search-engine traffic! Glad you could join us. Now back to our regularly scheduled blog, already in progress: many novelists obsessively track word count, chapter count, progress through the outline, anything that will tell them how far they’ve traveled down a seemingly endless path. You don’t get gold stars for putting in a good week of novel writing. You don’t get money (usually). You don’t get sex, or at least I haven’t (although if this has happened to you, please do write in and share your tales of literary concupiscence, you big liar, you). You don’t get cups of energy drink at tables staffed by volunteers. So you create your own little goodies to give yourself. That’s what I’m doing here. My novel currently stands at 51, 657 words, and I’m celebrating that fact, partly because it’s a real accomplishment, and partly because I need to see it as a real accomplishment and celebrate it as such.

The 100,000-word target for novel length is not completely arbitrary. The blog Indefeasible has helpfully provided the word counts of dozens of classic novels and of more recent novels that have won the PEN/Faulkner award (one of the highest awards an American novel can win). Out of those novels, I have abstracted a comparison subset that only includes novels from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, that includes only one novel by any given author, and that specifically excludes The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged due to their prodigious length. Some of the novels on my subset list of twenty-three books are Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson, Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison, Lord of the Flies by William Golding, Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston, As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner, and The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen. The average word count of all twenty-three novels is 107, 636. This figure agrees with the conventional wisdom, bandied about in creative-writing programs and writing magazines and online forums, that 100,000 words is a good rough target for novel length.

I think the 100,000 word target functions as more of a minimum than a maximum, which is why it makes a good rough metric for determining when you may be close to being done. That is, if your novel comes in a good deal shorter than 100,000 words, you are probably in novella territory, which is a territory notably devoid of sales opportunities. But novels can be much longer than 100,000 words without being disqualified as a novel. It will be harder to sell your 500,000-word magnum opus than to sell your 100,000 word hit-it-and-quit-it book, but they’re both novels.

So hooray for halfway through, in some sense of the word “halfway.” And now to celebrate, in some sense of the word “beer.”

The Fecundity of the Quotidian

I’ve written here before about how much I like my job, and it’s true. In fact, I’m pretty happy with my overall life situation right now. But no life is perfect, and there is one thing about my current situation that’s a little hard to take: the daily grind.

How grindeth the machine, you ask? How big the teeth? How fast the wheel? Here’s my typical weekday:

• 6:00 — Wake up
• 6:15 — Begin exercising
• 7:00 — Hit the shower
• 7:15 — Get dressed, eat breakfast, brush teeth
• 7:35 — Hit the door
• 7:40 — Catch bus #1
• 8:00 — Catch bus #2; work on novel until I arrive in Raleigh
• 8:45 — Get dropped off at work; walk across campus to office
• 9:00 — Begin workday
• 5:30 — Leave work; walk across campus to bus stop
• 5:45 — Catch bus #1; work on novel until I arrive in Chapel Hill
• 6:30 — Arrive in Chapel Hill; catch bus #2
• 6:55 — Get home

I eat dinner after I get home, and I often have things to do after dinner, like doing the dishes and cleaning the kitchen, paying bills, reading, maybe reconciling the checkbook against the bank statement, I might have an errand to run, I may answer correspondence, etc. Many of my weekdays are just packed, all day long. So when Friday afternoon rolls around, I’m ready. More than ready: hungry for the weekend.

So sometimes when I get on bus #1 on a Tuesday or Wednesday morning for the 45-minute ride to Raleigh, I don’t particularly feel like writing. Maybe I just want to stare out the window for a little while. God knows I deserve it. Who could blame me? No one—except for me. Because if I’m staring out the window, I’m not writing. If I’m not writing, the novel is in stasis. And I believe I have a calling to tell this story that I’m telling in my novel. And I believe that if you have a calling and don’t answer it, you’ll regret it for the rest of your life.

So the real challenge for my writing these days is simply keeping up with the daily grind—holding to that schedule five days a week, not just two or three days, not just on the good days. I think I’m doing a good job of it so far; I’m about one-third of the way through the novel (45,000 words), which is way ahead of where I thought I’d be after about three months of writing. To put it in perspective, the last time I tried to write a novel, six years ago, I got about 49,000 words in before I quit, which took me five months. So back then I was writing an average of 9,800 words per month. Now I’m writing an average of 15,000 words per month. I attribute every word of the roughly 50% productivity increase to the daily grind.

I find, to my own surprise, that I have become the opposite of the “weekend writer.” I use that term non-pejoratively, just descriptively. I have certainly been a weekend writer before, and I’ve known good writers who only wrote on weekends. I was once in a writing group with someone who explicitly said of herself, “I’m very much a weekend writer.” Nothing wrong with that—unless you want to be a professional working artist. In that case, you need to put more work into your art and treat your art more like work.

I leave you with a quote by French novelist Gustave Flaubert, who described his own philosophy of work thus: “Be regular and orderly in your methods like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work.” En garde!

What Pablo Picasso Didn’t Say

Pablo Picasso, 1962.

Author Samuel Delany has an interesting theory about how your reading affects your writing:

It is almost impossible to write a novel any better than the best novel you’ve read in the three to six months before you began writing your own. Thus you must read excellent novels regularly. (Delany, About Writing, p. 127)

I would surmise that this principle applies equally well to other art forms if you swapped out the nouns and verbs as needed. Thus, “It is almost impossible to write an essay” or “paint a painting” or “write a song” that is better than the best one you’ve seen or read or heard in the past three to six months. In short, if you want to create good art, you must consume excellent art regularly.

Delany’s theory is just a theory, with only anecdotal evidence to back it up; but it makes sense on the face of it. So I’ve decided to act on the assumption that it’s true by reading Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina as I write my novel. The great Russian novels of the nineteenth century are generally regarded as cornerstones of world literature, which is why I’m a little chagrined to admit that I’ve never read any of them. I’ve read plenty of Chekhov’s short stories, and one or two of his plays, but War and Peace and Crime and Punishment and the like have thus far eluded me. But I’m a big William Faulkner fan, and Faulkner said he thought Anna Karenina was the finest novel ever written, so I figured the top was a good place to start.

I’m not writing this post to give a review of the book. Those abound in print and pixels, and besides, I’m only 38% of the way through it (so says my Kindle app). I’m writing to advocate for the idea of artists consuming excellent art. We’re surrounded by mediocre art, which makes it much easier to consume mediocrity than excellence. And, hey, I do it myself. Sometimes you just want to switch your brain off, pop a beer, and watch an episode of Supernatural. (Team Sam!) But if Supernatural represented the high-water mark of the art I’ve consumed over the past three to six months, then my novel (if Delany’s right) will rise no higher than that level—and I want my novel to be better than that. I want my novel to be much, much better than that. Hence the ongoing encounter with Tolstoy.

When I ran across Delany’s theory, the first thing I thought of was that famous Picasso quote: “Good artists copy. Great artists steal.” The artist in me thought, That principle explains why Delany’s theory is true, and if it’s good enough for Picasso, it’s good enough for me, hell yeah, read read read, steal steal steal, etc. But when I went to write up this post, the editor in me thought, Well, I better verify that Picasso actually said that. Quotes do get misattributed, especially on the Series of Tubes. So I hunted and I poked, and I couldn’t find any authoritative site that quoted Picasso as saying that. The Wikiquote site for Steve Jobs notes that Jobs liked to cite that quote, but they also say it’s a misquote. That led me to a great little video clip where Jobs explains his take on the concept:

Whether the original quote is accurate or not, Jobs is clearly onto something. If you want to create excellence, first you have to learn how. You learn how to create something by first observing it. And you can’t observe something if it isn’t there. Therefore, you must put yourself in the way of excellence.

In researching this spurious Picasso quote, I did find a real passage from an essay by T.S. Eliot in which he expresses much the same idea:

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest. (Eliot, “Philip Massinger,” The Sacred Wood, 1921; http://www.bartleby.com/200/sw11.html.)

Eliot wrote my tied-for-favorite poem, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (my other favorite poem is Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl”), so I’m inclined to trust him on this one. And Steve Jobs, and Samuel Delany. And, ultimately, Leo Tolstoy.

What’s 6 Miles, 976 Yards, and 9 Inches Long?

And no, the answer is not anything dirty, Mr. or Ms. Dirty Mind. It’s the novel I’m writing! I just finished chapter 10. I’m estimating that the book will be forty to forty-five chapters long, so as of now I can say that I might be roughly ¼ of the way through. And because writing a novel is a marathon, not a sprint, that means I’m ¼ of the way through the marathon.

If anyone reading this post has actually run a marathon, I’d appreciate your comments about what it feels like to get ¼ of the way through. Do you even know when you’ve reached that mark? Do you feel encouraged because you’ve made it to some sort of milestone? Or do you feel weary, knowing that you’ve still got ¾ of the course in front of you? Or do you think it’s pretty idiotic to compare a static, sedentary, practically immobile activity like writing to a dynamic, strenuous, highly mobile activity like running? (Be honest with me. I can take it.)

Anyway, I’m psyched. The last time I tried to climb this kind of mountain, I gave up before this point. Now I’m ¼ of the way to the top. I can’t see the peak yet, but I can see the treeline, where the tundra begins. That’s where I’m headed next. See you there.

Learning How to Fly

Illustration by Arthur Rackham in Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens, 1906.

I’ve been at my new job for six months now, and I can safely say that I really like it. I’m not just saying that for public consumption, either. When I first started, I was practically walking on air the whole time. I felt ridiculously lucky and grateful.

It took about three months for me to have my first legitimately bad day. I had a run-in with a co-worker; nothing too serious, but it was enough to put me in a bad mood for the rest of the day. In fact, I was still grumpy the next morning, when I had a meeting with someone else. That person could tell something was wrong and asked me how I was. That was when I realized that I was still in a bad mood from the previous day, which didn’t make a whole lot of sense, relative to the seriousness of the original run-in.

I then came to terms with the simple fact that when a bad day came along in my job, I was going to have to cope with it in a way that didn’t let one bad day poison the whole job experience. This may sound very basic, but remember that I freelanced for 11 years before taking this job. It had been a long time since I had dealt with the ins and outs of a regular job, having to survive the daily grind.

I reminded myself of how happy I had been just a couple of days prior, and I thought, I’ve just got to get my happy thoughts back. I’m talking about the Peter Pan happy thoughts—the kind that enable you to fly. I’d had them for three months, and it felt great. Losing them felt horrible. I had to get them back. But how? It involved a strange combination of self-discipline and open-heartedness. I simply had to decide to focus on the positive and move back to a place that felt good. It was as if I was priming my own emotional pump so that water would flow once again. The results weren’t instantaneous, but soon I was, if not walking on air, at least walking with a noticeable spring in my step.

I mention all this because I recently underwent a similar process with my novel. I was cranking along, writing and writing, eight chapters in, when suddenly I screeched to a halt. I had reached a place where a certain plot point constellated two very important questions that I absolutely had to answer before I could write any more. And answering the questions involved a lot of sitting and thinking, a lot of journal-style writing to myself, some research, even some feeling, as I sat and observed how different ideas and options for the novel made me feel inside.

But as I did all this introspection, I felt anxiety nipping at my heels. My anxiety said: You’re not writing words in the novel. The novel has ground to a halt. You have to do what you’re doing, but how long will it take? How much time are you losing? How long will it take you to write this thing? How old will you be when it’s finally published—if it’s ever published?

When I had finally figured out everything I needed to figure out and was ready to move forward again, three days had passed. I started writing, but the words came slowly, reluctantly, painfully. Just when speed had become more important—to make up for all that lost time—I was writing slower than ever. I didn’t understand what was wrong. I seemed to have fallen out of love with the novel. Writing the novel used to feel so good. Now it felt like torture.

Then I remembered: happy thoughts. I had lost my happy thoughts where my novel was concerned because of all that time-related anxiety. And now look at me, shuffling around on the ground, getting nowhere. Fortunately, I knew what to do about it. Once again, I used a combination of self-discipline and open-heartedness to get my head and my heart back in the game. Once again I primed my own emotional pump. And once again the water—and, this time, the words—began to flow.

Writing a novel isn’t a sprint. It’s a marathon. You’ve got to be in it for the long haul. And making it over the long haul means you’ve got to be able to get your happy thoughts back after you lose them. Because you will lose them, eventually; that’s just how the long haul is. And the long haul is much, much easier when you have happy thoughts to sustain you.

Today when I saw my boss, he said, “Congratulations, by the way. Your six-month probation period is over. You’re permanent now. I guess you weren’t too worried about that, but now it’s official.” So that was good news. And I finished chapter 8 and am about 3/4 through chapter 9 now. That’s good news too.

What’s So Scary About the Number “6”?

 

When I first went to college, right out of high school, I was a golden boy. President of the Thespians, president of my church youth group, National Honor Society, academic scholarship recipient—the list of achievements and honors went on. But at the end of my freshman year, my grades were so bad that I lost my scholarship, I lost my regular financial aid, and I was on academic probation, with one semester left to pull my grades up above a 2.0. I couldn’t afford to go to school without financial aid, so I dropped out.

Fourteen years later, when I went back to school, I was petrified by the thought that I somehow lacked the essential qualities necessary to earn a college degree. I feared that I might be an inherently deficient person. Even after I got an A on my first test—even after I got As in the first two classes I took—I didn’t fully trust that I wouldn’t screw it up this time around. That fear didn’t go away until I had completed a full year’s worth of classes in good academic standing. That’s when I realized that I had surpassed the mark I had formerly set. I had done better the second time around. Maybe I could go all the way this time.

I’m in a similar situation with this novel I’m writing. I’ve already tried and failed once before to write a novel. As I said in this post, I didn’t get beyond chapter 6. Since I started writing my current novel, the number 6 has loomed for me as an ominous signpost. Am I one of those people who can’t write anything with more than 6 chapters in it? (And don’t ask me who “those people” are or whether such a group even exists. In the land of my fears, there are thousands of them, and they’re constantly insisting that I’m one of them.) Am I—what would the word for a fear of “6” be? Sexaphobic? (Can’t wait to see the site traffic that word will generate.)

As of a couple of days ago, I can now say that I’m no sexaphobe. I have completed chapter 6 of my novel and am well into chapter 7. As was the case with college, I have surpassed the mark I formerly set. And I really do think I’m going to go all the way this time.

P.S. I did finish that degree, by the way. Go Heels.