So, on reading and writing: I finished Gravity's Rainbow. Yay me. I can't recommend it to anyone though, even though it had its moments. I started Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, but yeah I don't know if I really have the drive to read through it, at least in order to finish it before school starts. My brother's been getting David Sedaris books from the library, and my mom's been buying books that aren't crap. (I told her to pick up 100 Years Of Solitude, and she's also bought a handful of ex-hip book-club-style books from Borders' Buy 3, get 1 free table, so she's got the first Augusten Burroughs book, Life of Pi, and some other stuff.) My brother also has some books that he owns and I sometimes think about reading, like William S. Burroughs' The Wild Boys. All of these ae lighter quicker reads than the actually pretty enjoyable and compelling Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. And after Gravity's Rainbow, my brain is going to have to decompress on the light quick reads before reading another ungodly long novel. Oh and yesterday I got a handful of Grant Morrison's Doom Patrol, (best comic ever) rounding it out, so maybe someday soon I'll be able to spend an afternoon reading that whole run front to back. That would be a fucking great afternoon.

Did I ever write about how my mom has some girl from church living in my room? Okay, technically, it's not my room, it's a guest room, with a lot of my shit there. (i.e. comics, making the room important for my Best Afternoon Ever plan) But anyway, yeah, that's happening, which kind of sucks.

Oh and I told my mom I was stopping going to her church (you know, the one I grew up in) because it was too conservative and I felt consistently more and more alienated from the proceedings. I've had differences in terms of interpretation with the church leadership for fucking forever, but now, you know, I gots me a job, so it's one more reason to stop going. These two things combine so I won't be seeing my mom as much as I have been. Which I'm pretty cool with, except for the kinks in the Best Afternoon Ever plan. That's really all I care about.

So, yeah, writing. I am a slow writer. Here's the latest news. The book I had entitled Get Broken has transmogrified and now is being called Powers Of Observation. I'm pretty excited about it, although I should probably do more research before I write any more. The story I called Shoppe is now called Drawing In Frosting, but isn't quite done. There's a part of me hoping I can finish it by the time school's out.

I have two more short stories that I've written and finished since taking up the short story form in earnest following being kicked out of my dorm room last November. One's called Of Mice And Men, which I submitted in the McSweeney's August Van Zorn contest and a few people have read. The other's called Companion, which no one has read and I might submit for publication after I'm back at Evergreen. I finished writing Companion before the school year ended. But yeah, still haven't finished Drawing In Frosting, which I think I began writing around the same time as Companion. Actually, probably before.

I'm a slow writer. Don't know what I'm going to do when I'm in a writing class, where presumably I'll have to write fiction. Essays and autobio I can pretty much crap out. Maybe other people are faster at writing fiction because they just write thinly-veiled autobiography, or maybe I just suck. I mean, it's not like I'm slow because I'm meticulously crafting sentences, I'm slow because I have to wait for more insights to write down and pace out the thing. Drawing in Frosting had like a three-paragraph meditation on the nature of marriage. And the rest of the story is all about the interaction between a husband and wife. The husband doesn't quite understand the wife, which needs to be made clear, but it's being written from the husband's perspective, so I can't just declare it. So... that's going to be tricky.