I’m back. I’ve been back for a week, I just haven’t been in the right state to get back into this. It was a long trip and everything went great, but it was also the kind of thing that made returning to New York difficult, and I’ve spent the last week not really able to work on anything.
The good news is that Rumored to Exist is out, and it’s at Barnes and Noble and I got my first six copies in the mail last week. It looks incredible, and having the book in my hands as a real book and not a bunch of laserprinter paper feels great. But I have no idea how to tell people about it, and I am not the salesperson type. So please check it out, and read it online, and tell other people or mention it on your site or whatever else you can do to help. I think people will really enjoy the book, it’s just a matter of getting it to them.
I am oscillating between two writing projects, and I’m not sure which one will take. The first is called The Device, and it is a time-travel story I wrote a while ago that I’ve been trying to get into a book for a few years now. The other is another book about Bloomington, something that takes place after Summer Rain and basically fixes a lot of things that were wrong in there. I’m not sure which one will happen, but I’m sortof gravitating toward the Bloomington thing, and I plan to visit there when I’m in Indiana in two weeks, so that might be the catalyst for the whole thing.
I’ve been reading a lot lately, mostly because it’s too damn hot to do anything but sit in one place. I’m working on this book by Joseph Heller that talks about his early life, his childhood. He grew up on Coney Island, a Russian Jew during the depression. His dad died when he was five, so everyone worked a million odd jobs to get by. But the way he describes the neighborhood, the boardwalk in its heyday, is the kind of writing I enjoy. I go to Coney Island maybe once a year, and it’s pretty much a shithole now. But there are these little glimpses of a more majestic past that intrigue me. I wonder what it would be like to live there, to have the ocean as your backyard and have all of Brooklyn and Manhattan in front of you. I’m only 50 pages into the book, but I’ve always been a big fan of Heller’s since I found a battered copy of Catch-22 in my parents’ books. (My parents were not literary by any means, but it must have been my mom that bought some of the grocerystore paperpacks that I eventually stole years later – stuff like Fear of Flying, The Terminal Man, and The Godfather.)
I saw the movie The Bourne Identity this Saturday, in a rare trip to the theatres. Since they closed the old Steinway theatre, so the “talk through the whole movie” crowd has moved to the multiplex where I usually go. That means I pretty much can’t go to movies like Men in Black and I either have to go to a really late show, or to a movie that I know no adolescent Queens boys would like. And that’s fine, but it means I go less. Anyway, Bourne was a good movie, and had one of those prototypical Robert Ludlum thrillride suspense plots. As much as you want to make fun of me, I think Matt Damon’s a capable actor, and handled the lead in this well. Good action took place with the beautiful background of Europe. I realize I’m saying nothing about the movie itself, but it was worth a watch, and I enjoyed getting out of the house for the evening.
Lots of movies lately, lots of books, and lots of heat. It will be nice to go to Indiana in the beginning of August only because I will have an air-conditioned car.
Gotta go finish my Big Mac…