Compiling this journal book has been harder than I thought. I have a million journal entries, but they all fall into one of the following categories:
- The weather
- How I’m sick
- What I’m reading
- Music
- Movies
- Long, rambling stories about the past
- Travel diaries
- Bad stuff that happened
- Why I hate New York
- What I miss about Indiana/Seattle
- Unfinished or rejected stories I decided to post to get rid of them
Or a combination of the above.
I’m now trying to categorize things into each of the above and have a section of the book of each, which is similar to that Mikal Gilmore book of old articles, and isn’t as boring as a straight-up chronological thing. The trip essays from when I crossed the country in 1999 will be in there, maybe as an appendix. And I’m trying to dredge up either some paper journal entries, or some of the stuff I write in my not-published journal, so there will be new stuff that isn’t on the web. (Yes, I keep a journal on my computer that isn’t online, mostly for when I’m so disgusted with writing online, but I need to write about something.)
I’ve been taking codeine lately. Not large doses, but in Tylenol-3, for my back. The good thing is, it completely blows out the back pain, and makes me feel all nice and neat. But I can’t take it at work (or maybe I should) and it completely weirds out my dream cycle. I have a lot of really vivid, really abnormal dreams, but within five minutes of waking, I completely forget them, but still remember that I had them. I also wake up in the middle of the night with an incredible thirst for something really sweet. On Friday, I woke up in the middle of the night and drank half a gallon of Tropicana fruit punch without even thinking about it. The back’s just about better, so no more weird dreams.
I went back and re-read The Device, or at least what I had done, and it’s largely unusable. There are line 9 chapters of setup, before the plot starts. Then there’s no plot, no notes on the plot, nothing. I vaguely thought of stealing some of the premise of that book for the second act of the current book (not the journal one, the real one) and there’s no way. I might steal the most basic premise of it, and the title. It will mean this is the third book attempt with the same title, which might be bad. It’s like the car stereo I had that I used in three different cars, all of which ended up totalled. I think that happened with the parts off of James Dean’s car, too. Or maybe that was a Twilight Zone, I’m not sure.
Oh, I got the first Air in the Paragraph Line with a bar code yesterday. Neat.