Chapter 1.

North America

Chapter 2. Amsterdam

Chapter 3. The Workshop

Chapter 4. Exercise

Chapter 5. Another Fictional Workshop

Chapter 6. Television

Chapter 7. The World

Chapter 8. Itzehoe

Chapter 9. Amsterdam Once More

Chapter 10. An Afternoon

Chapter 11. Untitled

Chapter 12. Where New York Is Happening

Chapter 13. Fashion Week Once More

Chapter 14. Another Story Still

Chapter 15. It Is What It Is

Chapter 16. What To Write About?

Chapter 17. 1888

Chapter 18. Well

1
Chapter 19. Here

Chapter 20. NYC Fashion- Shows Showz

Chapter 21. Afternoon

Chapter 22. Another Chapter Again

Chapter 23. Fashione

Chapter 24. Milan

Chapter 25. Let Us See.

Chapter 26. So Many Words

Chapter 27. Writing A Book

Chapter 28. Later

Chapter 29. Still Later

Chapter 30. Still Still Later

Chapter 31. Storyboard

Chapter 32. Day Six

Chapter 33. Day Seven

Chapter 34. Later In The Day Here

Chapter 35. And What Is Next?

Chapter 36. Day One

2
Chapter 37. Gallia, Ah, Gallia

Chapter 38. The End Of The Book Here

CHAPTER 1. NORTH AMERICA

GALLIA

Gallia writes a book. No, she is not part of the Lost Generation. No, she is not part of the

Bloomsbury crowd. And her name is not Gallia. She drives an SUV. Well, more a sedan who

tries to be an SUV. She is a raging alcoholic, so, we can provide that. There are personas of

writers, of writers that are published. That go on book tours. That answer Q and A-s after

intelligent talks that they give at McNallyJackson on Mott. (Technically, on Prince.)

Gallia is not like that. She is a failure. She has no luck. Her writing will be lauded posthumously.

Not in her life-time. Two hundred years from now. It is what it is.

She has written some 121 or so words. Every day 2000. That is what writers do, day-in and day-

out. They find the time. They sit at their lap-tops. Gallia has to do the same.

She usually writes in spurts, she manufactures two or three books a 100 000 words per year.

Every year. Since 2007. It is now 2017 and she has not published any of those tomes. They are

online, scribd, issuu. They rot in the cloud, just like yelp-reviews do. Curated Instagram

accounts. Nobody reads her twitter-insights, she is no Donaldi. Her blogs, all five of them, her

vimeo accounts, her you tube accounts. Everything 4 da birdz. Gallia is as good a name as any.

One day she will write the perfect book. The great American novel. You can do that even if you

dont hold a US-passport. Maybe she should be Dutch or Norwegian. They do great in

translation. Swedish crime novels in yellow with little orange-red dots. The best career move for

3
an artist is death. She has 288 words. It is a lazy Sunday in late August. Tomorrow, she has a

root canal. At two in the afternoon. That will cheer her up.

It is what it is.

A novel has S-E-X in it. Soft porn. If it lacks that, it is not a novel. It is something non-fiction-

shimaguggy. A novel has neologisms in it. A novel is written by ppl with MFAs in Creative

Writing. Upton Sinclair did not have that. He apparently wrote more than one hundred books. He

stood next to his books and the heap of books was taller than his six foot something frame, his

work towered over him.

Gallia likes stories like this. What do writers eat, what do they drink? Which cafes do they

frequent? Are they suicidal or non-suicidal?

Suicide as career move, instant notoriety.

A tragedy that propels forth a career. You cannot write away in suburbia and try to make it.

There has to be something, fleeing from oppression, that kind of thing. You have to distinguish

yourself from the masses of scribes, of hapless scribes. You have to somehow hop to the other

side, where the rich and famous subside. Btw, you have to know the meaning of subside, its

proper usage. But that in itself is not enough. The right prepositions, the accurate ones, they will

not cement your place in world lit. maybe you should be male, white, have a beard. Maybe you

should be a woman who whines a lot. There are clearly defined trajectories. It does not help to

wear glasses and be a dork. And if you think that bespectacledness and dorkness are the same,

you are way off. Writing is a science. Art is a science. Art is science. Something like that here.

She has to wash her hair, she has an appointment at two. It is one oh nine, fifty-one minutes for

shower, mascara and the like here. Maybe lipstick will do. Mascara is for ppl. who do not write

4
books. You have to always dress for success. Painted faces do not go with intellectualness. An

intellectual being never ever wears make-up. These are ironclad rules. Gallia knows here. And

stop and spellcheck, save in the cloud.

DETLEF

Detlef likes New York. It is the city that will make him famous. He is an artist and artists

flourish in the city. His off-off Broadway piece will meander to midtown. At this point it

meandered to Hoboken, not even Newark, not even Jersey City.

It is what it is.

Sinatra left Hoboken and Detlef performs on the street. In which ever city gives him shelter. He

is young or he pretends to be young. He was born old, but who would know looking at him?

Somebody gave him the name Detlef, the kiss of death for any field. You cannot make it

anywhere on this planet with a name like this. Too Teutonic for its own good, too archaic. Do

you write this with an F or a V? It is not the equivalent of a Mariah, there the H adds value. You

cannot add value to a name like Detlef. Some things are impossible. What is in a name?

Playwright, huh. He should pen novels or poems. Or write an op-ed piece for the Times.

Something, anything. A piece for the Brooklyn Rail. A happy yelp-review. This Mc Donalds is

the best, the best, I tell yer. The woman to the right is hot, the one in the drive-thru is everything

but.

Detlef. Ok, so his name is not Detlef, a pseudonym and the worst pseudonym on this planet.

Detlef, huh.

5
He goes down to the Whole Foods. Has kombucha, though it basically tastes disgusting. He

drinks it on the second floor. Looks down on Houston. It is getting late, dark. He hates New

York, the city that will eat you alive. This is what the woman said to George Costanza. He

watches Seinfeld, he watches Friends. He watched King of Queens and Big Bang Theory. This is

not how you become a playwright. You have to read Chapter Two. He has it all wrong, he does it

all wrong. The kombucha tastes disgusting. A beer would be better but he has to quit. Cold

turkey. Some things have to be done. He and alcohol, they cannot co-exist. He will end up in the

gutter, he is that kind of personality. You cannot choose your genes.

It is what it is.

MANDANA

Mandana is slightly pretty. Her name is prettier than she is. She is way too fat. She is way too fat

since age five. the other girls in Gisela Grimms ballet class had skinnier wrists. And she was not

even in ballet, maybe pre-ballet. Or gymnastics, anyways, she left before the big performance.

She is an adult now. Well, so they say. She will never ever be an adult, but, shh, nobody need to

know here.

ANETTE

She watches Columbo on the telly. She types up stuff.

ANTHRUH

She is in Starbucks. That is where you find her on Monday mornings. Cars park outside,

Maseratis, Ferraris. Everybody wants a cuppa joe. You can come back after three in the

afternoon and have a Frappuccino. Not for free, mind you, nope, but it is the lump sum of three

6
bucks here in this very establishment. Not a bargain at all. Except if you have this over-sized

dollop of cream on top. The one that is spirally like a staircase in a bell tower. Antruh thinks

about that, funny lil metaphors that do not make much sense at all. She reads these days, one

book per day. If she can manage it, that is the goal. Writers and their flowery languages. She too

is a writer, not a poet, nope, it is the novel form for her. She packs the words, heaps them onto

the page. Her stories are wild. Unbelievable. Or too blah. She has a funny name that she just

made up.

GEORGIA

Writing is her calling. Or something. She could be part of a creative writing workshop. But that

is not her m.o. She is the go into the attic kind of writer. The one that toils in solitude. The

construction worker who fixes the lighthouse on the desolate piece of land that burgeons out into

the fjord. She cannot handle criticism. She writes in utter isolation, then she saves it all and sends

it out to New York City. In the city someone will read this, on the subway, on the L-train, out of

Bedford Station. By First Avenue, by Third Avenue. The assistant to the newly minted lit agent

should miss her proverbial stop. Once she is on Sixth Ave, she will look up and mutter: This is

genius.

Georgia has dreams, of fame of fortune. It keeps her going, it makes her wake up every morn to

go and push down squares on the typewriter.

ARSTA

It is the wrong name, even for a name that is made-up. Arsta, what does that even mean? A

flower, yup, why not. There are flowers with the funniest of names. A nom de plume. For a

roman a clef. Why is the lingo apropos writing, penning, so gauche, so French here.

7
Arsta heaps on stories, scenes of different people who write. Persons who type up stuff. They are

not related, they do not know each other. They live all over the world, on five continents. Not in

Antarctica though. Just like the online community of the National Novel writers, the ones that

type feverishly every November since 1999.

Arsta lives a very small life, but she reads Moby Dick and The Jungle online. She just bought

three books that cost her sixty-six bucks. She still can give them back and got her money back.

But maybe she likes the smell of old books, maybe she too is a bibliophile. If you wait long

enough. These books will be old and then they have that kind of smell here. She can give them to

the used bookstore after. Or the take a book leave a book place on the third floor in the A

building on the community college on forty-ninth. Arsta. A funny name for a poet. A flower,

maybe.

TAHI

She is Finnish. Finnish like Rava in Seinfeld. She has too dark hair for a person from

Scandinavia. Short and dark. She never laughs, just like Rava. Watching TV makes yer invent

people. The persons on the telly are made-up and the figures that the writer makes up are even

more made-up. Made -up once removed. They lack reality, because who needs reality anyways?

That is why we drink, to forget. She does not drink anymore and it is killing her inside. The lack

of drinks that drives yer crazy here. She will warm up the food in the fridge. Swedish meatballs

in beige sauce. It is good, it is frozen. Frozen food rocks. It is what writers in their peejays and

the t-shirts with holes eat. Writers that live in a vacuum, go to the gym and come back. They toil

in isolation until they are certifiable insane. It comes with the territory solitude does that to a

person. Snap out of it. There is a balance between mental incongruity and insanity, the fine line,

yup, that one. She misuses the words, English is a toughy. She could use German for that matter,

8
but those days are over. Nowadays it is merely English, which has its advantages. A bigger

market, though a shrinking market what with people and their blogs, their yelps, their Instagram-

accounts, their Vimeo vids. People tell their stories online, at the corner of film and words, film

and book. Image and word.

Well, she is not Finnish, but we can always pretend here.

Imagination can give you wings. The school opposite of ziggys apartment, the sentences

proclaiming, by reading you can travel to worlds far away, meet people you will never see. Just

open a book and you are immersed in other worlds, you fly to places far away. You live in

nonreality and that makes your real life better, richer. Or something like that.

1975 words, it is all good here, all good here.

BOB

Bob likes Thai food. It is the name of a restaurant in vancity, at the corner of main and tenth.

Bob and Thai, aha. If Bob likes it, you will too. Bob cannot be wrong here. On the telly, Friends,

the one with naked chicks. Or Chandler saying something about naked chicks. Now the theme

song, who are these people that dance in a fountain? With hats on their heads.

2057 words here.

DIANE

CHAPTER 2. AMSTERDAM

Living in Holland. To write. To pen a masterpiece. She needs toothpaste. She is jet lagged.

Maybe this was not such a good idea. She is homesick. Three months in Amsterdam. She

9
calculates how much this will cost her. She will go thru her savings, well, thru half of them. A

trust fund baby. Well, she is not, but she likes to pretend that she is. If you want to be part of the

canon of world lit, you have to be good at pretending. All the extra time to walk thru the streets

of this city and avoiding bikes, trying not to be run over by them. Bikes rule the streets in this

city. It is marvelous, the greatest city on earth. She will walk by the bookstores, peer into the

windows. Scriveners. The bookstores here are different from anywhere else on this planet.

She will have rose and beer, espresso verkeerd, espresso doppio. French fries with mayo in a red

and white paper bag. She will walk by the palace. Take trips to Rotterdam, to Leiden. To

Antwerp, Bruges. She will not check her email. Amsterdam is the bomb. People speak Dutch and

she does not understand their sing song. Men look like Rem Koolhaas. This is Amsterdam for

yer. She feels so alone and it is a good feel. Only in this city here.

Even if nobody will foot the bill for publishing this, she still will have had one hundred great

days. It is late August in Amsterdam, what more can you want. To see Amsterdam and die. It is

nice to glorify a city, a place. Nothing is wrong here, this is the perfect place on the planet. The

honeymoon will be over in three months, but that is when she will be in Schiphol and book the

KLM flight. She will have the pear pastry in terminal seven.

She will go back to New York City and then to Vancouver. Her adventure will be over, but she

will have written one hundred thousand words.

She read a lot, Moby Dick and Rabbit Run. She studied how novels are constructed. She has

what it takes to pen a novel. She has to stay positive. Her words have to be squeaky clean, no

murder, no deaths. Just rosy rosy happiness. A novel without disaster. Nothing that can be made

10
into a movie. There are strict rules about what she will do and what not. She has to adhere to her

principles, stick to them.

Amsterdam, the city where you write here.

THE HAGUE

A coffee shop is a coffee shop. Even if you do not know anybody in this city. You can still sip in

the corner, watch people, inside here and walking by on the outside on the street. You can feel

lonely or happy that you are left alone. You can take out your pad and scribble notes. She will be

a famous writer. The new Melville. She can be anything she wants to. There are no frontiers in

Walter Mitty-land.

NEW YORK

Fashion week is near. She left Amsterdam, mainly because she was bored. She feels more at

home in this city here. She speaks the language. She has money to burn and it is more fun in this

city. In the end, she will have a novel. Writing in coffee shops in Chelsea. It is better for writers

than anywhere else. Outside. People on Eighth. It is that weird time between day and night.

Closing time is creeping near. She has no plot for her novel but that is fine. It is what it is. Eight

million in this city who want to make it. She is one of them. Or something like that, something of

that kind. Her language is not precise, it never is. It is hit or miss with words.

She could get a haircut. Dye her hair. Put night cream on her wrinkles. All these things are fun.

Ground her. The hygienical routines. Showers, gym. The daily things we do in this city.

11
She is a writer, she must be. She told David Sedaris that she is a writer. If you say it often

enough, you will make it. You will believe it and people will believe it. You do not need a

certificate. You need a publishing contract but that will come eventually. She capitalizes the first

letter of each sentence and ends each and every sentence with a full stop. What more do you

want? Meaning, ah, that will fall into place, like magic.

ICELAND

Reykjavik, kofitar. Words penned in Iceland are more fascinating, exotic, interesting. They

smack of Bjoerk. She likes it here because what is not to like. Here you can write better, your

words will go farther. She will never eke out a plot, she might just as well run with it. The

plotless writer. The one that scoffs at plots. No Romeo, no Juliet. No love stories. Travelling is

where it is at, the different places on this planet. In 2017. You write up words, you type, you

scribble. You document your life.

She writes in Calibri body. 11.

SEATTLE

Back in the US of A. Having a cuppa joe. The aromatic whiff. Outside people in hats on the

street.

HAMBURG

Too much boozing.

PARIS

Everybody speaks French. She does not speak the language. She has 2955 words, she weighs 195

lbs. The numbers do not add up. They are never ever alright.

12
She will have some 3000 words, she needs so many more. Once she is at 100 000, she will wrap

it up and call it a novel. Come hell or high water.

She will be book touring. The publisher will pay for the hotels on the road.

She will eat in different places. All on company expense. One of the big five has to publish this,

gotta. Better.

Paris has been good to writers. Though in a different century, arguably. Maybe Zurich would do

her words better. You know, Dada et. al. Once again, wrong century.

ITZEHOE

The small city. The small place. Rain outside. 3078 words.

CHAPTER 3. THE WORKSHOP

1.

Women sitting around a kitchen table and workshopping their creative writings. Rose in

wineglasses, laughter. It seems very unprofessional, a gossip fest. This is suburbia, definitely.

Long Island, East Bay. Pick any place outside of the city. These are not the texts that will make

it. A futile endeavor. No one will publish this stuff.

Gallia is a writer. But she is somewhere lost on the outskirts of serious writing. It is not even the

grammar or the words she chooses. It is something else that produces the glass ceiling. It is what

art school did to her painting. The process of over thinking. The trivializing of writing. The wine

is good, the writing sucks. She will vacuum the floor after everybody left.

2.

13
Gallia woke up at five and went to the coffee house. The policemen were all sitting in the back of

the store, she counted, there were more women than men. The woman behind the counter lets

Gallia wait, she does not have light brew as of yet, only dark. She actually forgot about Gallia,

she has to be reminded. Finally, it is coffee time, the right kind of brew. Outside of the coffee

house, the city is wakening up. She takes the car to the mall, parks there and takes the train to

downtown, to the gym. She tells herself that this is good for writing a book, the motioning thru

the city. The staring at other peoples faces. She still goes to another coffee place, this one is in

downtown and it is busy. It usually has tons of tourists, it is the United Nations of coffee houses.

Gallia thinks about workshops, writing workshops. They might be better for a writer than the

moving thru the city, there has to be a story arc, so they say. Something with a beginning and an

end, something that makes sense. A narrative, drama, surprise, the like. A novel is not an episode

of THE PRICE IS RIGHT, a novel is different. It is a story that makes sense, that is not all over

the place.

Downtown is accommodating, it always is. You meander thru the streets, with stops in all the

nice hotels en route. Until you finally make it to the gym. Wow, our weight is the same as the

day before, no wait, we lost some 400 grams or so. Four tenths of a pound. Four times 45, 200

grams. The fifth of a kilogram. She is not good with calculating this, but she knows that she

weighs less than the day before. The downward spiral is good weightwise. You want to lose the

extra poundage.

She might write about bookstores, places where the final products are sold. She is fashioning

different characters and different locales. It all is fragmented; the only constant is the writer

herself. The one with the funny name. Gallia? What language could that be? It has an A at the

end, so it might be the name of a woman. A female writer. She ponders, what is the percentage

14
of female writers in the world? The greats are all guys, the lesser ones are gals. Something is

amiss. Do women not have as many stories to tell? Are they too verbose originally and gap so

much that they lose their energy to type it all up?

She has to think about that, research different items. Wikipedia, here we come.

On the telly, it is THE PRICE IS RIGHT. It is nine ten in the morning in late August. She will

have a dentist appointment later in the day here. She is tired already, waking up at five in the

morn does that to yer. You are spent at nine in the ey em.

3.

Maybe, she should start a writing group. She is not that kind of person, not the one, that makes

things happen. She is definitely not an organizer. She knows what she is not, but she is not quite

sure what she actually is. She documents the journey, the literal one. Her trips thru the world.

Her sojourns between writing spurts. Every day, each and every one, there should be some two

thousand words. We can cut out words at a later time. Editing, curating. Making it better.

Polishing.

Writing group and wine. Reading group and wine. Book group and wine. Maybe we should cut

out the booze. Liquoring uo does not make for a coherent story. It is a myth that writers are fnd

of hard liquor. It has to be.

4.

She has 3853 words.

5.

3857.

15
CHAPTER 4. EXERCISE

She goes a lot to the gym. Not so much to use the stationary bike or the weights. It is more a

place where one can weigh oneself. Keep tabs on your weight. There was a time when she would

go down to the gym in downtown, the one next to the nice hotel, the one where everybody looks

like a fashion model. The young gym. She would weigh herself and then come home and write it

down on a letter sized paper. Every day, there was a new letter sized paper. After three months,

she had a heap of 90 pages. She could follow her weightloss. It was quite a production but it

worked. She lost weight.

She has 3990 words. Everything is measured. The words we write, the kilograms we have.

Height weight age. Everything has to counted. What time it is, what date it is. How many more

days on this planet. A preoccupation with numbers. GPA. Money in the bank. How many dollar

signs. Numbers numbers numbers. The temperature of your coffee.

Her writing sucks. An exercise in futility. Stream of conscience is not a good thing.

Her writing has to be streamlined. Orderly writing.

Anyhoo, on the telly, it is this cooking show THE CHEW. It is nice, yup, whatev.

It is later in the day now. The dental appointment is over. One could write about that. But it is

basically irrelevant. On the telly, a sitcom. Laugh tracks. Amy says to Raj something about a

wine tasting on skid row. Penny has a sip of wine. After saying something about a room in a Best

Western and ending up there with a guy named Luther. Now Sheldon and the others in a high

school. Now the girls in the car.

16
She had ice cream from that place near the dentist. And two pieces of cake from the Chinese

bakery. Nothing to do with exercise which is the title of this very chapter. After the dentist you

have to eat. And we are standing at 4212 words here.

Somehow this became autobiographical. Which does not really fly. Gallia is merely the

protagonist of this novel. A woman who writes a book. Seems that is all we need to know here.

Her life overlaps with the life of the author of these words but not really. Updike said that there

are similarities between him and Harry Rabbit Angstrom, but there are definitely differences.

A fictional character is just that, a made-up person that does not exist in reality.

There are courses that teach you how to construct a novel. The premise being that you can teach

that which is highly debatable. Writing is something you learn by doing. Or you do not learn it.

Practice makes perfect. There are no short cuts.

4338 words.

Moby Dick has a lot of chapters. Each has a one-word-title that might or might not correspond to

the text. The titles seem kind of random. Apparently that is ok, it is just a stylistic tool.

4376 words.

A thousand words per chapter. That sounds about ok.

4388 words.

CHAPTER 5. ANOTHER FICTIONAL WORKSHOP

The group and their workshop. Five women, five rising stars. It will not happen, none of them is

that good a wordsmith. There are obvious rivalries. There are subtle ones, hardly noticeable ones.

Everybody tries to outdo the other. They are helping each other up or suppressing the creative

17
spirit. Art is very fickle. There is no right, there is no wrong. Bullshit. There are very obvious

wrongs, very obvious rights.

The wine is good, citrussy. It costs just as much as the other wines, but it is way more aromatic.

The name of it is white wine, not chardonnay, not sauvignon blanc. A punch of white wines. It is

very good.

Wine does not go with workshopping texts. It makes the mind wander, lose focus.

Gallia is too old to make it in the world of words. You have to write when you are young, the

break-out-novel, the debut. Writing when you are old and decrepit, well, good luck with that.

She goes for a walk. Leaves the others to do the workshopping. She is not the hostess, so she can

do that.

The neighborhood is boring. Houses. Tree-lined streets. Culs de sac. John Cheever would love it.

A city is better to a writer. An urban environment. Shops, trains. More to see. Motion, dynamic.

Ever changing sights.

No repetition.

If you do not have a good text to start, not a strong enough one, all the workshopping in the

world cannot salvage the words. You either have it or you dont.

CHAPTER 6. TELEVISION

5:52 PM. A Tuesday in late August. On the telly, the flood in Houston. Hurricane Harvey and

devastation. Nothing good on the news. Like in the Beatles song. If it is happy stuff, it is not

news-worthy. Outside greenery. Sunshine. A nice day. Nice weather. This is not Texas.

18
One can change what is going on on the screen. Something with laugh tracks.

4729 words. This is her fourth day of writing. If she keeps this up, she will be finished come

November.

Painting the image of some woman named Gallia. Age, hair color. Eye color. Weight, height. \

On the telly, Chris Cuomo. CNN. It is a new program, Cuomo Primetime. He is giving Anderson

Cooper 360 a run for its money. The branding of journalists.

She is at the end of her writing. There is no story, no plot. Nothing ventured nothing conquered.

The abyss of wordlessness. Forget story, there is not even something to describe in here in the

room with the telly. A talking head, one like all the others. Sometimes there is a commercial to

liven this up.

It is Don Lemon, David Gergen and another guy. Usually these talk about politics, now they talk

about Hurricane Harvey.

The Gallia woman. What to say on her?

We officially stop this. Gallia writes a book. This is the tentative title. And this is all we have

here. There were other writers too, in the beginning. Other locales. Writing is so weird. An

exercise in futility.

What about the Detlef guy? We should flesh him out. There is something ah so boring about

making up people. Characters in a play. What about reality. Maybe author here is just not cut out

for creating fiction, for spinning a tall yarn. Maybe non-fiction is the way to go.

4965 words. So next to 5000. Twenty times this and we have a book.

19
A story about bistros and cheese. Something French. Romance. Provence. Love. Music. Wine. A

book like a walk thru the mall. Something light. Light fair. Just saying.

Coffee, coffee houses. Stuff that is called espresso.

We are losing it here, that happens when you are willing yourself to be a writer. You cannot will

art, poetry, poesie. It is impossible. You have to be in the mood. Apparently. Nah, what do we

care here, we just yap along. It is getting late and the wordcount stands at 5061. Tomorrow is

another day for writing.

CHAPTER 7. THE WORLD

And what to write about now? Apparently there is a novel named Gallia, and there is a goddess

named Gallia. So, there is a precedence for the name.

The title of the chapter is THE WORLD. Now we somehow have to fix this, there has to be a

correlation between title and contents. Hmm, writing is kind of tough here.

Why would anybody in her right mind choose to write a book? It is boring, it is tedious. It does

not pay the rent. It is a weird hobby, pushing words into some machine.

The Novocain is wearing off. Or whatever the anesthetic was that she got at the dentist.

This is the nicest weather for a kayaking trip. Which is something she would never do.

Wilderness, nah. We prefer the concrete jungle here.

We had seven chapters in nineteen pages. Somehow this sounds so wrong here.

Maybe we should get back to the workshop with wine. It somehow sounds fetching. Or we can

wait for tomorrow morning and watch the people on the bus. Let us call it a day and watch King

of Queens. We could need a laugh here.

20
5273 words.

On the telly, one of these court shows. One can type up stuff while listening in. which might be

detrimental to both writing and listening. Multitasking just means that you are doing several

tasks subpar.

Now an ad for an insurance company, the one that has the statue of liberty on its logo.

It is a dazy dizzy day. There is an air quality warning in place. August thirty. She had her coffee

and now it is all about typing up some two thousand words. That is the plot, the woman who

types. Enough of a plot. A person who writes a book. Why would anybody do that, scribble up

words that document her days. All the minutia. Futile endeavor. 5395 words here.

A writing workshop. She could describe that once more. Socializing while working.

Once more, we are out of words. The women on the telly. There is something to describe.

Greenery outside. The coffee house in the morn. That is about it. There is nothing more to

describe here. How to spin a yarn? Or not spin a yarn.

How will she ever go on a book tour for this? Who will foot the bill for this? How does

publishing even work?

She should do some research. The most fascinating thing she read recently was this dissertation

by a woman in Germany about author photos. The ones that are used on the backs of books.

What they convey or do not. Interesting. Publishing as one big marketing scheme. The marketing

of words. Without visuals. Sans images. A mere author image will do.

She has 5539 words. We need some 1500 words more to finish up the daily allotment.

CHAPTER 8. ITZEHOE

21
The small city outside of Hamburg. She writes in the coffee house on the Bahnhofstrasse,

number 20. It is rainy outside.

It is such a weird place to write a book. Everything is so surreal. Dislocation makes for good

words, for the right kind of words. You are in the wrong place, you write the right kind of words.

Funny, how this works. Well, at least the rain is as rain should be. Water pouring down.

She will order the steak with gravy and mushrooms and potato mush. Peas. She will look out at

the rain. She will eventually take the train back to Hamburg, will stay the night in the hotel on

the Esplanade. She will feel weird and dislocated. The right kind of feel for the fashioning of the

great big novel. There is nothing else to do but write. All your energy goes into the task at hand

here.

Her chaptering is weird. Lots of chapters. Lots and lots of them.

There are ways to do this. Tons of ways. The main problem is that you are kind of competing

with film. Images on a screen. They are more concise than words. Words can be misinterpreted.

Or the reader can visualize stuff in certain ways. Each reader will see it differently.

She does not know much about literary criticism. Literary theory. It does not even matter in the

big picture of things. She just has to write, she is like a bricklayer, the words being the bricks.

One word after the next. Do not look to the right and do not look to the left. Just do your thing.

The steak arrives. The woman smiles. HIER. Bitte, Danke. And the rain is coming down on the

city.

CHAPTER 9. AMSTERDAM ONCE MORE

22
The woman looks out the window. There are bikes, bikes. A parking garage full of bikes. Three

stories.

This is Amsterdam for yer.

She is jet-lagged, the flight outta JFK.

She has a tooth brush but no tooth paste. She will join the Thursday afternoon crowds in the city

until she will come upon a drugstore.

She will stay in this city for three months.

She feels dazed.

Her writing is no good.

She is no writer.

CHAPTER 10. AN AFTERNOON

The telly and Big Bang. Laugh tracks.

Outside, a mulmy day. August 30. She could go out for a walk, to the donut place. Pick up a

Canadian Maple. She could read the rest of Moby Dick. The 500 pages that are left. She is so

into reading these days. There are 13 books, one on the other on the table in the other room. She

has read more. Online. She has gotten rid of books. She put the one on the shelf outside of the

Used Books store in the side street near Union Square.

There are so many books to read. She read Updike and Emma Straub. Upton Sinclair and

Melville. She can read forever. Instead of writing this up. Her stuff will not be published

anyways. It is not good enough. There are better texts, better words.

23
She likes bookstores. Funny retail places that cater to an archaic profession. Why read when you

can see the movie? Writing is dead, reading is dead. Long live books.

Outside, the greenery is becoming pale here.

She has ten chapters in ten pages. Her chapters have to be longer. You cannot have too many

chapters. One hundred chapters in a book, unheard of. Though you can Wikipedia it. Maybe

there is a multi-chapter version of a novel. Too many of em.

On the telly, Sheldon Cooper.

She feels like red wine. They have that in the store on West Boulevard. It is a mere short walk

but the shopkeeper gives her funny looks. If you are female and get wine too often, you fill a

certain stereo type. A woman with money to burn. Burn it on booze. It is not sexy. It is Betty

Ford. It is something you do with a strand of pearls.

She likes to make up stuff on drinking. It is way better than doing the real thing here. Boozing as

a state of mind. Not as a career.

She is not quite sure what she is saying. Her words are always a tad off. Open to interpretation.

She used to write very precise, very accurate. You cannot do that. There has to be some sort of

poetic mystique.

CHAPTER 11. UNTITLED

There is a website for a place in Austin, Texas. A writers retreat. The funniest thing is this

image of a laptop and a glass of wine. White wine. Boozing and writing go hand in hand. Why is

that? Do you have to be inebriated to write. Stock drunk. Is that what you need to make up

stories? Is it a myth fostered by vintners?

24
Tomorrow will be Princess Dianas day of death- twenty days later.

It is on the news.

Back to boozing.

Why not cream puffs with writing? Chocolates? Is it important what we digest while spinning a

yarn?

She has nothing to write about. Boredom is so palpable. 6428 words here.

Reading and writing go hand in hand. Or not.

Aargghh. This is so tough.

The blankest of pages. Everything worth saying has been said before. You cannot stumble upon

anything new. It is the impossible. All stories have been told. Already. This is it.

6475.

She writes a book while the day starts up. There is diligence. There is no plot. A plus, a minus.

Who will win? Will diligence will in the plot?

The day and the starting up. We can describe that in detail. The waking up of the day. The

sunrise on the website of The Independent, a newspaper out of London. The sunrise is in Santa

Monica. Satellites make that possible. You are in different locales at once. What is your reality?

It diffuses somehow. It kind of expands on your wish for places far away. Somebody exploits

your hunger for foreign lands. Pros and cons.

25
In the old times, when people had Olivetti typewriters she would not write books. Now, she does

two per year. She can sit in her in her lil adobe and send book proposals all over the world by a

click.

The day is starting up, still starting up and we work on the book, even before having the

obligatory cuppa joe. Her writ used to be good, but now it sucks. It has lost teeth, tooth, it does

not bite anymore. The cadences are way off. the rhythms here.

CHAPTER 12. WHERE NEW YORK IS HAPPENING

It is the first day of fashion week. Or maybe it is not. She has to go online to figure this out.

Maybe, the whole brouhaha starts after labour day. But apparently not, Milan does not know

labour days. The fashion week extravaganzas start in New York and then they go to London

Paris Milan and various other cities. They are all interconnected. Paying too much for the rags

you put on ur body to look modest that is something that has to be churned artificially by a

global conglomerate. You have to feel bad about your body in order to put stuff on that will

make you better looking to the people around you. The Unabomber does not need YSL, then

again neither does Yves himself. Fashion is a fickle business, a fun business. Gallia does not

know much about fashion and neither does the writer of this text. Fashion is something so

ethereal, nobody knows what is going on. FIT does not know, the Fashion Institute of

Technology or whatever FIT stands for. Fit usually means to be fit, to be able to move ur body

fast and furiously. To be able to do sports. The fat woman next to author on the bus in the morn,

she had sweats and an Adidas bag and sneakers. But most important was the big FIT that was

written on her T-shirt. Nope, it had nothing to do with FIT in nyc on Seventh Av., it was all

about being fit and wearing fitbit, and adhering to a certain level of fitness, whatever that might

be. Is Lance Armstrong fit or is he overworked?

26
Anyhoo, author, is obsessed with a lot of things, with VFS, which is the Vancouver Film School

and was written on the backpack of the youngster on the bus, and of course fashion. Everything

in our world is in acronyms, we meander between different acronyms. She thinks about books, is

reading Moby Dick online, she finished one third already, 200 pages of 600 or so. Books,

fashion, coffee, film. There is so much to see in the morn. She left home at five and is back home

at eight. The back alleys of the coffee shop, the Y, the weight that is ey oh key but that could

easily be some thirty pounds less. Lighterness.

Anyhoo, it is time to follow the fashion week online here.

Yup, Gallia still writes her book and now it will be about New York fashion week here. The stuff

that u can see online.

New York fashion week 2017 will begin on September seven, so apparently a week from now.

Bummer. But u can still explore the site. And feel, pretend that u r part of the action. Gallia can

write a book about this. Author here can write a book about that. Gallia and the author are the

same person or not. There are tons of books where the protagonist and the writer fight with each

other. The old story of Pygmalion. I created you, you have to do what I tell you to do. And then

there is a mutiny.

Audrey Hepburn reacting to Rex Harrison.

But that is a subplot.

Let us focus on fashion, mainly because everybody likes that. Everybody has to wear something

and thus make a statement one way or the other here. Authors statement is I dont care a damn,

I am a person of the mind. Well, good luck with that, if u can pull it off. Lets face it, a writer

has to have a different gender if she wants to be published, you cannot be a girl and write. Boys

27
can write whatever they feel like, the girls are usually typecast in their choice of subject matter.

Grub street is very fickle about whom they will admit. And now there are even the big five,

down from the big six. You can selfpublish but that will not garner u a Pulitzer. It is the

equivalent of houses that are sold by owner. They never make a dent in the economy, they are

somewhere on the fringes. If you want to get somewhere in publishing, you have to find your

Maxwell Perkins here.

CHAPTER 13. FASHION WEEK ONCE MORE

So appparently one writes the acronym for by the way in caps. BTW and not btw. Gallia slash

author here has to find the exact space where she used the expression btw and change it into

BTW. This is how writing goes, it is all about punctuation and grammar. Though after reading

some 15 or so books in the last two months, she noticed that nobody is a stickler for correct

English. It seems that grammar and punctuation are secondary to style and meaning. Editors do

not seem to care, neither do publishers. Lots of times it is not quite clear what is said and it

seems that nobody cares. Journalists are much more accurate in their wordings, Huffington Post ,

and the like. The New Yorker. There is even a style book for the New Yorker. And for the

Times. New York and otherwise.

So, basically, it is all about doing the writing and then somehow clamuster it all together.

Klamuester. It is a German slangy word apparently and anybody can decipher its meaning from

the context. That is how reading Moby Dick goes, we can just figure out what is meant. The flow

of the sentence tells you what Melville was talking about. Each word is but one element of a text.

28
 Author here went on the website for nyc fashion week, looked at the movies on vimeo.

Was fun, it was all spring fashion or maybe even older. One could make out that the venues were

somewhere near the meatpacking.

Author here is hungry, she had a tea in the nice place on Forty-first. She bought a book that is

slightly racist. They all are. They always are something of the -ist category.

You have to look at who publishes what, and then you know why certain books are published

and others are not. There always is a reason. If Portnoys Complaint finds a publisher at a certain

time in US herstory, there is a reason, obviously.

Even Roth himself objected to an interviewer that there is no reason to read hime passages from

said book. I am distinguished writer of eighty years, like in 80 years old, why do you drudge

back the past. It is ancient history.

Author here has some 7000 or 8000 words already of her book, it is now something between,

diary and reality. Diary and documentary. Gallia is a fictional person, the funny thing is that

somebody told her that he knew a person named Gallia, the sister of so-and-so. She had a son my

age he said. A tad older. What ever happened to them?

Seems, the narrative comes out of the woodworks. Once you give a name to a protagonist, the

story acquires a life of its own. Once she named a protagonist ROGER and read the story to a

lady from Scarborough, Ontario. After two pages of reading in relative stupor, which is what

people do when they want to read their bullshit to total strangers, the lady from Scarborough,

Ontario remembered one thing: the protagonist was called ROGER. Author was even asked

about why ROGER did this or that, so somehow, the Roger person was fleshed out and acquired

a life of his own. Even though there was a clear factual mistake, no 23-year-old would be called

29
Roger, at least not a Caucasian person. Maybe, if he was Asian. British Rogers are the age of

Roger Moore, he lived at a time when people named their offspring Roger. Usually the name

gives away nationality, age, the like. She knows a guy who has a certain German name and one

can easily deduce that he must be Austrian. If you know the culture, you can deduce a lot of

things. Just as you can look at the image of street fashion and notice that it is somewhere near the

highline and you just know that if you have walked the streets of New York in that particular

neighbourhood.

There is of course a flipside to this, if you write fictional stuff, you have to make sure that youve

got your facts right. This is why John Updike or Scott Fitzgerald make up cities that are kind of

reminiscent of other cities but are nonetheless fictional.

It is all about pampering your back. She ponders, she has the idiom wrong, got your back, is

what one would say, but nobody says I pampered ur back.

Writing is tough, but we have some 8000 words already and that should do for today.

She walks a lot these days, she went to the green bakery and got some awful and overpriced

baked good that she had to throw away. They were out of ice cream. Their ice cream is divine,

the camping bar was everything but. Well, if you like marshmallow then you would like it, it is

some play on smores.

Author bought this book that is basically junk. She read the amazon dot com reviews and the best

reviews are usually the ones that give one star. You will then know what is wrong with the book.

Actually, some talking head on the telly said the same, I always read the one star reviews, then I

know the negative sides of a product. Buyer beware.

CHAPTER 14. ANOTHER STORY STILL

30
8262, suddenly a story crystallizes. Something about a writer who writes a novel. And the

problems that one encounters when writing fiction. A woman said on Instagram that there is not

any difference between fiction and nonfiction. So true. She is actually a published author and she

did a reading at this store in SoHo.

And that is what it is all about, doing readings. Author here has done readings, some seven years

ago, from her first book, that, lets face it, is still her masterpiece. No book after that came even

close. It was a travelogue and nothing can go wrong with a travelogue. You just move around on

this planet and describe places and people. What can go wrong? Nothing, nada, zilch.

The editor at MIT rejected it, well, maybe mainly because her stuff was not nonfiction enough

for the Massachusetts Institute of Science and technology. Sometimes university presses do

fiction, but that is the exception not the rule. Harvard did it, but only once. And somehow the

writer was a scientist too, a geneticist or something, the boss of a lab in Paris. Yup, that will fly.

Publishing is so weird and curious.

There is no way around it, it is what it is.

CHAPTER 15. IT IS WHAT IT IS

8476.

Writing about Queequeg. Starbuck. Ishmael. Ahab.

She is inside and reads. This will take a while. Reminds her of Thor Heyerdahls Kon Tiki.

Ulysses, War and Peace, Chapter Two. She can read forever and not even make a dent in the list

of books she has not read. An avid reader we aint here. Given that the majority of persons that

roam this planet read even less, it does not make a difference one way or another.

31
But she soldiers on and reads. Online, in book form. Audio. Audio is always fun, it is a lullabye,

you fall asleep and wake up when the murder is solved.

She prefers to read about the people who write. Listen to their talks.

On the telly, 2 Broke Girls. Outside, the sun. she in here cooped up with Melville. There are

better lives. Drama, adventure. She has too many chapters. A chapter bonanza. A new way of

doing things. One that will not fly. The way that books are written. Traditional ways,

experimental ways. After a while the new way of doing things becomes the old way of doing

things. If you wait long enough here.

She had a coffee in the morn. It is September One. The woman behind the counter was new.

There are always different ones.

The coffee place is the constant in her life. Maybe she will get out there again, a latte, whip. She

should describe a woman named Gallia, but shed rather write about her own life. The

adventures of author are outdoing the protagonist. The person behind the camera is more

important than the subject. Something like that something of that kind. On the telly, roaring

laugh tracks here.

8788.

CHAPTER 16. WHAT TO WRITE HERE?

Sixteen chapters in 8788 words.

Maybe chicklit is where its at. Women writing about other women. Gossip girl. Make-up,

fashion.

Gallia thinks about it. Well, it is more like pondering. Writers always ponder.

32
Gallia is tired and hot. It is seven minutes after three on a Saturday. On the Saturday before

Labor Day. There is something called 3-day novel writing contest. She does not know if it is

taking place right now. 50 000 words in three days, Saturday, Sunday, Monday. She could do

this, her novel stands at 8881. She has a head start. Or she can produce still some 50 000 words

till midnite of Monday. There are bookstores where people sit in storefronts and write. Writing

as performance art.

That is how it is that is how it is here.

CHAPTER 17. 1881

I am reading the classics these days. Why, you ask. Because I have extra time. The question is

what exactly are the classics? Maybe it are merely all the books in my bookshelf that I bought

and never read. I paid money and I do not want it to be in vain. I finally want to get my money

worth. It is the day before Labor Day and the sun is shining brightly here in this city.

CHAPTER 18. WELL

Well, she did not write for quite some days. Her back hurts. She is basically house-bound.

Hoping that this will get better. And it is, though in so very small increments here. She now can

sit in a chair, which is a big improvement. It is now 17 days, sorry, 72 hours since she slid and

fell. That happens when the floor is wet. You slide, you fall. You are that knocked up that you

forego the emergency room. Who wants to wait for ten hours in the night before Labor Day until

you are x-rayed and CT-scanned and then sent home. You just have to wait this out. And it

definitely heals up very, very slowly. She finished Moby Dick, tough and is now half way

through the novel about, well, rich people. This is what you do, when you basically are out of

33
commission. She watches Two and a Half Men. When u r sick, u watch what is on the telly, and

u read. And write some here.

Now it is so much later in the day. Ten twenty-seven, next to midnite. On the telly, John le Carre.

A writer who made it. On the sofa, the book about rich people. All the books that are published,

all the writers who are published. A woman talking about hurricane Irma. A middle of the road

weather bunny. Gallia writes a book Gallia writes a book. She has so near to ten thousand

already already here.

CHAPTER 19. HERE

She is watching the livestream from the fashionweek in another window, all those people who

are talking and waiting for this Noor by Noor performance to begin which is live streamed

around the world. People in a dark room with red goodie bags and a red and white shiny

program. A woman in a hat and gloggbly earrings interviewed. The excitement of what is New

York fashion week. The hustle the bustle just right here in her own living rom, it is as if she is

there, on the other side of the continent, it is twelve twelve here, it is twelve after three over

there. Everybody is talking at once. Her leg still hurts when she moves it, she has to rest, but it

feels as if she is somewhere in SoHo, on the westside and being part of this big crowd that awaits

the show that is on right now. Desigual was amazing. So many different images, quite a

performance and after that, it was is very feminine show, Bolt, Bond, something like that. And

they say there is nothing to see, you can go to all the sites, Milan, London, etc, you feel as if you

are in there, even though it is all on a crumby little screen. The voices sound very Italian here.

Let us watch. Let the show begin here. She is more than halfway thru the book about rich people,

it lies on the green sofa. On the telly, an ad for a double-decker Big Mac here.

34
CHAPTER 20. NYC FASHION- SHOWS SHOWZ

Now there is space on the runway, it shimmers it awaits the models to walk over it. Still

everybody talking loudly. People have to chat, everybody has something to say. The communal

voices, the storm before the storm.

9563 words.

CHAPER 21. AFTERNOON

Sitting around, contemplating. Next to ten thousand, sitting here n thousands of words. Looking

at snippets from Desigual. The seven second movie. Short, short snips. A woman on the steets in

SoHo. In full regalia, halloweenish. Halloween in the middle of the day here.

This is what is happening, a big brouhaha. On the telly, champagne salesmen talking.

Everything changes constantly, the scenes on the telly, the screen where fastpacedness is

happening. So many many images, on the laptop on the telly. And the words that shlapper onto

the computer here. So near to ten thousand so near to ten thousand here.

CHAPTER 22. ANOTHER CHAPTER AGAIN

So this is what we well do on this dreary morn on a Friday in early September. Watching the

fashion shows in New York City, pretending to be part of all of the action here. It is happening

so many miles away, so this is definitely armchair tourism. Mainly because of her broken

collarbone or whichever bone it is. Pelvis bone maybe. She still cannot sit normally, she still is

housebound here. And refuses to get an x-ray.

Anyhoo, fashion fashion. On the other side of the world. One can open several windows and

look at the show, watch the action while typing. The same as if you are sitting front row, front

35
and center and typing up what you see, instagramming, blogging. Taking pics. Even the people

with those monumental cameras cannot do what those people in regular garb and little screen in

their hands can do. Sometimes less is more, let me restate that, less is always more. Well,

sometimes less is less, sometimes, more is more, oh, the h. with it, just go online and watch the

happenings. The ones that lots of people disapprove of, ah, it is only fashion. Another person was

of the opinion that fashion shows are a joke. It is not the field, it is that part of fashion that

manifests itself in shows. The commercialism or whatever. Being jaded versus being all gung-ho.

Well, we will chose being gung-ho here. Fashion fashion fashion here.

CHAPTER 23. FASHIONE

Day two. 8:25 here, 11:25 over there. Gallia writes a book. Well, good luck with that here. The

notes on the monitor of the laptop of the writer. Vancouver has rain, it is starting to drop and

drizzle.

While the rain is coming down, we can follow all this on the telly, no, wait, the screen of the

laptop. The women who say as answer to the question: What are you wearing?, Desigual

Couture, Darling, in the seven-second little scenes, the short short films. Everything is like that,

small, shortish scenes. Yup, that is what Gallia here writes about. Though technically Gallia is

the protagonist and not the author herself. Where does Gallia end and where does she start? Does

everything merge together here? Is this how writing happens these days here? Author is still

reading her book about the rich and it is such a weird book. She watched the show in nyc that

was in a park or something, the Tony Burche show or Tory Burche. Very nice, very impressive.

Rain is coming down on this city while the weather was very nice in New York City at the Open-

Door-Show. What would they have done if it was rainy? Indoors versus outdoors. Author

36
misused the word open door, but she is of the opinion that she has to lax down her ways of using

the language. No more precise language, make it more flowing.

It is nine oh seven and it is rainy and lonely here. Lowly. The solitude of the writers studio.

Where it is just you, yourself and the computer here. And the rain the rain the rain and the rain.

The workshop, the studio. Where books are written, perceived, fashioned. Good ones and bad

ones here. She has some ten thousand words and there will be some ninety thousand more and

then we can call it a day. Today it is fashion week day number two, next Wednesday the one in

New York will be over and then the one in London will start up. Paris and Milan. It is basically a

month of fashion weeks and they are all for the spring and summer of 2018. The one by Tory

Burch had the models log around a lot of stuff, yoga mats, big bags, stuff for the beach maybe.

Luggage as accessories, something like that. And then there was this other show, but it was

indoors, which was a big but after the beauty of the outdoor show.

Looking at pics from the fashion shows. There are so many venues. So much info. Apparently,

the shows will move from the Clarkson Skylight venues to other places in 2018. Very important.

It is kind of weird to follow all of this from a small room. This is how journalism feels

apparently. In the trenches. But you do not see real life, you see stuff on a screen. You can figure

out that this woman says Desigual Dahling while on Mercer Street but you cannot figure out the

side street. You have to look it up on google maps. It is very weird to watch stuff like this. We

are used to reality or maybe we are not. On the telly, it is Two and a Half Men here.

Writing ah writing. The rain has stopped but the city is ah so wet.

CHAPTER 24. MILAN

37
Maybe there is something to be said about a neighbourhood book shop. The last sentence was

part of her notes that she typed up and put in a file on her desktop. They were nice sentences,

poetic ones. But they were kind of alone-standing sentences. It works for images but not so much

for sentences. Sentences, they come in groups.

Though snapshots work, why should snap sentences not work. Insightful ones. They are all parts

of a continuum.

It is later in the afternoon, actually quite late, thirteen minutes after six. She still does not know

what to do with her leg. Go to get an X-ray? Or just wait it out.

CHAPTER 25. LET US SEE.

Well, Writing comes easy to me and that might be a liability. In her mind, she gives interviews

or at the very least talks with people that she hasnt seen in seven years about what she does

these days. I read, I write. That is it, it is an uphill struggle. Not the writing, but the getting

published. There will be no publishing. This will always be a hobby. Something yer doing for

fun. Like travel, like going to the mall. Window-shopping, listening to music. It is something

extra you do.

Hers are no intriguing complex stories that nobody understands. She writes how she talks. Tries

to stay away from convoluted ideas. Write in simple words. On the telly, the woman from

Canada pouring beer into a mug. Before, it was the end of Seinfeld, the song by this band. Green

Day, maybe. Something unpredictable but in the end. I had the time of my life.

This is why we write here, to have the time of our life.

CHAPTER 26. SO MANY WORDS

38
So, the second day of the fashion week is over. Tomorrow, the third day. Keep us posted.

Today, the third day. Nothing special. The weather here in this city is ah so chill. On the telly, a

woman talking about cooking. Author here irons out the glitches in her writings.

This is what you do, as a writer. Life is very work-a-day. No glamour whatsoever.

She could dress up and go out. Have a coffee, a glass owine. She could read her new book,

something about a woman coming to Amsterdam. From a small village. Country mouse, city

mouse. That kind of thing. The excitement of the big city. With clogs. In 17-century-Holland. So

she has read 16 books already this year, she is now at book seventeen. Writing is more fun here.

This is book 2 this year. The woman talks about cooking still.

CHAPTER 27. WRITING A BOOK

So she read 17 books this summer. She now should be able to write a book.

She has moved to Santa Monica. Hangs out at the pier. Well, that is not really true, she prefers

the coffee houses, the ones that are farther away from the pier. She likes to go for walks. There

are the happily drunk persons that Sheryl Crow sang abut. She looked it up. Santa Monica is by

far the drunkest city in California. And it shows.

Walking across the street, the name of which she does not know. It is a Monday, her friends have

left. She will be here one more day. It is fodder for her writing. She likes her room in Del Mar

Vista or whatever the name of the hotel is. They have rubber duckies in the bathroom.

A big tv.

They have people who watch the Academy Awards.

She feels very posh in this hotel.

39
The street is different, reality. You know that it is the place of broken dreams

She will write about that.

She does not know where reality ends and where reality starts. It is this preoccupation with

writing a book. About a woman named Gallia.

Writing has to be straightforward. Like a manual for a toaster. There cannot be s(h)immery

places of unreality.

When she says SHE, it is never clear if she means the protagonist or the writer. If she talks about

the fictional character or the very real person who sits at the kitchen table and types up a text. If

this was a dissertation, it would be easier. But it is not. The dissertation of a woman who read 17

books, since June. 5 are nonfiction.

Every morning, she watches the New York Fashion Show online thingie. Music, women walking

with pissed faces. It is day five and the livestream is breaking up.

In the other room it is 2 and a Half Men. No, 2 Broke Girls. Outside, the sun is shining. She

wished she was somewhere else. She wished she was boozing. Life is disorderly, the words will

order it somehow.

She has 39 pages. Which is good. At least this is going forward here. She started a new book

about people named Red and Abbie and Denny. It is written well. Good writing is good. She

herself sucks these days at writing. She read too much bad stuff. Bad writing is contagious, just

as good writing is here. Simple words or elaborate words, that is the question. It is ten nineteen,

10:19.

She has 11 390 words here.

40
CHAPTER 28. LATER

So, I wanted to write about how it feels to write a book. She hears herself talking while she looks

at the people in the audience. There are lots of people listening, thirty or so. That is a big crowd

for this small place. They are sitting crowded. This is in the bookstore on Mott, on the lower

floor. She is good at talking about the book. People listen. They try to decipher what she is

talking about. It seems pretty straight forward. A description of what you are doing. That makes

sense. Im doing something and I am documenting it. I am explaining what I do, why I am doing

it. More the what than the why.

People are all ages but mainly young. A young crowd because SoHo is a young place. Hip.

She could give the same talk to a different crowd, in between she reads from the book. Her book.

It is book number 20 but nobody needs to know, as far as these people are concerned this is her

debut novel. The accumulation of her literary work. Or the start here. There was a short article in

the Times. Three lines, which is more than enough. They spelled her last name wrong. That is

fine. Any publicity is good publicity.

She will sign her books and talk to the readers. The potential readers. Maybe they are more like

her, they just gather books and let them collect dust. Hoarders.

CHAPTER 29. STILL LATER

She has to explain why there are so many chapters. Well, mainly because I do not know how to

do this. That is why there is an overabundance of chapters. We are just learning here. She feels

like peppermintschnapps. Or sangria in red. In Santa Monica, in the beautiful hotel that you do

not want to leave. Ever.

41
CHAPTER 30. STILL STILL LATER

11705. One one seven oh five. Now it is Mike and Molly. She writes and describes what is on

TV. A new genre. The telly dictates its stories to a shut-in. Akhh, there is nothing more boring

than being a writer. How did she ever end up to do this?

CHAPTER 31. STORYBOARD

A storyboard is the equivalent of a blueprint. A storyboard is for time-based media, a blueprint is

for three-dimensional media, that is how it is that is how it is here.

CAPTER 32. DAY SIX

Day six of the fashionweek. And nine days since her fall. The increments of our time on this

planet here.

CHAPTER 33. DAY SEVEN

Writing on a day like this. A day grey, where even the green of the trees bows down to grey.

Seven and twenty-six on a Monday, the coffee house has new faces in baristadom. She will go

back and do her writings, the ones she did do merely sporadically what with all her readings,

Norman Mailer, Young Jane Young, the Dutch book about Delft and its porcelain. Midnight

Blue or something. She sat next to two Dutch women in the tea place down in Yaletown, talked

about Amsterdam and was not able to tell them about the book she just finished. It somehow was

too complicated here. The fashion weeks now meandered from New York City to London, they

will go on to Milan and Paris. Her writing here and her writing here. A book is made up figures

slapped between two pieces of cardboard, so the words by Mailer somewhere in his book. She

now has finished some twenty books over the summer, two of them online. Six of them non-

42
fiction. She categorizes the twenty books any way she wants here, she is her own librarian. She

could give the books away or hold onto them. What to do with books once you are done? The

fetishisms of books, with books.

The coffee house was bleak, bleak in a happy way, bleak in a Monday morningish way. People

going to work, the woman with too much fat around her waist. There is so much to see, so much

to describe. Or not so much. Maybe the emptiness of the place is what makes you write. Makes

you figure out stuff, makes you invent figures that do not exist in reality. Women, men. On the

other side, the greek religious place, on the other side of the not yet busy street.

She could go down to the city, take the bus, look at people, the rush hour crowd. The persons

that have to be somewhere, predetermined. The ones that get paid. The ones that are not laid off.

the ones who will not go home to their desks and type up words that have to be peddled later and

might not find takers. The highest bidder, but there are no bidders for convoluted stories that go

off into different directions at once. Where protagonist and maker collide. Where does the writer

begin and where does the story end?

There are workshops and they all suck. They are in places far away from here. Somewhere on

23rd street, somewhere on a fifth floor. There are small rooms where disastrous teachers look at

yer and try to assess you and usually do not decipher at once, that you are a genius, the only

genius that is there in these times, the one that is chosen to write the right words. Man of letters,

woman of letters.

The day before, just before Columbo, there was the Emmys thingie and Margaret Atwood and

The Handmaidens Tale or whatever the title is. If you write, there should be films about the

persons that do not exist and are only alive on the pages of a book.

43
Gallia who writes a book, who cares about that fictional writer here, is it not better to write about

the real writer of these lines? Woman of letters, man of letters. What do they mean by letters,

letters as parts of words or letters that people write to each other?

Who knows, who knows here.

She has 12357 words, we need some more here and some more here. The chaptering is off, but

who cares who cares, it is art, there are no rules, there should be no rules here.

She is finishing up her pretty fat book by Mailer, it is weird, mainly because it has all these

essays from times gone by. It is as if one relives history, herstory here.

Gallia write a book, Gallia writes a book. It does not make sense, it is not getting better if you

repeat the title. We still have no woman named Gallia, we still do not know how tall she is and

what the color of her hair is. She still is way to fictional, she is not fleshed out, she is merely a

number, a stand-in for all the writers on this planet. A female writer, one that gets outdone by the

boys. Men writers have gravitas, women writers are lesser ones. It will change, silently,

gradually. Maybe it has changed already without you knowing. There are laptops for everyone.

The great equalizers.

The wordcount number on the interface and who exactly still uses a word like INTERFACE?

There are dated words that show your age.

Let us stop this, for moments for moments here.

CHAPTER 34. LATER IN THE DAY HERE

Out and about once more. Mall, gym. People walking to the community college. Different faces.

The drive home. Gallia is many persons. Many personas. She puts on personas like others put on

44
dresses. She imagines and reimagines persons. She is a writer and then she is a fashion model.

An entrepreneur. A woman who starts a fashion line that she shows in Milan. There are so many

choices.

Writing a book is dull, you just sit and type. It is way too sedentary a job. You are to move

around. Move around on the globe. The world is your oyster. That kind of thing. You have to tell

stories or non-stories. Fiction or nonfiction. Though lots of people prescribe to the notion that

there is no dif tween fiction and nonfiction. It is all one big mush.

She took the train too, so many people together in one big metal container. Sardines. She did not

go downtown, just from Oakridge to Langara and from Langara to Oakridge. That is enough.

There is a book that has to be typed up. A story, the nonstory. She has to read the end of the

Norman Mailer book, she is now at the Clinton administration election. It is so weird to read

those articles, which now describe what is ancient history. You know the outcome here. He is a

good writer, they all are. All those persons who get published.

Gallia, the protagonist of this book.

Still waiting to be fleshed out.

Gallia, her alter ego. Gallia the alter ego of the author here. All protagonists are, all antagonists

are. The fine line between fiction and nonfiction. She feels like a pudding cup here.

CHAPTER 35. AND WHAT IS NEXT?

So, what do you do all day? I write. Sometimes I read. What? Everything. Novels, grocery lists.

Well, I write grocery lists, too.

45
One day I will be interviewed. By people who write for magazines about books. Something like

that.

I will forge my way into litland. Anybody can do that. If you have something to say and if you

have nothing to say. A show about nothing, a book about nothing here. Describing what is on the

aisles in the market. Referring to a supermarket as market.

Describing the train and the bus. Different buses. The mall. The city and the sub cities on this

planet of ours. It is September. A cold chilly September day that slightly warmed up. The sun so

reluctantly.

13005.

The bookstore, the library of the college, the library in the basement of the Center. Places full of

books. Computers did not kill the books, they have nine lives. Literature has nine lives. Whatev,

ah, whatev. Here.

CHAPTER 36. DAY ONE

There are too many chapters here. There are traditions of writing and if you disobey them, youd

better have a damn good reason for that. The subversion of literary conventions, a play on what

is normal. Conventions change over the years. They are different in different languages. In

different times. In different fields. They are arbitrary.

50 pages and 40 chapters. One chapter for each new scene. It is confusing. Creative writing, it

changes over the years. You can make up new ways of doing things. If you can get away with it.

If it looks nice on paper. On the monitor.

46
Gallia, the woman who writes a book. According to the title. She still is just a figure on paper.

No real person as of yet. A figment of authors imagination, but not a believable one. One that

changes colors too often. There has to be consistency when fleshing out a character. One day,

she (author here) will take a class that teaches her how to do this. A workshop. A creative writing

workshop. But not now. At this time, she will just try to wing it. She read some twenty books in

summer. All through summer. June July August September. 20 books of all kinds. Some were

good some not so much. But they all were digestible.

They were novels and others were not.

Not everything can be called a novel.

Rabbit Run, well, that was a novel. The story of Rabbit Angstrom. Harry Angstrom. But it is

irrelevant what the stories were that author here read over the summer.

Gallia still is busy with the writing of her book here. Author finished the bulk of the Mailer book.

On the telly, this show with the three judges.

Author here still has to say something about the partitioning of the text. The form. The 40 or so

lil chapters. She got that from Moby Dick. 100 chapters on 600 pages. If that could fly in 1856,

why not in 2017?

Lots of chapters.

It is more about how to print that. More chapters means more paper.

Because there is half a page without text. Except if you do not print it like that. If you just go on

with the text on the same page.

47
You can make up the rules while you go. If you make up a name like Gallia while there is no real

person named Gallia, you might as well make up ways of how to chapterize a text. Make it up

while you go. And now it is time for watching a Friends rerun, later on. we will continue here

with this amazing novel here. It is after all the time of Trump, grandiosity will bring you

somewhere. The best novel, the best, forget the rest.

13571 words here.

Gallia is a woman who wants to move to Holland in order to get her masters. Grad studies in

Utrecht. At the art school over there. It will take two years and it will cost quite a lot. Not

tuitionwise, but living over there is expensive.

So now we know more about this Gallia person. She has short hair and is 57 years old. Or maybe

64. Maybe that is better, she is a retired teacher. Secretary? A retired soccer mom? Homemakers

do not retire. Have you ever heard of a retired housewife? Only wage earners are retired.

So, there has to be more fleshing out to be done.

She speaks Finnish. Or Dutch. She lives in the Midwest. She lives in Austin.

She has to lose 30 lbs.

Her voice is nasal.

Gallia, huh.

Maybe Gallia should be Italian. Look like one of Joeys sisters in Friends. Have a strong New

York accent. New Jersey?

There are different ways that this can go.

48
She just had a donut, Canadian Maple. No, wait, that was author here. The woman who is in

search of a plot for this her novel here. A walk to Kerrisdale, a foray into the lil bookstore. The

purchase of this yellow book. Zadie Smith. Not White Fang or Minute Man. Swing time. The

new one. Author here has to know what all the hype is about. There is a pic of the author. She

looks like Erica Badu.

Should authors be good looking or butt ugly? What is better for the career of a writer? Most

famous writers start out young. The debut novel at age 23. With a picture and everybody looks

good at 23.

CHAPTER 37. Gallia, ah gallia

She likes the foam on her latte. Pumpkin Spice because it is that time of the year. Everything

about Gallia we learn now. Her nose. Not a very straight one, not a crooked one either. A good

enough nose. Her looks are basically above average. Too many wrinkles though. I am looking

for someone with lines in her face. If you are afraid of Botox injections then you listen to

Leonard Cohen. Hey, Marianne.

Today Trump spoke in the UN. Facebook told author that.

39454.

Sorry, 13946 words here. We still need so much more. For this book. There has to be a story.

The galliawoman who writes a book. After a while it does not really matter what kind of person

this gallia woman is. She writes and she reads. Norman Mailer was not very sympathetic to the

female voice in letters. Though, technically, he did not dismiss it at all. He just stated that he

does not know many female writers. And neither do I. There are female writers, tons of them, but

it seems that publishers are very choosy whose female voice they will publish. The gatekeepers

49
make sure that they keep out voices based on gender. Girls should write cookbooks. Or stuff

about love. Family. Emotions. Not about space travel.

The more things change, the more they stay the same. Nothing ever changes.

48087 words here. Sorry, 14091. The word-icon is way too small. Freudian slips. Wishful

thinking. She so wishes that she has finished this novel. And to think that she does not even have

the protagonist pat down. Her physical attributes, her age, her nationality. She is an anygallia. A

generic Gallia. A generic writer. We do not even know her last name here. She likes the foam of

her latte. But then again, show me anybody who does not like the foam on latte. A so very

predictable, generic woman named Gallia.

She will still write more chapters here. Or she could go the other way, 30 chapters in the first 50

pages and then one long chapter that is chapter number 31 and is 250 pages long. A very

asymmetrical book. In theater, there are usually 3 acts. They are all equal in length. If you do it

differently you create asymmetry. It might have slight shock value but not enough to make the

papers. In the old times, novels became famous because there were trials. Decency trials. Three

was censorship, there were book burnings. Nowadays you just will not get picked up by a

publisher. The big 5 can make or break yer. There is self-publishing but that will never ever

work.

How many houses are really sold by owner.

Distribution. Marketing, storage, those are totally different animals from writing here.

Anybody can type. She feels like getting drunk drunk drunk drunk here. There is a reason why

writers are boozehounds. Even if they arent, they still have that kind of mentality. You have to

drown your demons somehow. With some kind of binging. Some kind of excess here.

50
50 pages. She typed up 50 pages since Labor Day. It is September 19. One month, give or take

some, for a third of a book. She could write feverishly and finish this, she is no Jack, believe me.

Jack Kerouac that is here.

CHAPTER 38. THE END OF THE BOOK HERE

Gallia was a dancer. She moved from New York City to Berlin. She had a gig at the Komische

Oper. She did not speak German. She just made friends with expats. The different diasporas. She

was part of the international diaspora. The well-heeled diaspora. The trust fund babies. The

academics. People that do not speak German because everybody speaks English here anyways.

You can get by for ages without learning more than ten German words. Gallia is pretty and

young and athletic. She reads books, she writes books. She tries her hand at poems because

writing a poem is easier, faster. You just have to wear white and sit on the second or third floor

in a house in Amherst in Massachusetts. And then you have to die. Artists, their best career move

is death. Well, ujntil the she has to do the second best, work on her athleticism. Eat sensibly and

ruin her feet. Modern dance is better than ballet. You need those tippytoesies.

So, this is one kind of Gallia. Still another Gallia would be a male Gallia. Gallia as a male name.

he is from Greenland and lives now in Brooklyn. He works at traders joe. And at night he

writes. He holds an mfa in creative writing from the university of Chicago. Or Columbia.

There are so many potential gallias here. Choices, ah, choices. Author here has to google if the

university of Chicago even offers masters in creative writing.

Every morn she sits at the computer and writes a tad. It will be a masterpiece in the end because

that is how it should be. Each and every one of us has a master piece in himeinm. Lots of

masterpieces. The more we write the more masterpieces we tend to produce. It just comes with

51
the territory. All seven billion who are roaming this planet. They are all good, they are all

amazing. They know how to use the language, how to manipulate the words. How to use

sentences that will make it. There are no differences in style, no differences in ability. Once you

are alive you are an amazing user of words. Given, well, that there are better times and worse

times. Nobody can always hit the mark or always miss the mark. But if yer writing enough, if

you produce the right amount of words per day, say, two thousand, then, chances are, you too

will be worth a Nobel prize of literature, you t should be booking a flight to Norway or spain,

well, more Stockholm, that seems to be the place where the Nobel prize podium is standing and

awaiting you in silence. In the old times, there was no Alfred Nobel, nobody gave out prizes 4

writing. Then how did they garner fame or where they even famous in their life time or did they

die of hunger, all those breadless poets in attics, at times when the median age of the world

population was thirty versus the seventy that rules the world nowadays?

Outside, there is something rainlike, the young barista said hi to her, they know you there, they

know you there. He is the Gunther of this place down on Arbutus, if you watch as much what is

on the telly, you too know who Gunther is, he is the person in Central Perk, the one who is the

boss of Rachel and who is madly in love with her.

Author here ponders, if the readers of her own amazing book are the same people who watch

Friends and Seinfeld, incessantly, the right people, the right target audience. The ones who quote

Mike and Molly or Deak in King of Queens. The ones who watch CNN and have seen him twice

in person on the streets of nyc, once in this fitness center on seventh when this woman from new

jersey was talking to him, all enthusiastic, while cameras were rolling and the crew was watching

in silence and trying to somehow shus,h author here, not with words but more with silent

gestures here. Later on one could see that interview on you tube here. Author made sure not to be

52
part of the people who are filmed. We want anonymity here, which kind of works against fame

and fortune. Contrary to what it seems like, the majority of the inhabitants of this rolling planet

of ours, do make sure to avoid the spectacular fifteen minutes of fame. Sorry, late Andy, but you

might have been wrong here, even though you did all those Siebdrucks of Campbell Soup, even

though and even though here.

But writing is fun in itself, the ability to type up sentences, the journey of creation in itself, yup,

that one and that one here. Later, at a time so much later, author here will go in and edit this, take

out words, add words, but there is something to be said for a first draft here. A first draft here.

There is something to be said for first writing and by the same token for first reading. She will

read that yellow book on the table, the one that cost twenty-three Canadian and that the woman

wanted to pack up but author here did not need to pack up. The one by the woman who is that

good-looking that she is on the cove r, her pic, which does not happen that often, that often here.

Only her and that guy who said something about how women are taking over the world and he

does not like it because they are taking over and dethroning men to put themselves on the

pedestal instead. Norman something, Mailer something here.

Author here, she has more than 15000, 15000 new words in all of September. Ashe will move to

nyc and have wine on fourteenth street, in this little place near the meatpacking and in this other

place that has a statue of a parrot, somewhere on ninth, tipsy something. Tipsy parson or parsons,

their wine was divine. Author ponders if it is spelled wine or vine, we talk about vineries,

vintners. Wineing swhining,

We are losing it now, time to end this, wrap it up, eh, wrap it up here. Should we write ah or eh,

eh is way too Canadian here, way to stereotypical, if you make your home in vancitay here. And

stop and spellcheck spellcheck here. 15437 words, so wonderful, ah so wonderful here.

53
Yes, it is later. Later in the day, later in the week, the month, the year. She is reading Swing

Time by Zadie Smith, her 22nd book this year. The book that will make her write better words

here. It is after all her second novel this year. She read 22 novels and she wrote 2 novels. Well,

technically that is not so quite right. She did not finish her second novel as of yet. Merely some

15575 words here. And she did not finish novel number twenty-three as of yet. There are still

one hundred pages left here.

And not all of the books were novels, though they were for the most part. Five of the books were

non-fiction. The rest, well, novels. Though even the nonfiction book were kind of like novels.

They were stories. Autobiographies, well, two of em were.

On the telly, it is Mike and Molly now.

It is September 20.

Outside the sun is a-shining here.

She will go back to reading the rest of Swing Time. But it is more fun to rummage on the web,

Wikipedia, Zadie Smiths reading list for a syllabus in 2013, a course she taught at Columbia

with another writer.

It was published in the Village Voice, apparently.

There is this article that talks about reading lists that famous authors give their students. Maybe it

was in the New Yorker.

On the telly, the persons in Mike and Molly. They all tend to drink.

Boozer galore here.

54
Today is a day in Milan fashion week. It goes like this: first nyc, then, London, then Paris and

then Milan. Sorry, first Milan and then Paris.

Fashionweeks.

And Gallia still writes, though, face it, this is author here who writes, not Gallia. The fictional

Gallia has not found herself as of yet. She is still in the planning state. And it would be nice, if

we knew if she was male or female here.

Author ponders, if she should write a diet book. A diet journal. Dieting is what everybody thinks

about. The weight, the weight here. The one that shows if you are disciplined or not. She had a

big salad and a banana loaf and coffee and cream and a wrap with quinoa in it. And it is one and

twenty-four minutes. What to do until the next day here. We have 1200 calories already inside of

the body. That has to do until seven in the morn on September 21. Some 18 hours without food

here. What to do, what to do?

Shed like to booze, but that is a no-go, a no-show either. Only reading or writing here. Sleeping,

watching what is on on the telly here.

Planning the most amazing novel, this one here, this one here.

15960. Pretty good some more and we have 16000. Wordcount ah wordcount here.

Another Mike and Molly is starting up. The sign of Warner Brothers. Who were the Brothers

Warner exactly? Wikipedia will tell.

Where were we before Wikipedia. What kind of life was that. There even was a time when there

was no microwave, when tv was in black and white. If you were born in 55, you have seen it all.

55
There was a time when jfk was called idlewild, when crutches banged on the table with his shoe

at the UN.

We are old here, old I tell yer here.

16061.

It is five and forty-three. In the afternoon. She got an clair from the bakery on the way. The

elegant confiserie. She had a donut from the donut shop too. Shed rather would have had a pizza

from the sandwich place but they do not sell slices, just whole personal pizzas. So, the clair had

to do, even though it is a slight sugar overfill.

She finished the book, it was so-so. Lukewarm. There are better ones.

She read about this book the house with the 20 000 books. Maybe she will read that one. But first

it is the nom de plume book here that she bought eons of years ago and never read. There is this

book about Patti Hearst somewhere too, it should be read. We are on a mission to finish up all of

those books in the house here. They are not mere decorations, not wallpaper.

She walked around the neighborhood, that should suffice for exercise. A short stroll. In the morn

she did this other stroll, from train station to gym and back. Short strolls but regular strolls. She

has 16248 words here.

Gallia is elegant and wears a beret. She designs clothing. She went to Central St. Martins. She is

twenty-four years old and from this city in China, number three in population, after Beijing and

Shanghai.

56
Well, maybe not. Gallia is an existential writer. Somebody like Juliette Greco. Though Greco

was a singer but you get the drift. Sketches of people. People that do not exist in reality, figments

of anybodys imagination.

When did people start to write up novels? Fairy tales?

How does it feel to be a novelist?

A writer?

Author did readings, a long time ago. From essays and from travelogues. People in the audience

are always good, except for when they are not. Author has seen it all. Though nobody has thrown

moldy fruit at her as of yet.

Words words words words ah words here.

Outside, the shadows are getting longer here.

16395, so it is so it is here.

Still later here. She did some editing, though it was kind of an uphill battle. Lots of times she

herself cannot decipher what the heck she was writing about. Your guess is as good as mine here.

On the telly, a person talking about Jose. After Irma et. al. So many hurricanes, tornadoes, winds,

storms.

Now Trump at the United Nations. Though his speech was actually on Tuesday. Hurricane

Maria? How many storms are there? This one is a new one here.

Tomorrow there will be a new day and she will go in the morning to the coffee place where they

seem to know her. She goes there and then comes back to her laptop to type up this her master

57
piece. Her writing is so-so, but you have to keep on truckin, just push down the keys and hope

for the best. Something will, must crystallize. Or not. It is a thankless job, one she is totally and

utterly ill-equipped for. All writers are. It is a journey into the unknown, that is the nature of the

beast. More platitudes should help. And this is standing at 16609 here.

Friends on the telly. Phoebe and the physicist who is played by Hank Azaria. He was the voice of

some cartoon character in THE SIMPSONS. This was a long time ago. He then went to Minsk.

Not Hank Azaria, but the character that he plays on Friends. This is when Ross still has Marcel,

the monkey. Minsk, it is in Russia. I know where Minsk is. When are you leaving? January first.

The grant went thru, we will be there for three years.

Author here has 85 000 words left to pen. To write. To type. To fill in the remainder of the non-

novel that she is fabricating here.

I am not going to Minsk. I want to stay here and make out with my girlfriend. The laugh of Janis.

And now something else: there is this book called NOM DE PLUME, which is about writers

writing under pseudonyms. Apparently, this is so yesterday, nowadays you will hardly find a

writer who changes her name. Times change. Writing is a profession, just like acting is. These

are now professions that came out of the shadow. That generate money. Artists as taxpayers, not

as people in the fringes. Maybe it all started when Reagan became president. A B-actor in the

highest office of the land.

Now, Mike and Molly. The person who works in the diner. The two policemen. Karl and Mike.

Samuel. Mike gives the step counter to Samuel. He wants to impress Molly. Or maybe he is

slightly afraid of her. Or a lot afraid. It is tough to write while following what is on the telly here.

58
Step counter. The stepdad of Molly and Mike are trying to figure out how to lower the steps on

the step counter here.

The tone is coming from inside Vince. Seven miles.

It is One in the afternoon. Actually. twelve after one. Author was out all day. Coffee in Safeway,

gym, airport, downtown, the casino. Whole Foods. Actually, we did not go to the airport. But

lots of malls, lots of Yaletown, a movie in Yaletown, a film shoot for something called super

girl. The tea place inn Yaletown, where everybody pretends to be young, even the seventy-five-

year olds. Young at heart. Usually guys with short white hair. The ones who drive red

convertible. The midlife crisis crowd. And once you are past fifty, everybody is in midlife crisis.

You cant avoid it. Todays people will die as teenagers, that is how it is how it is here. The baby

boomer crowd, whatever that is here.

The writing ah the writing here. She will write about that Gallia person, how the name is pretty

bad, it sounds like De Gaulle or Fernandel. The connotations are ah so weird here.

There is no more Bloomsbury and there is no more Paris with the lost generation. Writers do not

live in Brooklyn anymore, the prices are too high. Brooklyn was in for writers some ten years

ago. Todays writers live everywhere, in Portland, in the burbs.

Everything changes, everything is in flux.

17128 words, still some 80 000 to go here. Save and spellcheck spellcheck here. She will lose

weight she has to lose weight here. Some thirty pounds till x-mas here. In downtown they gave

out free peanut butter, Jiff.

59
3000 words more. Maybe that is what we will do here. It will keep us busy. The last chapter of

the novel. Different thoughts on writing. Ruminations here. Falafel here.

BTW, fall started in the northern hemisphere some twenty minutes ago. Google doodles keep us

up to date here. We definitely came a long way here.

Three hours later. It is 29 minutes after 5 in the afternoon, some day in late September. Author

here listened to this germann woman talking about painting. She is a prof at the staedelschule, an

art academie in Frankfurt. She was quite good and talked for an hour and tweny minues on you

tube. Then there was still another talk, more like a paneldiscussion, this one too about art but

suddenl the internet connection was off.

Authr should venture out into the real world, it is just better, more, well, real. Freash air. Nature.

Trees, the like. The walk through the shops on forty-first. A coffee maybe. People. She could

drive but she does not have much gas, so it is better to hike. The walk thru the neighbourhood.

The walk thru suburbia. There is something weird about that, you just basically walk by houses

that all look alike.

5:35 PM. 17336 words here.

A Saturday in late September. A Saturday that picks her up just so. The time in the coffee house,

somewhere tween lunch and breakfast. A woman with three kids, coming from one of those

extra-curriculars. Author messed up the whole place, one big tumbler of too dark coffee, the

youngest of the baristas has to clean it all up. Horrible to be this clumsy, she feels so very bad

and she should. The woman says do you want a bag, but that is not it. It is poor eyesight and we

know it. The eyesight that makes her tumble thru the world as a lesser person.

60
She will go back home and type up the amazing novel. She is busy with reading Look Back

Angel, or Look Homeward Angel, the magna opus by Thomas Wolfe, one of those that he wrote

while towering over the refrigerator, the fridge being the table to hold his papers. Somewhere in

the East Village, somewhere in the New York of so many years ago. Before the second world

war. Author here finished swing time by Zadie Smith, and down and out in London and Paris, or

Paris and London, by George Orwell. Whenever she reads Zadie she thinks of the other writer

who quipped that now he wants to be called Zean instead of Sean, or be written like that or some

other joke making fun of changing the Z to an S in ones name here. The taking up of a public

persona, the reinvention. Youve gotta be authentic, stay true to your roots. Dont be a phony.

She still will read the book about the noms de plume, why writers change their names.

Anyhoo, we were still writing about, describing the coffee house. Everything is happening in that

coffee house. It is different every day, a Saturday that is shiny and bright is different from a grey

Monday. A sunny day in late September, the last hiccup of sunniness after dreary greyness all

week, all week here. People and their kids, the schoolyear, the school year.

Gallia, the one who writes a book. There is no Gallia, nobody by that name exists, at least not as

an author. A made-up person, total fiction, total fiction here. She has as much reality as the A has

in an equation, Gallia is a symbol for a real person, it is a figment of authors imagination here.

These are people that are all made up, all these persons in novels the world over. Stories that do

not run true here. The phone rings and we are scanning here, scanning. Sorry, gotta write a book,

there is no time to answer the phone. We have to produce something to be published, it is a dirty

job, a tough job, but someone has to do it here.

It is warmer, hotter.

61
A day in September, at home, writing a book. She has done this so many times before. Her

oeuvre is quite large, she is writing now for some ten years or so. Two or three books per year.

After that, the sending out and after that the rejections. We have to keep trying, the uphill battle

keeps yer going.

Rejection might be better than success, gotta be philosophical bout that here. No need to bury a

dream but maybe this is not her dream anyways. Using words instead of paint on canvas. A

lesser medium. A colorless medium. Uttered syllables et. al.

She hates this protagonist, hates the name. it sounds like gallstones, like disease. You have the

gall to say this, seems there are mere negative connotations to the prefix GALL. But we chose

that name, cannot change it now. It is too much work to change each and every GALLIA in a

text of some 17 000 words. Now this has to stand until the bitter end here.

Gallia writes a book, seems that is as much of narrative that we can muster here. The very first

sentence of a book, the rest the reader can imagine.

Novels are such weird concoctions, so different from what one thinks it will be, based on the

title. She read a lot this summer, 23 books or so, all thru June, July, August, September. She said

it many times, but it is worth repeating, especially when one is basically a non-reader. She

watches movies, whatever is on the telly. Reading, that is a whole different animal. John

Grisham said I write books in a country where nobody reads, which is so true, so true here. It is a

lost tlent, reading. Especially reading of books. But bookstores sell stuff, they are always full.

People like to take home those trophies of the written word, put it somewhere in their house and

then forget about it. There is something to be said for a long long text compressed into a lil

rectangle object, like magic, like magic here. And you can decipher the message only if you

62
speak the language. You cannot decipher what Selma Lagerloef wrote, you cannot read a tome in

Finnish here.

The day is sunny, the last summer day. Wait, make that first day of fall, or second day of fall.

Anyways, the city is happening, outside, outside here. She will be inside here, type this up, the

work has to be done and her work seems to be typing up a long long text here here. A text that

wants to be a novel but cannot, can not.

18 286, later, she will walk to the donut place on forty-first there are different coffee places in

Kerrisdale, there is this one on West Boulevard next to the barber shop. She could describe those

places, there is a book in that, a book in that here. All of them or most of them are parts of a

chain, you can philosophize about that if yer feeling like it here. Her writing is not like that, it is

not political, and it seems that even George Orwell was not political in the beginning. Author

likes to read about writers more so than read about cities, places, locales. People who chose

writing as mtier, what kind of persons are those? What would possess a person to share their

innermost feelings with the world at large. Maybe, in the times of social media we can

understand it better here. I am so off twitter, said this person in the sitcom, on Big Bang theory.

That was way before Trump and twitter, times change so very fast these days here these days

here.

Gallia writes a book, let us stick to that, the woman who writes a book here. Let us not wander

off, let us stick to fashioning the narrative here. 18 493 words here. We have a fifth of the text

already, already here.

The glimmering first part. Author here feels that she should use more painterly lingo, the last

books that she read were very baroque, lots of words,, words en masse, an overabundance of

63
descriptive words, maybe that is the way to go here, in order to fill the pages. In order to activate

a mood here.

Fifty-two minutes later here. The problem with a laptop is obvious. You tend to check ur email,

Facebook, look at each and every pic that people you know have posted on Instagram. Then

there is the perusing of the news. Then there is the reading about who Thomas Wolfe was, how

he wrote, where he wrote. Because we are at chapter ten of the forty chapters of the Homeward

Bound book. Look Back something here. It is ok, the language is brutal tough. Baroque. Lots and

lots of descriptive words here.

He was the Jackson Pollock of writers, somebody said, his very visual way of writing. Lots of

times that is good, the physical that makes you shoot for better words. It is inevitable. Author

here did the same when she did her animations, though, she is not doing it with typing, she walks

around between writing spurts but does not do physical motioning thru space while the writing

itself is going on. That is done while sitting still. You move thru the city, you compress reality,

you then vomit it onto the paper, the keyboard, into the monitor here.

The weather in different places, the times in different places here. It is nineteen degrees here in

this city, it is thirty degrees in New York City, twenty-six in Amagansett, nineteen in Zurich but

with showers. You are at your kitchen table here but you can imagine yourself in all those other

more exoticish places. Where life is happening, where the world is going on. Where you move

around near to the Parade Platz, where there are cars parked near the Opera or this place next to

the Zurich lake., Zuricher see, lake Zurich here. The place next to Bellevue.

You can imagine other places while in reality this is the mere kitchen table. Prosaicness galore.

64
Other times, other places here. Only imagination, that is all you need here. Just like it said

outside on the PS1 in Chelsea, PS something. The one for writers and artists, the children school

next to the apartment of Ziggy. There is this writing on the wall that says that you can imagine

yourselves in other places and other times, just by the virtue of reading books, you will be

transcended to places you have never been and will never be, you will live there because of your

imagination. You can travel the whole world. Author here has some 19 000 words here, the

Gallia book has one sentence, and that is all fine, all fine here. It is seven at nite in Europe, life

flows on, goes on ah goes on here.

Later on she will go back in here and iron out the glitches, the glitches here.

The writing of a book. Author here will not be the first to describe the making of a long text. The

mechanics of how to slap together a patch work of words with an intelligible flow. Outside the

sun and is shining, in here, the laugh tracks on Two and a Half Men, the snarky remarks by all of

the actors here. Vancouver is happening, there is an interior design show in downtown which is

usually quite good, though last time author here was there, she fell over a cable, stumbled down

onto the ground. The cable was laid very bad, one did not see that there was a step which is

pretty bad for a convention about interior design.

Anyhoo, we have some 19142 words here. Slow and steady does it.

She now has finished ten chapters of the forty chapters of the book by Thomas Wolfe. The going

ons in this fictional place called Altamont.

All this reading is not neccesarily conducive to good writing, it is kind of confusing here. It is

two and twenty-two here, repetition of the same number. Writing on a keyboard is weird, there

are so many distractions on the monitor here. 19220 words, she feels like chocolate. Or a latte.

65
She had this wrap that has Monterey Jack cheese in it, it is pretty good but has about 600 calories

here. The description of different food intakes here.

20 000 words in September, this is what she does here. How about describing Gallia taking the

train to a place outside of Hamburg in order to work on her novel. It is a boring narrative, author

here wonders why she cannot come up with more intriguing storylines. Apparently, she cannot

and that is how it is how it is here. No drama, no deaths. Nothing but silence, quietness.

She saw this documentary about persons that have reached age one hundred, somewhere near

Naples, in a village up on a hill, with a spectacular view of the Adriatic. They show this film

repeatedly, on Aljazeera. Living to 100. Centenarians.

But bac to the book writing here. On the telly, the woman who used to play Blossom and who is

now the Amy character on Big Bang, she talks about innovators and there is a documentary

about a guy at Northwestern who is studying stuff about epilepsy here.

19 400, write write write write here. She could go for a walk, watch the people that come to the

pizzeria on West Boulevard. The people that come to the Italian coffee house, the persons who

are there at the bookstore. Kerrisdale village is pretty full of people on a Saturday afternoon in

late September, while the sun is shining here, shining here.

19427.

Now it is 2 Broke Girls. So, this is what we do here, sit around, watch tv, type, read. It is a weird

job, a nonprofession. People who make money with words. With uttering, stammerings. On

paper. She is still not quite sure what the word was when she read thru her stuff. Writing is a lost

tlnt. That does not make any sense here. Maybe she meant the word art. Reading is a lost art.

That makes sense here.

66
On the telly, all of those laugh tracks here. On Saturdays, it sometimes has older movies, stuff

like Bridget jones or Nottingham Hill. Not black and white old movies, the newer old movies.

The ones after the turn of the century here.

19596.

We could go downtown, stuff to see, stuff to listen to. The motion of the city. Petula Clark

cannot be all wrong here.

THE WRITING OF A BOOK, it has to go on. A wordcount that eels itself to one hundred

thousand here. On the telly, another episode of Two and A Half, nope, wait, Two Broke Girls.

They are temping now, because they are no more in the cupcake biz.

19566.

She has to check out the film festival. There always is the fringe and the film fest at this time of

the year here. Something cultural. Actually, the word on the street thingie is going on, the word

fest at the central library here. It is always fun. Maybe she will do that on Sunday.

19722. Apparently, she misread the icon here. It is just way too tiny, so your guess is as good as

mine. So, this is what she did all day, tv, reading, typing this up. The day marches forward, it is

now next to evening. Well, let us rephrase this, it is late afternoon, at least that is how the

weather is. It is greyer than it should be at tis time of the day here. On the telly, Big Bang and

laugh tracks. It is entertaining, Penny and her acting career versus her career in pharmacology.

Author here looks at different news points, anything from nyc to Hamburg. There is always

something to divert ones attention on the internet. In between some typing here.

19846, 19847.

67
Not that much to have, to reach the 20 000 here. The narrative is put on hold which is fine. The

story is annoying anyways. Who wants to read about a woman writing a book? Especially when

there is no clear line between author and protagonist. It is way too confusing, not

straightforward. Being straightforward in writing is what keeps the words grounded. Anything

extraneous sucks. Straight lines, a linear story. One thing is clear here, one thing is sure. The

wordcount stands at 19929, the time is four and fifteen, it is September 23, 2017. The

temperature is, well it is something here. We can google it but that is the outside temperature, not

the one in here in this room where this novel is building up here.

19973.

An ad for dogfood, an ad for toilet paper. Charmin, author here listened to the person who does

the stop motion for the ad.

An ad for Lord and Taylor. 20003. So, this is good here. 20000 words in one month. This all

started in September. She has to check if that is true here.

Ok, so it started in late August. Well, 20 000 in one month. Pretty laggingish, mainly because she

fell and could not sit. That is where the delay comes from here. It is the second text this year,

maybe she will do the third one in November, nano month time here.

20086.

On the telly, Family Feud. The day later. 6:51. Long shadows outside. Still fighting with the

Thomas Wolfe novel, it is quite laborious here. She is at the beginning of chapter 12. The whole

book has 30, no, 40 chapters. The yelling on Family Feud.

68
The rest of the day: How I Met Your Mother. And reading of the Thomas Wolfe book. And a

documentary about fast trains in China. Whatever is on the screen, we watch here. BTW, 20166,

yay ah yaay here.

And now we type this up here on a Sunday, a sunny Sunday here. The tv is blaring loudly which

makes it difficult to pen some 2000 words here, because that is what one does if one wants to

write a book, it is the daily thang you do here. Author was out already, and there was a lot to see

at the coffee house. She ponders about the name of the place, the one that has to do with the

seminal, all-american text that became famous and all-american more after the writers demise.

Yup, apparently, moby dick was nothing in the beginning, even in melvilles lifetime, it attained

its glory much much later here.

The coffee house made it later too, it was not important when it started out in seattle, just one of

many.

Author ponders, there was a time she would not even go in there, even though there were two of

em in her neigbourhood she thought it was way too posh. Which is not what anybody thinks

nowadays, you go in there in all kind of clothes. People come for a coffee run, while in their

construction work clothes. It is not like that anymore, not like that anymore here. It is part of

anybodys daily makeup, it stands in for mc donalds nowadays. Mc donalds is for people that do

not care about length of life, lifespan, tough they will all die anyways.the coffee house is for

everyone. An everyman, everywoman place here.

On the other side it is people flocking to the greek plaace, all dressed as if they are defined by

Hollywood, by zorba the greek.

69
We dress the way that we are portrayed on the silver screen, our collective persona is something

invented in a studio or in the basement of a studio. Somewhere on santa monica boulevard,

somewhere under the pier.

The door of the coffee house says something about fall, a slogan that posits that fall comes every

year, inevitably. Here is a time when Halloween costumes are everywhere that time of the year,

that time of year here. And to think that we are in autumn for some mere three days here. Her fall

novel, she is writing her fall novel. Starting in late august and all thru September, her amazing

novel that will be refuted, utterly rejected, mainly because there is no story, there never ever iks.

Fictional characters, there aint, this is a mere autobiography and one that is full of narrative

holes, one that will not make it, will not make it here. One that will not be reviewed on both

sides of the pond, a non new York times bestseller here. No writeup in the new Yorker or in the

new York review of books or whatever it is called. No discussion in the atlantic here. It will not

even be published, some wanna-be Maxwell perkins will take a stand and say no, even before

reading thru it. One of the heap of the rejected here. There is no hook that she can use to get this

published, her writing is ayokay because if you sit in front of a typewriter, at the keyboard, then

you just like anybody else can start pushing down different keys here, a laptop makes yer write

up 100 000 words easy peasy, there is no carbon ribbon to be changed like in the old times what

with an olivetti, there is not the problem with the round typing head of the IBM. Nowadays all of

us can type up stuff, easy ah, peasy, and send it out to young eager agents in nyc or in London,

England.

The telly, the telly, apparently, fareed Zakaria is not on anymore, a show discontinued here.

Discontinued here.

20792 words here, the sun is ashining here, we write we write here.

70
She has seventy pages, a fifth of a book. She is reading the book by tom wolfe, the look back

angel one, look homeward, she is thru some 15 chapters of 40, reading and writing, this is what

we do these days, very Sisyphean here, very Sisyphean here.

20853 here, she could imagine herself somewhere else, in Amsterdam, Zurich, in itzehoe,

Copenhagen. In nyc, in a bistro, anywhere but here in the room with the green sofa, the green

couch and the paper basket with lace and the telly where a man is talking now about stuff and

sports and politics here.

She could have a tea or talk about the old peoples house that she saw on the way to the

coffeehouse, the tank that is half full, there are all these scenes that she is bombarded with since

she woke up in the morn, the problem about how to make this all stick and somehow magically

morph into one coherent story here. Everything is disassociated, fragments that do not relate to

each other, but we want one story one tagline, persons that interact with each other, a moral

story, something that makes sense somehow but that is not how life happens, never ever ever

here. There is no picture in a frame, the story bursts out of the frame and veers out, bleeds out, all

over the place all over life here. The world is interconnected, everything is somehow related to

other things, to each other. The time of texts and subtexts is over, it is now, text and subtext and

all of it together in one big rush, anarchy, chaos, the like and the like here. Literature in the new

millennium, literature in 2017. We write differently, we have to write differently. Words have to

outdo pics on Instagram, movie clips on vimeo and youtube, compete with audio,, our world is

happening everywhere, how do you even compete with reality here, with reality. Come to think

of it we are competing with other ways of documenting reality, with the stuff that flimmers over

a screen here. The stories that come out of our fones here.

71
She has to stop and spellcheck spellcheck and save this here. Apparently angela merkel won for

a fourth term in germany here. 21183 words here. Markel on the telly, the afd won big too

apparently here, the far right.

She penned three pages, double-spaced, times new roman, 12-point font. Maybe she can really

stop now maybe she managed to further the storyline of this her amazingish book here. The book

that teeters between fiction and nonfiction here.

34 minutes ago, author here was on this site and did some writing, and now, some 34 minutes

later she is here again. The laptop, the site tells you exactly that you are doing, it increments,

measures your doings without you even knowing and we tend to believe whatever the machines

tell us, they have the numbers after all, they measure the minutes of our lives and they seem to

know it all, because they are so accurate in their numberings, how would we even know if it is

all a lie. We have to look at different watches, at different clocks and compare the numbers and

then see if there are differences here.

On the telly, they talk about Merkel, they are all in Berlin here, Angie is chancellor once more

here.

German election.

There will be a symposium on painting at the end of this week in downtown and on Great

Northern Way, actually in different places all over town here. Author could go, but she is not a

painter anymore, she used to paint, some twenty years ago, now, she writes, which is quite a

different ballgame here. Your hands stay clean and ur clothes stay clean. U r hunched over

though, because you have to sit contorted at the laptop or hold ur fingers weirdly if you write

longhand. Painting is more physical, you move ur body around the canvas, walk to, walk back.

72
Storage is a problem though, transport of the final object. With writing u do not have that

problem, the storage is in the cloud.

21 497. The problem with writing is, of course, that there is constant rejection, it is very difficult

to break in, there are rejected writers everywhere, you will not be part of the chosen ones, you

cannot break in easily here. With painting, it is so much easier here.

On the telly, Cheers. So, this is what we do here, four minutes after midnite. Her left thumb is

hurting, because of the fall in the mall. Maybe she should just let it peeter out, nothing is broken

but still. She cannot really move the finger, so maybe she will just ice it. It is definitely swollen,

so, no typing with the left hand. Everything has to be typed with just one hand, the right hand,

which of course slows down the writing process.

So now we know, if Gallia wants to write a book, she needs hands that are functional. Who cares

about ideas, ideas, they come and go, but you need the tools to type the writing up here. It is all

so very physical a process, much more than an intellectual one. That is how it is, that is the story

we stick to here. BTW, 21691 words here.

She reads up on obesity. On weight loss. On the woman who wrote the shopaholic series. She

listened to Angela Merkel at her press conference. Outside, rainy dreariness. On the telly, Mike

and Molly. Life is predictable. She is near to chapter 16 on the online novel here. This day, she

will stay in, listen to documentings of the NFL players who kneeled while the national anthem

was on. The day is dreary, she will produce words. The slight novel, the little engine that could.

2000 words, maybe, she broke the thumb of her left hand. Or sprained it. The voices on the telly,

the grandma of Carl, Carl and Mike here. The day before we watched Columbo. The adventures

73
of a couch potato here. The philosophical musings, the ones that sometimes stumble upon an

insight, a gleaming one here. 21 846.

It is ten thirty-seven btw. September 25 here. In 2017 here. The words that crawl over the page

here.

Five fifty-one. She was reading for thirty minutes, that is how much it took to finish one chapter

here. The book is long and boring, we are not even half-way thru. And it is more fun to hold a

real book, reading on the screen, it is stifling, you are limited in your motioning around here.

Chained to the computer, while the telly is singing its songs, the news outta Boston. It is hot out

there, warm. Whereas here it is grey and dreary.

So, this is how we write here, stifling slow words, mainly descriptions of the here and now. The

experimenting with the words, maybe, though the term EXPERIMENTAL is so yesterday. It is

an archaic term these days. Literary theory is weird, kind of indistinguishable here. Nobody

knows what is really going on here. She reads mainly American lit, well, except for DOWN

AND OUT IN PARIS AND LONDON.

She was inside of the place all day, mainly because of her sore thumb. Or because she wants to

will herself to pen some two thousand words here. 22049. This is snailing forward, snailing

forward here. Now it is the Law and Order episode, the one with the woman who is the daughter

of Jane Mansfield here. On the telly, Anthony Weiner got twenty-one months in jail. Well, that

was on the news, but it looks just like something out of Law and Order. Same locales, same

places in nyc, downtown here.

74
It is four minutes after six, it is September 25. For some reason, this show is mostly black and

white. The captain is played by the same guy who is in the insurance commercial. We know a

thing or two cause we have seen a thing or two here.

Time is standing still, writing and reading and some forays into the coffee place, some latte,

drinks with white, beige foam thereon. Cars driving by on the outside of the place. On the telly

an ad for peloton. 22200 words here.

One fifth of a book written here.

One can read up all one needs to know about this episode. The shooting of each TV-episode is

documented in detail here.

Background on books on movies, backgrounds on fictional worlds here.

Ice cream would be nice here. It is six and twenty-nine.

Bernie Sanders on the telly, now Lindsey Graham. Both of them on CNN. They talk about

Obamacare. Reading, writing. It is dark outside now here. Dark at seven and thirty-three here.

Another senator, her first name is Amy. This is a debate, a roundtable. This is what we write

about here. Still another senator, a guy named Bill. He used to be a doctor, that he states here.

The words are ah so languidly spewn out here. The show is over, everybody laps. Taking a knee

is constitutionally protected deed.

Back at the laptop. On the telly, Mike and Molly. She read one chapter of the online book,

chapter 22. The book has 40 chapters, it is the angel book and author here is making her way

through the baroque wordings here. It is a grey day but less grey than the day before. Maybe

75
Indian summer will come to town after all, maybe October will be sunny again here. The hiccup

of summer before the real cold sets in here.

Her fingers are better, though still swollen. She can use her left hand, silently, cautiously. There

is no need for an x-ray, after all, she can move the fingers, so nothing is broken. The hand is just

swollen, bruised which happens if 200 lbs. fall on it. But it is only the muscles, the pipes inside

are fine and unhurt, unbruised. Nothing broke, nothing splintered.

Author was down in the coffee place. She sat there extra-long, inhaled what she saw. Twenty

minutes, half an hour. Each and every day, the watching of the going-ons in that place, that is

more than enough fodder for some book. The coffee place ah, the coffee place here. On the telly,

the King of Queens opening here. The title song. It is nine and thirty-one in the morn in late

September in Vancouver, Canada here.

22568 words, the novel motions forward, silently here.

The coffee place. On her way, it was tough to find a space on the street for driving, all of the cars

were going downtown and you had it somehow manage to find a space in there to drive down.

Sometimes, right turns are tough here.

The coffee place and all of those people. So many scenes. Next time, she will take pictures so

that she remembers what was going on.

It is nine and thirty-five here and there is no story, no plot. The novel, the non-novel. Maybe, the

title will change, the title, she has now, is more a working title. 22680 words. She could go

downtown and look for ideas, stuff to write about here. She will take notes, so that she can write

about things she saw, once she is back at the laptop here.

76
76 pages. Writers block does not seem to be an affliction for yours truly, author here always

finds stuff to ramble about. The words feed upon each other here.

It is ten and thirty-six in the AM. Another Mike and Molly. There was a 2 Broke Girls in

between here. So, this is how her days are. TV and lots of it. Writing while the telly sings its

songs. In between, she surfs the net. Galia writes a book, the theme is lost. She had a title for her

masterpiece here, she misspells gallia. Maybe one L is better. You know how to pronounce the

word here. A long A.

On the telly, the woman who plays MOLLY. She now has a clothing line at LORD AND

TAYLOR. Though she herself lost a lot of weight and does not even need clothes that are not

body hugging here.

23 000 words here, well, not quite.

She still should tell stories about the coffee place in the morn. A documentary of that place. A

man with a manbun near the window. Well, actually, a young lad, very scrawny. Another one

comes in, he knows the manbun person. They talk. They are both Irish or British, more Irish than

British. People far away from home. They used to live on the other side of the pond. Are here to

take over the world. Immigrants, emigrants.

It is tough to make it here. In the end you sit in a room and type up stories, ah, nonstories here.

The literature in exile.

22974.

So near to 23000.

77
Wordcount. It is different to type in the times of WORD. You can monitor ur progress. You

always know how many words you wrote. It could be good for literature, it could be bad. But it

definitely has an impact on the written word. Life in the age of digitalization. Now, there is a title

for a book that will garner publishing here. Nonfiction is easier to sell anyways. Yu just posit

stuffi muffi and then superimpose some endnotes. Make it look scientific. After that, it is all

about book touring, answering questions by total strangers here. Interacting with both fans and

nonfans. And we type we type here.

23087, wow, ah, wow here.

Still another King of Queens. And laugh tracks here. Outside, the weather is nicer than before,

slivers of sunniness here.

Maybe 2000 words, on a day in late September. She had a wrap and a banana loaf, a coffee,

some cream here. The wrap was too warm, which makes the sauce melt. Or the Monterey Jack

cheese. It is wrapped in there, so one does not really know what is going on there. The book she

is reading is filled with descriptions of food, in detail. So maybe we could use that here to fill the

page. A trick, a literary trick here.

Ten twenty, sorry, eleven twenty here.

Eleven forty-two

Still the telly, now 2 Broke Girls. These are all reruns. In between writing she looks at the sva

site. Everything on the screen, on a screen is always engaging. Our world on a screen. She

watched this movie on vimeo. About a person who designed subway posters in nyc. You can be

entertained by google all day long. Hardly a need to venture out into reality. Just stay in and push

78
buttons and stuff appears like magic here. You read about worlds, you see stuff about worlds.

The screen is a window into a bigger world, takes you places you can never go to in person.

She feels like throwing liquor down her throat here. But those days are over, nowadays it is all

about strict sobriety here. Writers and boozing, ah so yesterday, so yesterday here. Gone are the

days of hard liquor. Hemingway, roll over here. Or whoever was the quintessential boozehound

in literature. Maybe they all are, writing and alcohol go hand in hand, apparently. The myth of

the auteur. The persona of a writer here. The comical figure, the caricature.

Outside. it is still more sunny here.

23 396 words here, 23 396 here.

THE PROBLEM WITH HER WRITING

The main problem with her writing is that she was trained to write about specifics. She went to

art school and that means that there is a lot of writing involved. But the writing is so very

specific, you describe a triangle, talk about the three sides and how much they each measure.

There is no poetics involved, no made-up story. It is what it is, a black triangle on a white

surface, three lines. Straight lines, nothing roundish, nothing ornamental. A very straightforward

description. Journalistic, a documentation of reality, of what can be seen by the naked eye. So

that later, when somebody reads the essay, she or he can reconstruct said reality. There is no

leeway, no window for error. You are supposed to relive the experience of the writer.

This is very different from making up stuff that does not exist. Figures that do not live in reality.

Cities that are pure fiction. Narratives that are made up. Storylines here. Love, hate, death,

drama. There is no drama in a triangle. Just the contrast of black against the white. That is not

enough for a book. Too much repetition. The line never ends. It just moves around, up and then

79
down and then either to the left or to the right here. Something like that, something of that kind.

On the telly, the voices of Janis and Chandler here. FRIENDS, yay and yay here.

23645 words here.

Still writing ah still writing here.

She reads, she writes, she goes out for cookies and then she comes home. This is how her life

flourishes here, this is how life happens here.

The persistence of the life of a writer, the non-fluidity, the boredom, the stagnation, the relative

one. Time passes but nothing happens here. No drama no bloo. The working day off a writer, the

production line, ah, the typing, the typing here.

On the telly, Ross and this woman who is his ex-wife here. The lesbian one. She used to play in

Hermans Head. Hermans Head here. Author has to google it, it is a so very old show with no

reruns here.

23765.

Twelve and fifty-five here.

It is kind of interesting to write while listening in to James Wood who wrote a book about novel

writing or fiction writing, a how to book maybe, he is an interesting fellow, writes about fiction,

about novels and what they lack, he is, after all, a literary critic for the New Republic and for the

New Yorker. He manages to say stuff about what is in fashion in novel writing at what times on

this planet, he is not all rarara for what is en vogue, he does not really care what sells in the

bookstores, he analyzes what is good and what is not, he could care less about what sells at the

moment because, let us face it, fashion changes constantly, what is well read now might be

80
totally forgotten in 100 years, the classics survive but what are tomorrows classics, nobody

knows. For a writer like me this kind of thought is off course something that I will search out,

because it makes me think, makes me hinge to the illusion that my words are the greatest on this

planet even though I am constantly rejected by each and everyone of the agents that I send my

query to.

After all, maybe success itself is nothing but fiction, a weird state of reality, something akin to

fame, fortune, celebrity, stuff that is inherently fleeting and unreal and mushy and fake. It is the

mere luck of the draw, just like physical beauty, you either have it or you dont. Well, except for

the thinness that you work for with long exercise regimens and certain ways of eating, looks as

the end result of hard work. But most lookthingies are not like that people are born either

beautiful or ugly and the majority of the population, any population are somewhere in between

the extremes.

Now it is this interview with James Wood on NPR, which is very interesting here, and it is fun to

listen and write at the same time here. It is like sitting in a lecture and going on on a tangent

while the speaker is going on with his or her lecture in front of the room, you on the other hand

can live your own life on the pages of your notes in the anonymity of the classroom, or in the

darkness of the lecture hall here. Maybe we should add that we have sit to numerous art

historical lectures which are mostly slide projection lectures where the listeners are basically

sitting in darkness, the lecture room is just like a big movie theater.

Later still later so much later here. It will be midnite in some four minutes here. On the telly,

FRIENDS. Author here read a lot about stuff, listened to a critic on you tube, it was all utterly

exhausting here. Maybe the best is just watching Joey, Rachel, and the rest of the gang here.

Good night to the reader, tomorrow is still another day here. BTW, 24262 here. Yyyyay.

81
 Janis and Ross and Chandler and still some other persons. Author here ponders that she

just can define easily what her writing is not. Not fiction, not non-fiction, not a memoir, not a

diary, not this and not that here. A bunch of nots. All the nots of the world here. Words on the

page, words that hiccup and sometimes flow fluidly here. Tomorrow, tomorrow, though

technically it is tomorrow already, it is eighteen minutes after midnite here. Tomorrow there will

be coffee in the coffeehouse here.

24352 words here.

I read and I write, every morning. The trek to the coffee place, yep, that is happening every

morning too. The day sunny, the coffee place way too crowded. She did not get a coffee, this is

her coffeeless day now. She is not sure if she paid, no receipt, nobody called her name once the

coffee was brewed, she did not give them her name here. Everything is complicated and Jerry

Springer is on the telly here. Sorry, some kind of court drama here. About couples. There is

something else, there is the news, different channels. There is the sitcom channel, food channel

here.

The writing, the writing here.

That is what we do, this is what we do here.

She listened to literary theory the day before, not quite getting what was going on here.

Apparently, lots of ppl have problems with criticism, with theory, at least according to the

amazon,ca and the smazon.com reviews. The ones that gave the author one out of five stars here.

Nine thirty on the dot here. A summery day in late September here. And the wordcount is

standin at 24540. She is picking up this nasty habit of not finishing a sentence, mainly, because

that is what those writers did some 100 years ago, some 150 years ago. Maybe she should read

82
more modern stuff here, maybe reading is detrimental to writing here. You pick up bad habits

instead of good habits, you write worse not better here. On the telly, Kiefer Sutherland on Kelly

and some other person. He has changed, grown old. Or just basically changed here. Morphed

into someone else.

400 words and this will stand at 25000 words here. On a Wednesday in late September.

The coffee house did not give any fodder for writing. This is what happens when they are out of

coffee and you have to stand in line. No people watching, it is overshadowed by the non-coffee.

outside, one could not even drive into the parking place. So, everything was kind of skewered.

Which of course will influence her writing and not for the better. For the worse, that is how it is

how it is here.

Ryan Seacrest, that is his name. The person who plays in this cop show. He has lost weight.

Bones, yup, that is what he plays in here. He got younger.

24745.

Three hundred words or so. All that is left to make it into the 25 000 here.

The end of King of Queens. And so, it starts, one sitcom after the next. There is life outside,

places to go, places to see here. It is not all about typing up words.

And there still is no plot, there never will be here. The nonstory, the story that is not. Nothing but

a big selfie. The artist staring at her own work. On the telly, 2 Broke Galz here. The cupcake

ladies.

Laugh tracks here.

Oleg apparently is on strike here.

83
The theme song.

150 words against the sunny weather outside. Two minutes after ten in the morn. We did our

foray into the world already. The coffee run which ended up without any coffee. The banana

bread and a Thai chili wrap. They were out of southwest bean wrap.

24896 words. Some hundred words about anything here. The sun is quite glaring. A Wednesday,

hump day. Which is not how writing works, as a writer you are in charge of your own schedule

here. You increment the week in wordcount, it is all about how many words you can produce

here. The wordcount becomes the story. It is the physical manifestation of what you did all week.

Even if this is never ever published, she still knows that she wrote that many words here. One of

so many writers on this planet here.

And still typing still typing here.

Five more words here, one, 25000 it is it is here.

There will be a talk at seven in the evening. One about painting. Author here does not know if

one can even disseminate painting. Painting is something you do. And after that you look at the

end result. Maybe they will talk about said end result. What is it all about? What are the colors

what are the shapes. The descriptions of the visual, of stuff that one can see.

The talk is far away. One has to change three buses to get there. It is quite a journey. Is it worth

it?

After it is finished it will be quite a journey to get back home. She will be at home at twelve.

And will be very tired. It will be exhausting.

84
There are better things to do with ones life. Though she will be ending up watching Don Lemon

and Anderson Cooper and this other guy with the funny show. So, maybe, getting out and

listening to the lecture is better. More adventurous. More fulfilling. Thought-provoking, that kind

of stuff.

The problem is that painting is something you do. You do not talk about it. You do it. But she

said that already here.

Let us see what we will do here.

BTW, we have exactly 25 220 words here. The writings of the morning. The coffee house was

interesting. Lots to see. Lots to remember that one can write about once one sits at the laptop.

The problem is that, after a while, all those coffee house excursions morph into one. Everything

seems repetitive, even though each excursion is a unicat, a onetime thing here. They all seem to

be similar because it is at the same locale. With the same players, the same baristas. They change

over the years, but still. Even the customers are the same faces here. The street outside is the

same, buses, cars and then there is the Greek temple on the other side of the street. The church

that looks like a temple here.

Later. So weird to be back in the art school which at this point is a totally different place. Maybe

mainly because this keyboard lacks a T and one can only guess where the T is. Author here will

listen to the lecture about painting but she is three hours too soon here. So maybe typing up stuff

is by far the best, penning parts of her seminal work here. She is coughingish, something is

wrong with this her throat. It is always scratching, well it started to scratch some ten days ago.

The scratchy throat, it is very annoying, more so like an allergy but she does not know what she

is allergic to. Maybe, the world in general, life. She has a latte and three madeleines, in the

85
coffee house near to the Canada Line station. Near to the pancake place. De Dutch, the Dutch

pancake place.

The funny thing about the art place is that it is full of new faces here. Which might as well,

author here is not keen to talk to ppl she knows here in this place. What are you up to? Well,

nothingish. The art skool did not work out 4 me, I did not start up a great career after it was all

finished here. No grad school, though technically she did not have a high enough GPA to get into

grad school. The reason why it did not work out lies basically in the strange way that art is taught

at this place. You get in being ten outta ten, you finish up being zero outta ten. They take artists

and make them into non-artists, it should be the other way around. But it is not. Instead of

teaching you how to produce art they make you talk about art. You paint, but here you learn how

to use words instead. You morph from visual artist to literary artist but you are still not good

enough with words here. Not good enough to become a scholar. But basically, you change from

being a practitioner to being a theorist. And that will not cut it, there are so many many art

historians who are clamoring for work, people that hold PhDs in creative stuffi muffi here.

There is no place for her, besides, she did not want to be in academia anyways. She wanted to be

a graphic designer or an architect, somebody who makes stuff that sells, stuff where there is a

market for. Something like that, something of that kind here.

She finished the novel, the Tom Wolfe one. It was good, she will read the other ones too.

Basically, it is an autobiography. A memoir. But, boy, is he wordy. That is why he used to stand

at the fridge and write and write and write and write here. Leaning over the fridge, that is what

he is famous for.

86
It is now four and thirty-two, the lecture will start up at seven. It is the keynote address of a

symposium about painting, tomorrow there will be three panel discussions at the downtown

campus of SFU, in the Woodward building here.

Maybe she will go there too.

The problem with this place here is that she has to somehow find her way back home at nine in

the evening and she is not quite sure if the bus goes from here. Last time she was here there was

a bus station so very near to the entrance door but it seems that they changed that because of

construction that is going on on second avenue here.

Outside, people are walking by, this place is funny. In the library in the old campus it was very

different, so very different. When you typed, you had a view of the ocean factory, which was a

concrete mixing place, you had a view of the bridge, and of the birds that flew against the sky.

You saw tourists walk by and cars walk by, sorry, drive by. There was a feel of the sky is the

limit, here on the other hand everything is claustrophobic. This is not the way this should be, not

the way an art skool should be. But maybe that is ok, if she would have gotten into the school of

visual arts, she would now sit on the fifth floor of a building on twenty-first street, somewhere

between seventh and sixth or seventh and eighth, or sixth and fifth somewhere in New York City

here. She would have hated it, mainly because she did not like the grad program. It was not up

her alley and that came thru in the skype interview she did. Anyhoo, still typing, still typing here.

The day after.

Suddenly the city is very fall like, the color of pumpkin spice latte. A wet pumpkin spice latte,

one where even the cup is glistening here.

87
Later on, she will go down to the painting symposium. But at this time, shed rather stay in,

where it is dry, where there is no need for exhaustion, exerting. Where you can stay in and feel

grumpy and utterly old. Still her left thumb hurts and looks suspiciously deformed and she

knows that every physician on the planet will send her home and tell her to wait this out, the

body will somehow, magically heal itself here.

She was at the symposium, but it was way too much. She could not make herself to sit thru the

whole thing. She watched less than half, then she just had to split here.

She would still be downtown to catch the bus because it is now 18 after 5 and the symposium

was finished at five. Well, she was here in time to watch two Big Bangs and now it is Two and a

Half Men. Seems that tv is cutting into her ability to listen in to lectures without keeling over

from boredom. She has to have more staying power here.

26 330.

It is five and forty-four on Friday. She definitely had a case of FOMO on the bus. She should

have just sat there and listened in to the rest of the symposium. They must have talked about

amazing things. Ah well, it will be online at one time here.

Later, still later. Eight and forty-four. Seinfeld, The Race.

And BTW, we have 26 406 here. Words, that is. She does not paint any more, she writes. Which

might have been a bad move here. But hey, that is life here. 26433. She feels sick, ever so

slightly here. 26441.

The coffee house as window to the world. A very narrow one, arguably. One place on this planet.

Basically, a room with a view. A room that is not square, that has walkways, niches. But that

88
feels like a square, organized. The layout of the coffee place. The sofas, the tables. It has this

weird combination of living room and dining room and waiting room. And office, though non-

threatening office. An office where masterpieces are penned while Sinatra sings. A piece of

contemporary America or what is the illusion of contemporary America. A coffee house that has

a suburban feel, it is the same in Seattle or in nyc or in an airport or in Zurich, on the other side

of the world here. A generic coffee place, unassuming, not over powering. That lets you be you.

The food is unobtrusive, even bland. It goes with everything, with every mood. You can be a

drunk or a saint, this place does not judge you. It used to, judge, that is, long ago, before it

became the place of the people. It is the new mc Donald, the everycafe.

Author ponders, is this what she does here, writing on coffee houses? She sounds like a writer

for a lifestyle magazine. Not a scholar, not a writer for the Paris Review. A fumbling artiste. A

muffled one. One of the out of work actors, singers, playwrights, novelists. Nobody will publish

this, nobody here. It is all disastrous here. Her thoughts are not well laid out. There is no plot, not

one that goes from A to B. It is a plot that just meanders forward, without a goal, it can end

anywhere and start anywhere. There are no insights, at least none that can be remembered and

quoted later. She does not do quotable, she does forgettable here. It is a Saturday and the coffee

house has hardly anyone in here. A man with a child, two women with laptops, one in black and

one in baby blue. Baristas talking, an all-female barista group, a henhouse. The barista is new

and worldly, she has seen it all here. She wears baristadom like a badge, she is not a poet on the

way, not a medical doctor on the way to a medical breakthrough. She is matter of fact, want

coffee? here you are. Drink this with a hint of caramel or white chocolate or salt or pumpkin

here. The sun is reluctant, glaring against the rained-in clouds. Author writes, semi-poetic. To

have poetry down like a science, dont quote me. Do not ah do not here.

89
26876. So near to 27000. The day before, the symposium, we are still reeling from it. There was

nothing wrong with it, there is everything right with a symposium about painting. But the weird

after taste is there, painting has to be looked at, you cannot talk about it. You have to see an

image and either like it or hate it, in a split second. Painting is like that, photographs are like that.

Music, ballet. Even a movie, you either like the colors or you hate them. Or they are soso,

impact-less here. The symposium was more like theater, a live performance. A room, actually,

two different rooms. It was too unscholarly or way too scholarly here. The symposium ah the

symposium. It reminded her of the symposium in Big Bang, where there was no symposium, but

it was a cover-up for not showing up. It was that kind of symposium here, it did not have much

to do with painting at all, so it seemed here. It did not make her go into the studio and grab a

paintbrush here. 27058 here.

A Sunday in September. Al-Jazeera. She had her coffee and is back at the computer here. Sun

shining, no rain. The words come reluctantly, at times more fluently. The novel is fleshing out,

more forceful in its resolve to stay vague, vague in its plotlessness. This is a descript of writing,

the process of writing and that should be enough here. She is at the second part of Thomas

Wolfes magnum opus, Eugene Gant is now on his way to Harvard, on the train still. He left

Altamont behind, Altamont that apparently is a stand-in for Ashville, North Carolina here.

Writing, reading here. There are movies in the VIFF in different venues in downtown. One could

venture out there but it is always quite a production. And it is expensive here, much more than

regular movie tics in town here. Well, a tad more, you have to purchase a festival pass, the price

of the ticket might be nearly the same here. She has to look it up here.

27229 words, this is her second book this year. She is prolific, even if she is not good, even if her

writing lacks structure, is just more something where she starts somewhere and ends somewhere.

90
No strategy, no construct of a story. More like growing wild, a story that sprouts however it feels

like. Whatever comes to mind, that is how we write this. Sometimes it is good nd at other times

not that much here. A diary or something like that. A journal, every day some thoughts against

the machine here.

27321, two-seven-three-two-one here.

She could go for a walk. Or read thru the STORY OF A NOVEL. Or watch tv, Fareed Zakaria

and the CEO of Microsoft. Nothing is really interesting here. The walk would be nice, the

kerrisdale village, the coffee place over there, different people, fresh air. Motioning thru the

world, aimlessly, observing, waiting for the next impulse to write this up here. Her words ah her

words here. Repeating what you did before.

27397 here.

There are way too many pages to be read for any one person in a lifetime here. Apparently, OF

TIME AND THE RIVER has some 900 pages, well, a tad less, some 800 and something here.

She could have read Tolstoy instead, a more important work. There are so many books to be

read, so many waiting to be typed up. It is stifling, exasperating. She cannot find the right words

to describe this here. Time to go for a walk, time to go for a walk here.

Walking around the neighborhood, looking at a red car, at the yellow leaves on the ground

against the grey pavement. It is cold, too chilly. But that is not it, she just wants to get back in

front of her typewriter. Sitting and typing, that seems to be her favorite pastime here. Something

that is done with obsession here. The obsession to fashion words here, the never-ending

obsession.

91
The red car, it is parked, it is somehow, grey-red, silvery while still being red. Metallic but not

too much. A strange red, a weird one here.

Still some minutes later here. Rick Steves on the telly. Rome, Spanish steps and now bloopers,

which are always funny here. Fast words, ah fast words here. There are other writers the world

over, typing uo stuff. She should do her readings, though, it seems way too long. Maybe tackling

the two green books is more fun, especially because they are real tactile books, not something on

a screen here.

BTW, 27653, two-seven-six-five-three here.

Everybody is going somewhere, at seven oclock in the morning.

October in nyc, well, actually, this is the westcoast, but it is writing, poetry, fiction, you can do

whatever you want. You can imagine stuff, mainly because it sounds better, October in nyc has a

certain ring to it, it is musical. But only if you say it as an acronym, as in EN-WY-SEA, a three-

syllable phrase that mirrors the three syllables in OCTOBER, the sentence is bookended, there is

only the IN between October and nyc, it is about time of year (October) and location (New York

City). The sentence itself is music, you can hear Sinatra in the back. The title of a song and not

any song, the title of a movie, and not any movie. A movie with ten Oscars. There is glamour,

implicit, October is that time of year, somewhere in between, melancholic, on the way, like a rest

stop between places where more stuff is happening. There is a narrative implicit, a dour one, a

happy one. But one thing is certain, the terms are loaded, their implications are straightforward.

There is not that much wiggle room, you get what you hear. This is something a construction

worker in full gear would exclaim, it is poetry, literature for the masses. The music of a plumber.

A we-are-all-in-this-together kind of art form. It is so far off from art for artists, this is art for the

92
everyman, the everywoman. The kind of art that you create, construct on a Monday morning,

with a brown bag in your hand, with thermos, boots and hardhat. This is the poetry that glides

above rivers, well, or something like that, something of that kind.

She is not weary of her position in life, she too can write, she too should write. Let regular

people write poetry, we will be better off as a species.

27931, so near to 28000, so near, gliding oh so near.

There have to be tweakings, there are glitches waiting to be ironed out. The coffee house was

brimming. With people that picked up their coffees. The woman in black and green, she had

texted them, her drink is reedy, she just parks her car, gets out and picks up the drink. No waste

of time, none whatsoever. You can rush to where you have to be, everything is so efficient, no

waste whatsoever.

And so how do you situate yourself in this, in between these cogs of efficiency. You are a writer,

by definition a nonjob, a job that is superfluous. Something extra, all those words that are an

extra in our lives. Stuff that nobody needs, it is such a pessimistic function in life. A flake, a

fake. You just take words and push them against each other, build stuff like Calder, but not as

good as Alexander Calder did. Your words swim around, hover, hardly ever shoot down on

truths. They are way too elusive, they never ever hit the goal. They try but they miss. Theyve

gotta miss. There are reasons for that, she is not a non-fiction writer, not a native speaker, not

young enough not old enough, not the right gender, not the right educational background. There

are reasons why she will never ever make it in literature land. As many reasons as there are sand

pebbles on the beach, her writing just sucks, sucks here.

93
Negativity is part of the game, but we are heaping on the words, the wordcount stands at 28240.

Later she will read, something about time and river, she will do laundry, go to the gym. Clean the

house do the dishes. Domesticity and art, what an oxymoron here. The city, that is what is

intrinsic to art, urban life and design. Her art is too pedestrian, too lukewarm, way too so-so.

Poetry, lyrical songs, ballet, she will never ever make it as a writer here. It cannot be done, it

cannot be done here.

Even if it is titled Gallia writes a book, the name Gallia in itself something poetic, but if push

comes to shove it is a mere stand-in, a fictional persona, a nonperson here. Anyhoo, the sun is

shining, October is on, and we are still writing still writing here. 28365, in November, there will

be novel writing month, but that is still another thing, still another other thingie here. 28384, two

eight three eight four here. There will be still laters, there will be still better words, there have to

be, because anything is better than this here, these horrible horrible words that will never ever

make it ah never ever make it here. Negativity rules, it comes with the territory of trying to

reinvent the wheel here, the wheel has already been invented, how can you even try to make a

name for yourself, when all the good words have already been taken, already been written here.

Nothing new under the sun nothing new here under the sun here.

One and fifty-five. October two. 2017. The sun is shining. She had kettle chips. With a taste of

honey mustard. A tad too sweet for chips. We had a cookie too. And a latte that was extra foamy.

Not decaf and not skim milk. The lunch that was 1000 calories. Cookie, latte, chips. In the place

with the red chairs. She is reading thru the film festival program and it seems there is nothing

good on. Just short films at four. Not really worth the trek downtown. And it will cost seventeen

bucks. Too much for six short films. Watching Friends reruns is more fun here. At least there is a

story. One with laugh tracks. Now it is Two and a Half Men. That is good, too. Not that good, it

94
is not Seinfeld. Some sitcom episodes are rubbish, some are pure genius. There are differences

here.

She was reading thru this novel. Reading up on literary criticism. Something about Main Street

and Beacon Street. It is not really worth it to decipher something that made sense some one

hundred years or so ago. There is no time to read all the novels of the world. The best thing is to

just keep on writing here. Fiction and non-fiction. Somebody said that non-fiction is the fictional

treatment of real lives. The fictionalization of reality. Maybe Gore Vidal said it. Whoever that

was. A guy who knew literature. Dead poet society. White men. Every saying, every quote is

seen through tinted glasses. Rosa red ones, pink ones, lilac ones, dark ones. She had too much

junk food. One thousand calories of junk. A banana bread, a wrap. Caffeine, twice here.

28 767 here. Two eleven and Gallia writes a book here.

It is just something I do. I go out, have a coffee, go to the gym, to the mall too, because they

have a market in there that I get groceries from, mainly readymade frozen foods. Later on, I am

back at the typing machine and feed at least two pages to it. I am lucky that there is always a

market for my words, I do not even have to write for the Atlantic Monthly or the New Yorker, I

do not even have to weigh in on skype on stuff that happens on the news, nope, my books are

always selling, I made a name for myself some forty years ago and ever since I can sell,

whatever I write. I just got lucky very soon in the game here. The persona of a writer, usually I

write half a year and booktour the other half of the year. That is how it is, how it is here.

Gallia ponders, this is basically a fictional account just as she herself is fictional, she, Gallia that

is.

95
Nonfiction and fiction merge, there is no clear border here. Nonfiction is the fictional account of

other peoples realities.

The sun is shining, it is October four. On the door of the coffee house there was this inscript that

says FALL AGAIN. While she is driving, she has two sentences pat own, two amazing

sentences. She lost them later on in the mall.

29017, the day before, she did not write at all. She just read, this long, languid story about a guy

named Gene. It is 918 pages long, though she is reading it online. She is half way thru. It is good,

but very very wordy. Time and river, of time and the river, something like that. Thomas Wolfe,

the one that was depicted in GENIUS, the one with Jude Law here. She read the book too, which

was actually very good. The book by A. S. Berg, he is good with language. Maybe better than

the writers he writes about. Well, he just wrote about Wolfe and Perkins, the other biographies

were about Woodrow Wilson and Katherine Hepburn. And Wolfe was a mere afterthought, the

main subject was Maxwell Perkins here.

The language in the book, the one about time and river, is definitely not pc, so you have to read

over that, apparently all American literature pre-Rosa Parks is like that.

Anyhoo, the sun is shining here. The writers studio is on here. There are movies in downtown,

the ones that are in VIFF. Vancouver International Film Festival. 300 movies or so, ah, better to

stay put and watch FRIENDS reruns. It is just as good, wait, better actually. You know when to

laugh, the laugh tracks make sure that you do the laughing at the right time, the right moment.

You dont ever miss a beat here.

Others watch General Hospital, romancey stuff. Satire is more up authors alley here. Or

basically slapstick. Laurel and Hardy. Sitcoms are like that, they are not necessarily satirical

96
because that implies some intellectual engagement. Nope, they are pure slapstick and that is what

makes it funny. Joke boy, as Kramer called Seinfeld. Or something like that, something of that

kind here.

One page already. We need to type up one more page here.

The movie that she could watch is a very dark, North Irelandish movie which plays in the nice

theater at five in the afternoon. It is definitely way too dark, way took serious. Better to watch

FRIENDS instead. Smelly cat galore.

She likes movies about artists and they usually have lots of them. She watched the one about nyc

and the fashion photorapher who lived on a roof above nyc, twice, some two years or so ago

here.

The movie theater with the red plush seats is the best here.

Rachel is pissed-off.

Two pages are in, so a days work is done here. It is like construction work, fragmented.

Construction for non-males, construction for old and decrepit creatures. Bur construction

nonetheless.

29 thousand and four hundred and something words here. On the tell, Ross, Rachel, the woman

who is played by the actress who was in the music video with the one who was born in the USA

and the actor who used to be in Magnum P.I, the one who was Magnum P.I. and now some

commercial, one of so many here. The sun is shining outside, the hiccup in October here.

The inscript on the door of the coffee place, the autumn again inscript. One could write about

that, forever. About the leaves that are falling, the way that that inscript is depressing and maybe

97
intentionally. Be depressed and hang out in coffee houses because in this weather there is

nothing else to do except for hibernating. Hibernate with a latte, the foam will lift your spirit.

The foaminess on your upper lip here.

Who are those ppl who make up slogans for ad companies? Where do they live? In Brooklyn? In

Australia? Nowadays it is all international. The subway commercials are made in New Zealand.

Everything is away with the click of a button here. You can send this here out to Christ Church,

in a second.

Philosophisizing about the global village, yup, why not and why not here. You can go anywhere,

far-away places, far away galaxies. Imagination will take you anywhere here. Places that you

will never be, time zones that are out of reach here. Antarctica, the like.

Author ponders, her writing is just so-so. She is not able to conjure up the image of the PS in

nyc, the one that was opposite of Ziggys apartment here. There was something written about far

away places, something that was written on the white wall of the building. And it was not really

white, more off-white, ecru. The color of egg shells.

Authors writing is bad, bad words it is here.

There are clear words, words that paint a picture accurately. Author here is not like that, maybe

she needs the wine that they sell in the place on West Boulevard. The wine that is really good

though kind of expensive here. Twenty bucks, which is way too much here. It is white but it

tastes more like fruit, melon, citrus. And it will intoxicate her, will jumble up her words here.

Maybe it is better to stay sober here, sobriety will produce better words, accurate words. If she

was a guy with a hard hat, she would not be allowed to booze before hammering away here.

98
Same for writing, for typing. After all, we are hammering away, literally, at the keyboard. The

words are off even now that she is all sober. We need all the concentration we can muster here.

29910, so near to thirty thou here.

She started in September or in late August here. Thirty thousand words already. Quantity begets

quality, lets hope, so lets hope so here.

29940.

Sixty words and we have 30000, then we could get out and have a donut, a maple one on West

Broadway. Or forty-first, whatever here.

On the telly, Mike and Molly, there are two episodes of Friends and two of Mike and Molly here.

Fifteen words and this will stand at thirty thousand, there, there, there it is here. 30000 exactly

here. Yay ah yay here.

In the beginning of this quasi-novel, there were more than one person. Protagonists and maybe-

antagonists. Antagonists in the making. Later on, it just got all about one person. The novel has

its own life. On the telly, it is now Two and a Half Men and laugh tracks ah laughtracks here.

She went out and had a sugar cookie. The person who sold it to her was the same that was there

some days ago. He has curly hair. Earrings. There is man standing at the counter, a customer.

The bakery is so very female, it is always weird if you see guys there. They seem so out of place

in that particular bakery where everything is about flowers. The whole dcor, the pistachio

coloring. The pastels. Any male in that surrounding stands out like a sore thumb.

30144. 144 words about a bakery. She had the big sugar cookie at home, with tea, silent tea. Tea

that is no strong. Tea with the remnants of the teabag. Beige-ish tea here.

99
Her writings, ah her writings here. Page 99, page 100 here. Once she will have 300 pages, she

will send this out to literary agents in nyc. Interns will read it. Will say yay or nay. They will

lean towards nay, that is how it has been here for the last nine years. Nine years of rejections.

Rejection letters here.

On the telly, Charlie Harper and his mother here. Laugh tracks here.

A story for this novel. A plot. Some kind of plot here. Any plot will do, should do. People are

into stories here. Narratives. Good narration here.

30276 words here. The story of 30276 words. The typing here.

Five pages, she typed up five pages, give some, take some here. This is what she does on

October four. The meandering thru the words. She reads, too, reads and writes. And listens to the

words on the telly. There is text everywhere here. Even if you would listen to music, it would be

all about the lyrics of different songs here. We are bombarded by words here. Yup, that is how it

is how it is here.

Two thirty in the pee em. On a Wednesday. She was in the mall, at the gym, at the coffee place

and in the bakery on thirty-third. Now it is all about writing this up here. The amazingish work.

The one that will garner her a place inside of the sanctum of Nobel laureates. Go big or go home

here.

There are lots of writers sans Nobel. They too are read. They too sell books. There are more

writers without a Nobel prize on the mantel. Way way more. Author ponders if the Nobel prize is

a statue. Like an Oscar, like a Tony. Or is it just that coin with the head of Alfred Nobel on it.

What do you get for good writing here? Are the persons with the Nobel prizes necessarily the

better writers? Or are they the worst, at the lower end of literary quests?

100
She could go downtown for a festival film. The people who pay more for a movie. The

volunteers. The excitement. World premieres. Panel discussions. Line-ups, queues. Line-ups and

queues are the same. UK-English, US-English here. Ireland-English, Northern Ireland here.

30553 words here. She should take the bus. Look at faces. At the houses outside. Stuff to see that

will translate, automatically, into stuff to write on, wax about here.

30581 words, we are getting somewhere.

Later here, so much later.

Nine and twenty-two in the eve. CNN is on. Author here was busy with reading, still the

river/time novel. Still more than half of it has to be done. It is a long text, one that will take

several days here. The hardcopy is nine hundred something pages. But she said that already here.

Reading it online is weird, one does not really know on which page one is. You just know if you

are half way thru, a quarter thru, that kind of thing. You ballpark it.

30682. 30683. On the telly, still the Las Vegas shooting.

It is too cold to write, way too chilly. This is the time that a coffee house would do, much better

than her own chilly quarters here. The colouring of a coffee house is better, there are other lost

souls that hang onto the foam, the sugar, the chocolate swirls here. Strangers who are there to get

their sustenance, to do housework, homeworks, the dissertation crowds. Men in hard hats who

look as if they know how to build a house. Houses that house coffee houses here. It is October,

sometime in October here. She is typing up her masterpiece, she always is, ah, always is here.

That is what you do after art school, that is the only thing you can do here. There are others who

do things differently, but for it is all about writing, all about writing here. You can store it is the

cloud, you do not need a warehouse on the outskirts of town. You sometimes go to attend

101
symposia about painting, just like she did last week here. A boring talk, many ah so boring and

repetitive talks. Nothing new under the sun, nothing, ah, nothing here.

30887, a Friday in 2017 here.

On the telly, BBC. Trump asking a question. With a smirk. Now a serious guy with white

eyebrows.

On the telly something called BAKE IT POSSIBLE. Outside, a milky Sunday, nope, make that

Saturday here. The image of a fluffy whipped creamy concoction on the telly, something

oversized and delish.

She reads, and now she writes here. Outside the world is happening, in here, nothing. The sounds

of the telly, artificial world. The book that never ever ends, it too is artificial. Later on, she will

go out, she was out for the coffee the cream the piece of cake the wrap. With beans therein here.

This is what she writes about here, not exactly hi-lit. too lo-brow, this will not cut it here.

Starting November, the national novel thingie will start up here, she still has to finish this

October-thingie, she has 25 days for 70 000 words here. Because it will be logistically

impossible to overlay both writing spurts here. It is all about numbers, numbers here.

31 061, BTW here, by the way here.

She is still busy with the Thomas Wolfe thingie here, a descript of a library. His ruminations

about books on shelves, he highlighted how these volumes are standing on the shelves inside a

RICH mans library. But it could be the New York Public Library, any library. The condensation

of human thought, human effort in small rectangly objects aka books here. On the telly, a young

girl in orange white and baby blue, with blond hair, unkempt, with locks, talking about making

102
the food here. Somehow, one cannot leave, one is mesmerized by the immediateness of the

show. The workshoppy quality, the illusion of making, even if we are not making anything here,

our hands stay clean, no gunk under the tops of our fingernails. That is why writing won here, no

going into the studio, no paint, no plaster, no clay here. Just words that are typed in here, it is

very officey, the job of a writer. A typist, that is what she is. Maybe, there was a time when that

was a derogative, when Capote derided Kerouac, but those times are long gone, distant past here.

For her, this is good, she is an animator by training, so feeding scenes in sequences to a machine

seems to be the way to go here.

31285 words here. On October seventh, maybe, eighth here, in 2017, on the west coast of

Canada here. Writing stupefiedly in closed quarters, while the telly sings about baking, walnuts,

while the world of the city happens and roars, somewhere outside, somewhere outside here.

Later she will be on the train, drive out to the airport and back, motion thru downtown just like

the song says here, but now, it is typing ah typing here, in pee jays, in utter disheveledness,

because that is what the greats do, the writers, the thinkers the poets here. They are usually male,

but roll over Beethoven the gals have arrived arrived here. She is not quite sure if glossing this

up with hints and tints of feminism will obstruct the reality that her writing sucks here sucks

here. Maybe not the right thing, to play the feminist card here. You are, after all, as good as your

words are here. She overused the term HERE here. And 314500 it is, it is, well, once again: here.

The baking show, this is the most important cake I made here. The bakers say the

darndest things, talking about fillings and how it feels in the mouth. A sweet and savory babka, a

lesser babka. Babka, the piece of baked goodness made famous by Seinfeld here. Ground

chicken and kale, yumm. Not here.

103
 31513. 11:50 in the AM. BAKE IT POSSIBLE, apparently, this is a different show, here.

No wait, still, the same. She fills the page with ramblings, this is ah so different from what the

writer at the fridge did. You know, the late Wolfe, of Time and River here.

It is what it is. How about a story titled THE CASINO NEXT TO THE TRAIN STATION? It is

Sunday, Canadian Thanksgiving. Or the day before. Monday, statutory holiday. So, lots of

people have their turkey the day before. Or any other time over the long weekend. Or not at all.

Pizza instead. Vegetarian pizza, even better than turferkey. Turfurkey.

In the morn, she was in the casino next to the train station. Such a great place to base a book on.

A plot. The casino next to the station. Because it is not really a train station. The train goes from

the airport to downtown. It is urban public transport. Not really a subway either. Nothing

underground.

The weirdness is that this casino is next to a commuter train station. Vegas smack in the midst of

everything, in the middle of town. Debauchery in the burbs.

Well, Vegas is a family destination nowadays. Everything is under control. The place, the casino,

she is talking about, smacks of destitution, though. People are old and decrepit. They all can be

described with a word that starts with the suffix de. Something is missing. Something is not

there that should be there. Deconstructed, desolate, destitute. Decrepit is too harsh a word, it has

politically incorrect connotations. But to hang out there on a Sunday morn basically shows to the

world that you are a loser. The fries she has taste like artificialness, like an impending coronary.

They are the opposite of organic grub, they are overpriced though. Even the tea is. She did not

tip, mainly because she could not read the inscript on the machine. Hopefully nobody will spit on

her fries. Garlic parmesan fries. They are actually quite good, they have mayo on them just as if

104
this is Schiphol. Amsterdam or something here. That is where they have mayo on French fries,

well, maybe not in the airport but they do so in downtown, near to the train station, near to the

three-storey parking lot filled to the rim with bicycles. Anyhoo, back to the idea of writing about

the casino near to the station.

They always have musical acts there, has-beens or wannabes. Some of the has-beens author here

knows, those are the ones where one is amazed that they are still alive. They must be one

hundred, how can they still tour? How come they still look like they did in the sixties? Seventies.

Nope, more, like sixties, early sixties that is. Author herself is very old, if she knows their names

here.

The casino is full of senior citizens. Once there was a big loud fight. The people in uniform

chased a guy. Same in the morn, in the mall, a woman and a man chased a hobo, he went out,

they went after him. Later she saw the uniformed persons outside of the mall. The funny thing

was, that all of them were about the same age. The hobo guy, the young lady in uniform, the

young man in uniform. They were all pleasant, young and happy. Matter-of fact, wether they

were security guard or hobo. They were basically interchangeable, athletic, full of youth, the

funny thing is that they were all running. From the law, for the law. And it was only the law of

the mall, nothing special. A place with shops, a private enterprise here.

Author ponders, she has to get back to the casino. Where there is food and booze and lots of

places to gamble and win money or lose money. In the bath room, there are pics in the stall that

advertise for addiction hotlines, addiction hot lines for gambling addiction. The face of the

person on the poster looks like somebody who could run for office. A state senator, a congress

man, a more distinguished kind of George Clooney. White hair, blue eyes. The lady on the poster

looks like a thinner, younger Imelda Marcos here. So, these are the gamblers, this is how

105
gamblers look like. The target audience of the addiction network. Maybe, you should not have a

gambling place, how about that? If you are concerned about too much gambling, if you think that

people cannot stop. If moderation is the problem, or non-moderation, for that matter.

Alcohol, s-e-x, work, you can be an -aholic in anything.

So how is this for writing a book about? She could do something like six characters in search of

a play. Eight characters in search of a sitcom. You know, something experimental. Where the

writer herself is part of the characters of the story. It has been done, many times. This Italia guy

who starts with a P, between world war1 and world war 2. In art, everything worth doing has

been done already, better, more forceful here. Nothing new under the sun, we are just

regurgitating what others have done before here.

In 2017 you cannot write something new, it is not possible, not possible here. You cannot

reinvent the wheel, it has been invented already here, already. But she said that already here, in

this very text here.

She will send out queries, anti-queries.

They always say that your query should look like the text of a book jacket. Hmm, how about a

pic too. A selfie. An authors portrait. The image you put on ur facebook page. Punkt punkt

komma strich fertig ist das mondgesicht. A smiley face, a caricature.

23435, she has to rest, in the evening, she will be at this big social event. The carving of the

turkey. It is the holidays, people shoot each other. Well, actually, the people at the thanksgiving

dinner are more acquaintances, so it should go smoothly. She has to watch her drinking, then

again, it is usually so boring, that one has to drink. Definitely a catch 22. Damned if you do,

damned if you dont. Between a rock and a hard place here.

106
She forgot about the plot, the discussion of the casino and the train station. And they say that

Trump goes off-topic, seems that we are all cultivating our inner Trump here.

Maybe going off-topic is the way to go. Ulysses, stream of conscience. Rambling as art form,

that is the way to be, that is how it is here.

She is still halfway thru the river and time book, actually, she is now tackling the fourth quarter.

Or the third third. There are no page numbers, one has to ballpark it. He sure goes off-topic, you

can even see how Perkins and Wolfe are arguing over passages. Well, not literally, but it totally

comes thru, this does not go with that, the story is fragmented, but it seems as if they all are, all

novels over 300 pages. Only in a song you can stay on focus, you can write a story that is three

minutes long. In a novel, well, that is tough. You have to stretch a plot so that it is 300 pages

long, at the very least. There is this six-word memory project, tell something in six words.

Compress a narrative, let it shine here. Three words is more like it. One plus two, one equals

two. A bigger than B. Instead of the bigger than you use the mathematical sign. The narrative

of mathematical equations, author should go back to describing the casino. Thomas Wolfe

describes debauchery in Paris, Orwell describes Paris and London. Upton Sinclair describes

Chicago, Zadie Smith describes lots of places but mainly London. The person who writes about

China, describes different places but mainly East Asia. The one woman described a lot of

Brooklyn. Wolfe used a place named Altamont as a stand-in for Ashville, North Carolina. As did

Scott Fitzgerald, a fictional place that is a stand-in for nyc, for Manhattan, author here does not

need to give the casino an actual place, an actual location, all casinos the world over are the same

anyways. They usually have dimmed lights, they used to when she was a kid in Sylt or in

Amrum. Some place outside of Hamburg, they were on a class trip. They all played the slots.

After the entertainment was over, the kids performances. Apparently, the legal rules were very

107
lax in those days, you could play the slots, nothing to it. Even if you are a minor. That was way

back, a war had just been lost, nobody cares about some debauchery done by nine-year-olds.

Author here will go to the casino and take pictures. It will be a very well-constructed story, a

novel that is foolproof. Nicely constructed, without narrative holes here.

32985 here, 32985.

Gallia writes a book, Gallia is tired, she should go out for a walk here. Have a latte, a latte here.

33009, even the wordcount is fictional, mainly because we cannot really decipher the miniscule

icon of the wordcount at the bottom of the page here.

33045 words, she ironed out the glitches, so this will do, should do here. Save this, the

spellcheck is done. Outside, the greenery, the midafternoon highlights, the sunniness on a

Sunday in October of 2017. It is irrelevant where this book is written, where the laptop is a-

standing, where this is typed-up, typed-up here. What is important is the writer, her problems

with writing, the same problems that anywriter the world over faces. The target audience is the

big mass of writers, would-be writers, writers who fashion their dissertations, mere essay writers

who have to give in a passable piece of work by Monday. Everybody writes and everybody reads

here.

So, this seems to be the premise, let go of description of locale and concentrate on the emotions

of the writer, the writer as maker, as producer, as inventor of a novel piece of work, a product, a

text, a book here. Author knows that she has to streamline this, be precise, tackle this as if it is a

scientific project, clean this up and clear it up. No wiggling all over the place here. Have a strong

voice, whatever that might be. Maybe her strong voice is the voice of whishy-whashyness, she

makes strong statements and two seconds later negates them completely. This is her m.o., being

108
strong in wishy-washyness. After all, nothing is certain here, you are as real as the last Instagram

pic you posted here. We tend to jump around, we all have the attention span of a three-year-old.

In 2017, the only adults are toddlers, the serious people of tomorrow. The future generation. Be

this as it may, we really have to get ready for the devouring of the turkey here. BTW, 33331,

what a cute number here. And the minute she writes about it, the icon changes, we are now @

33353 here. Time flies flies flies and flies here.

The immediacy is lost. She is outside, all of these things she sees, all of this that she wants to

document, to describe. But once she is back inside, it takes some time to open up the laptop,

somehow, everything gets lost. We have to recreate the feel of the gas station at seven on a

Monday, the freshness, the feel of the fresh air. The light that is opening up here, the sharp

contours. The man in white, who looks as if he could be anywhere, not just in the confines of this

place. The antithesis to the provincialness of this place, the feel that this is a mere village here.

The coffee house that is there day-in, day-out. The slight jazz music, the singer, female or male,

a generic voice, genderless here.

Coffee, the cake with walnuts that go under the teeth, get stuck, the lights of the cars outside. The

starkness of the contours, contrasts, it is a Tuesday, one that feels like a Monday here. She will

go back to the typer and type up her story, the change of the name of the writer from Gallia to

Asa, something that might make it interesting, a lesser part of boring here.

She lies awake in the nite and thinks about her writing, it all comes together, somehow,

magically.

109
She was at the airport and she was at a turkey celebration, in that Omelettery on Granville and in

the gym. She read this book about time and the river, she read parts of a book that garnered a

Nobel here or something like that.

Her writing is as bad or as good as you want it to be, the main objective is that it should be

published, once you publish one, then you can publish others. The foot in the door, something

like that ah something of that kind here.

33674 here, spellcheck, spellcheck here.

She ponders, there is more to the early morning coffee run, the description of the gas station

maybe, this time around she really noticed it, she usually never notices it. The gas station is so

mundane, so all-American, whereas the coffee house is more sophisticated, so European here.

Both companies are American though, she remembered all the Chevron places in Richmond,

when she used to live down in the States, some thirty years ago here.

The feel of this day, one of many days, something that has to be eternalized in writing, part of a

book, part of a novel here.

She has a mere page. Two pages is the minimum per day here.

The office, the home office. Where a book takes shape here. Whatever made her a writer? Does

she have the chops, does she lack them? Who will listen to her songs here, when are the words

poetic enough, precise enough, accurate sing-songs here. Does she have to frequent bars and

pubs where writers hang out? Where do they hang out nowadays, are they all part of Creative

Writing programs? Are they locked away in academia, because that is where literature is

happening these days? Far away from the real world here?

110
Do writers live in Santa Monica, ruminate endlessly on the pier, while the ferris wheel is

glistening in the distance? Do they all want to sell their scripts to people in Hollywood? The

Harvey Weinsteins of the world, and he is on the news a lot these days, though not for good

purposes, noble pursuits here.

She stares at the monitor, at the little icons that surround her writing here.

Later she will roam the citay, you can do that, maybe she will find stuff to write about, to write

about here.

Another sojourn out into the world. The mall before the stores are open. At eight in the morn.

Figures with clothes behind glass, mannequins in blue dresses. The dome of the ceiling, the

lights. Outside still dreariness, still greyness with light knifing sharply through it. She could

venture downtown, be part of the sardinelike existence which is inevitable at this time of the

year. Or go up to the airport, downtown, airport, all these places where you lose yourself in the

sea of people here. The city ah the city. And then to go back and write about it, the downtown

song, the Petula Clark song, in book form here, all of it extracted inside of a text here.

But she should rush home, get to it, venture some 70 000 words, so that she will be able to type

up the nano novel come November first here. Her fingers will hurt, too much typing does that to

yer. Especially your right hand, the middle finger and the nerves near the knuckle. Physically it

is impossible to be prolific, you have to use a Dictaphone or something here.

34 191 words, she feels nauseous, feels like barfing all over the place all over the place here. So

much to do, dieting, losing weight, writing, so many many novels here. All of these goals that are

totally unachievable, the to-do list will never be done, never be done here. Run a marathon too,

in your spare time here. Higher faster, richer. The superlatives that are all drearily and readily

111
unattainable here. She feels like coughing up blood, she is slumbered in by her inability to

fashion the right words here. Nothing works and nothing ever will. Later on she will make her

way to the wine store, they will hand her a bottle of chardonnay, the man with the big belly will

put it in a brown bag and she will venture home like the lowly whino that she is here. This is how

writers are these days, the ones that are not winning nobel prizes and not even a publishing

contract here. The ones that will rot in the cloud, on issuu and on scribd, the lowly ones, the

drunken ones, the forgotten ones, the ones that are not stored in volumes on shelves in mothy

libraries and second hand bookstores next to Union Square here. Hers is the land of the forgotten

poets, she will never ever make it, never make it here. Her characters are too shiny or too

obscure, they are always something too this or too that. Her writing sucks, apparently, apparently

here. Nobody will take her on and Maxwell Perkins is long long gone here.

34421. Write on ah write on here, type on here, type on here. In the distance the sound of an

ambulance, in here only the sound of the keys that are pushed down, and the hum of the

fluorescent light above her. Later on, she will watch FRIENDS, this is what keeps her grounded

in reality, watching characters that do not exist flimmering over a screen, a mirage here. It is

eight forty-two, on a Monday that is actually a Tuesday here. She will now do the reading thing,

read and write that is what we do here. The novel about time and the river, the fancy one with all

of those big big words here. She still has to do quite a lot of reading until this is done here.

Reading as chore ah reading as chore here. All of these books they all clamor together into one

big pile, she does not remember any of the individual stories anymore, that happens if you read

way too many books at a time her, you forget the individual plots, just remember the title pages,

the book covers here, how much you paid here for each and every book. And the ones that are

online, are even less discernible than the ones that you heap on each other on the coffee table in

112
the other room here. Later on, she will have a latte, a foamy one, but not yet, not yet here, first it

is reading and a-writing, a-writingish life here. Eight forty-seven, October nine or ten, in 2017, in

Vancouver, ah British Columbia, British Columbia here. 34686. Here, type on and type on and

type on here. Save it in the cloud, yep, why dont yer, dont yer here?

Well, she is a good writer but her writing is all over the place.

One sentence that gives the judgement. Thumbs up or thumbs down. You are either in or out.

You pass or you fail.

This is not how literature is. Any writing should be heard. Grocery lists are just as important as

dissertations. Value judgements suck. Hierarchies. Lower words, higher words. Judgements

inhibit creativity, make people stop writing. This is how it is how it is here. Author here can hear

the rain coming down. She will stay put, just type up words. Her home office here. One day she

will rent a room in a hi-rise in downtown, will venture there, make the writing process more

official. After all, she is a freelancer, a one-person operation. But still one who wants to sell her

words. She has to target publishers of books, not publishers of essays, shorter forms, articles. Not

the New York Times, but Straus Farrar something. Not midtown but downtown.

The rain is coming down coming down here.

34889, it is forty-four minutes after nine here. Later on, she will venture out and buy a can of

beans, baked ones here.

American cheese.

She will drive-thru mackadees and order a filet-o-fish from the woman with the crowdy, craggly

face here. The thin and old one, the dry one here. All dried up, all pruny here. Her hair in a bun,

113
she will sell her her piece of fish with the cheese and the bun here and a hint of mayo, a sharp

and overly-vinegary one. There is ketchup in there too and a pickle here. She still needs more

words here, more words here.

Her words are misguided by the words that she reads. She reads about food and thus she starts

describing food. See something, mimic it. Monkey see, monkey do here. The time and river book

has way too much influence on her writings here. Maybe writers should never ever read, abstain

from reading anything here. Maybe mere food labels or the names of businesses on storefronts.

The station names on the bus. They should listen to some jazz singer in the caf, the short

fragments of a song that finishes once you are out the door here. Words that pass you by, not

whole sentences here. Let the visual make your words, look at stuff, look at the world and then

write. Own your sentences, somehow and somewhere here. Let them be poetic, more poetic, less

poetic here.

She has 35131 words here, it is nine fifty-one in the morn, a grey morn, a rainy morn here. The

guy that she sent her text to, did not answer, we are snubbed by somebody who is way younger

than us here. These are the tastemakers of the nation, the world here. If they reject her, then they

are on the wrong side of history here.

35199, it rains ah it rains here. Time to watch King of Queens, yup, it is that time of the day here.

The telly and the couch and the rain and the typewriter. The ingredients for a great great book,

the greatest, the greatest on the planet. We are all Trump, we can all make up stuff about being

the best and the brightest. If you say it often enuf, it will somehow stick and somehow stick here.

Why be modest when u can be boastful here? The end of modesty, the world of trumpness here.

We can all nurture the inner Trump in all of us here.

114
On the telly, King of Queens here. It is eleven and seven, still dreary outside here. Actually,

more dreary than before. She could take this to the coffee house, there are people there just

waiting to be watched. Ah, the act of people watching here.

53, sorry, 35 353. All these numbers here. Reading or writing. Later on, she has to go out again,

to keep it real, so to speak. The coffee place and the mall, that in itself is not enough here. She is

definitely not the kind of writer who can just ruminate around the house and come up with

stories. She needs bright lights big city. Or some kind of substitute for that, even the gas station

will do here. Motion, movement. She is definitely not the kind of writer that can come up with

words while sitting on the second or third floor of a house near a placid lake. She needs the

energy of the city which will then translate easily into swills of words that glide onto the page,

miraculously, motionlessly. Writing is all about bullshitting, lets face it here. Any words will

do, should do here. All of these utterances are basically interchangeable, they are hit and miss,

that is how it is, how it is here. Nothing to it, nah, nothing to it here. That is her philosophy but

apparently it does not fly. The rejections of her queries are still there to prove it here.

And now it is the two broke gals on the telly. Author here just read up on the Nobel laureate of

economics, some guy who wrote book called MISBEHAVING. She must have seen it in the

bookstore because the book cover is very flashy. Book cover design is half the way if you want

to sell a book here.

35 611, near to 65 700. Well, not really, we still need some sentences here.

2300, she penned 2300 already. And it is not even noon. So it can be done here. Penning tons of

words, nothing to it. The story goes that Thomas Wolfe went out into the street yelling that he

wrote 10 000 words, ten thousand words today. And to think he did not even have a wordcount

115
icon on a monitor here. Nowadays there is nothing to it, a lady in Iceland wrote 50 000 words in

17 hours as part of nanomonth some two or three years ago. At least she claimed so on the

nanowrimo forum here. Nanowrimo, of course, is short for national novel writing month, what

else, here.

35 737.

Later, she can go out and have a cupcake here, because all this talk about cupcakes makes her

hungry. 2 Broke Girls is all about a cupcake business and it is what is on the telly just now here.

35777. Once more, the two Italian women who teach cake decorating in the 2 Broke Girls show,

yup, that episode.

Words words words here. In the river and time book, Eugene is now in Orleans in France. No,

not New Orleans, that is in the States here. Louisiana, maybe?

Author here just rambles on, just to fill the page here.

She should go down to the coffee place, have a latte or something.

Writers, at least, in North America do not have good lives. They live in their lil rooms in their

peejays, away from human contact, in total isolation and hammer away at their products. No

human interaction, total isolation here. The artists studio, the writers studio. The lowly lonely

genius. It all has to do with this misguided view of art, this bohemian, romanticism. This notion

of reality that is totally off. Anyhoo, she was in the coffee house and had this concoction that has

whip on it and weird, salty caramelly crystals that are not good for your teeth and not good for

you and kind of taste disgusting. The woman did not get her name, not even after spelling it

twice. Apparently, she does not believe in exotic names, apparently she is of the opinion that she

116
is the only one with an unusual name her. Nope, lady, we can deliver funny name, it is basically

our only strength. Here. Gotta milk it.

Now it is FRIENDS, 36016, BTW, here. Her hand hurts, something is off, is off here. Maybe she

broke her thumb after all, and should have hand surgery, x-rays, the whole enchilada here. Some

things you cannot just shrug off. some things apparently do not heal themselves. You cannot

walk off each and every booboo. It might get back to yer and bite you in the you know what

here. Phoebes, Ross, the like on the telly here. 12 and twenty-four, rainy day, nothing was going

on in the coffee place, except for that they now have a new kind of madeleines-three-pack.

Something with white glaze on it, glazey squiggles. It is October and her novel is non-published

as of yet here. Her second novel for the year and she still will pen another one here.

She could write a book about a woman named Asa who is originally from Sweden but now lives

in a city named Brownsville. The story is fictional, the woman is fictional, Brownsville is

fictional. Sweden is not but then again it would be because all that author here knows about

Sweden is Abba and Ikea, two logos basically, two words with four letters of the alphabet, all of

Sverige distilled into four letters, and one of them is the same, the B in ABBA, so basically it is a

word with three letters because the B is repeated. A country in three letters.

This is definitely fictional. And in this laptop, one cannot write the A of ASA the way it should

be, with the little O above the A, so that you pronounce it OA, just like Asa is pronounced in the

Swedish language, though intonations and dialects might differ, even in an all Swedish context.

Each region has its own intonation, each social group has its own way of saying things. Each

social sphere here.

36638, laugh tracks and once more Mike and Molly. All these sitcoms all day long here.

117
36654 words here.

Anyway, still writing here. Still writing here. She might go downtown and watch this movie

about moviemaking, it is a seven minute short and it is about the drama on a movie set. A behind

the scenes documentary. Well, apparently it is about the different characters on the movie set, the

director, the camera person, the actors, the crew. The people who hold the sign before somebody

yells action.

It should be interesting because it has moviemaking as subject matter, the very technical process

of moviemaking. It is the same as what we do here, write a book. Write a book about the process

of writing, write a book about the writer herself. A look at the persona of the writer here. What

does she eat, what does she do? The greenery outside of the window of the writer here.

Apparently, the sun is coming out reluctantly here. Not that good, the melodramatic rain is better

for the story here. The bright lights will kill the drama, the sunniness takes away from the story

here. Moll instead of Dur as the Germans say here. Moll is some kind of musical thingie just like

Dur is. Moll is muted, it is about muffliness, rainy days, about clouds in the sky here.

Diffuseness. Mystery here. The idea that there will be better days, the impending light, the not

yet there stuff, in short, the potential for positive stuff. The hope. The quest. We can do it, we

can reach the summit but we are definitely not there yet, we are still struggling. Life as struggle

with the potential for loss or for winning. The equal opportunity idea, sometimes you win some,

sometimes you lose some. That kind of thing, yup, that kind of thing here. She feels like frozen

yoghurt or something, Beaujolais or whiskey neat here. Vodka, sangria, ice cream here.

Chocolate or something something here.

36638, laugh tracks and once more Mike and Molly. All these sitcoms all day long here.

118
36654 words here.

Gallia writes a book, a stupid title for a terrible book. A horrible title for a horrible book here.

Yup, that seems about right here. Everything is falling into place, though not in a good way here.

Who wants to be a writer anyways? Must be so much better to write for a newspaper or

something here. You have the accumulation of talent in one place, you have colleagues, happy

hour. You can booze and forget that you suck at your job and lets face it, everybody sucks at

writing. Comes with the territory, comes with the territory here. Words are never good enough,

everybody knows that. They are a lesser thing than reality, they are an abstraction of the real

thing. You translate reality into some utterings, some guttural sounds here. Still typing, still

typing here.

Later she will go downtown, later she will observe the commuters. They are there to be watched,

to give her fodder for all of her stories here. For painting her scenes, the scenes of her novel here.

her sucky sucky non-novel here.

She will now read about the Nobel laureate, the one that wrote about something called behavioral

economics. The one who teaches at U of Chicago here. The one who made a name for himself.

76, sorry, 36895 here. She constantly misreads the tiny lil wordcount icon. Freudian slip,

wishful thinking here. She hates writing, hates that this is what it came too. A glorified

stenographer, a glorified typist. Maybe she should be a translator or something, translating

somebody elses glorified words here. Like this, she has to make it all up by herself, provide the

ideas, provide the contents. And then push it all into the right format here. At least, she refuses to

promote this, to market it, to bind it, to store it. No self-publishing for her, she is pooped already,

119
even just by providing the words here. She wants to get out and enjoy the sun here. Instead of

being cloistered up in here with the typewriting machine here.

37 021, she typed up some 4000 words in one day. Not bad, at least the numbers make it here.

She feels sick though. All this writing is not healthy, I tell yer.

There is a Brownsville, a city in Texas. There is one in Florida and still in another state.

California, maybe. But it seems that the Brownsville in Texas is the biggest one, the one that has

the highest population. The one that has the biggest area. Mainly, because Wikipedia has the

entry, the most data on it. Author ponders, if there really was an Altamont when Wolfe made it

up. The tricks of the novelists, did there even exist a Bulerbue when Astrid Lindgren wrote her

childrens books?

Five and forty in the evening. She does not feel like writing. There are better things one could

do. More pleasant ones here. Writing as chore. As task waiting to be filled. Author listened to

this talk, this online talk by the founder of the Brooklyn Rail which is a magazine about art. He

apparently did not view his job as chore, it was what he was doing for a living. Her writing here

is more like a hobby and maybe that is where the problem lies, that is why her writing lacks the

seriousness that literature, real literature has here.

Outside the nite is near, the last lights are on the tops of the trees outside. Goldenish green here,

orange tints. A day in October, so near to evening, to night here. Five forty-seven, she had fish

from the drive-thru on forty-first here.

37287, 37288 here.

120
Maybe she can drive this here down to forty thou, by midnite. It is now six and forty-seven, she

is writing since seven in the morn. Well, make that seven ten, that was when she had her cuppa-

joe in the coffee house next to the gas station. Ever since she is here at the typer here. Well,

frequently, one cannot really do this in one sitting here. There is reading, there are other short

trips here.

In between writing spurts you have to get out. And now she remembers the timeline, she was in

the mall, wanted to take the train down to downtown, look at total strangers in order to be able to

write the right words here. Tolstoy used to sit in the town square in order to be inspired by the

faces of the people. He did not need inspiration - what is that noise? Well, this is a sideline for

Seinfeld aficionados.

She still needs some more words here, some more words here. Six and fifty-two here.

Wildfires in California, so the telly. Near Santa Rosa, where exactly is Santa Rosa? Yesterday it

was Napa Valley, but that is in the North. Apparently, the wildfires are all thru California here.

She types, she types here. It is definitely getting dark, the day is coming to an end here. In the

morn, it was reluctantly bright, at this time of the day, everything was getting sharp just like now

everything is losing sharpness. One day, twelve hours. From sun to sun, getting up, getting

down. Dawn to dusk. And she is working on her words, working on her words here. The literary

agent did not answer, snub her. Aah, who cares, there are tons more where he comes from. The

whole city of New York, filled with young interns who read your words here. One of them will

like what she sees, has to has to. Who would like her stuff, usually the boys are more eager. They

seem to like her kind of words more, maybe because ah, who knows what goes on in peoples

minds here. Maybe the guys are more eager to take chances with funny voices. And any voice is

121
funny, any voice. Any voice by a new author. You have to tread lightly, do it as the convention

dictates, but you have to subvert the way that things are done ever so slightly. It is a balance act,

definitely. If you are too weird, then you are basically just that, weird. Way too off, way too far

from the mainstream, whatever that might be here. And if you are too conventional, then you are

way too boring. Fine line, ah, fine line here.

37740.

It is dark now, it is nineteen minutes after seven on an eve in October here. On the telly, Michael

Isikoff.

Seven fifty-six. Don Lemon and his guests. It is more like entertainment here. Politics just like

Seinfeld, sans laugh tracks though.

37783.

Author here is starting a new novel while still being at the other novel. Novel-overload. One

book that is written in 2017 versus one book that was written in 1935. Or maybe those are the

publishing dates. Ok, give or take some, 80 years in-between. The new book is constructed with

more care, like a building, the older book, though, is full of enthusiasm and full of words that are

slightly archaic. Lots of big words here. The older book meanders and maybe that is where its

charm lies in. Sleek books are kind of off-putting here. She is no literary reviewer, no literary

critic. She just reads so that she can figure out how to construct a novel.

37901.

One hundred words now and then this will stand at 38000.

122
Catalonia and Spain. Barcelona here. And now, Seinfeld here. The one with the dry cleaner,

though there are several of those here. This one is the one with Monica from FRIENDS here.

On the telly, the show about How I met your Mother.

So now a stab at the Asa story. Asa who lives in Brownsville. She moved there in order to work

on her writing. She does not know anybody in the city.

Thats it. That is all we have here. Brownsville, a female named Asa. Oh wait, she is from

Sweden. So, we have the city, the person, and her country of origin. And the purpose for her

move. We do not know the date of her move nd neither the date of the story. Somehow it is all

very thin. On the telly, the mold guy and his thanking the mold jury for his prize. Funny stuff

here. BTW, it is ten and twenty-nine and we have 38075 words here. Some 5000 words in one

day, well, not quite. Next to 5000 here. And now still another sitcom, Rules of Engagement here.

For some reason, they only have one episode of King of Queens in the evening. And two

FRIENDS at lunchtime. Some rearrangements here.

She is way too much in front of the telly here.

38136. She needs 200 more and then she will have 5000 words. 5000 words in 15 hours here.

That makes how many words per hour? 300 words per hour.

It is all about math here. Not about contents here. Not about style, punctuation, grammar here. If

something is written wrong, you can always call it experimental. Artsy fartsy here.

She is a visual artist, she trained as an animator. Writing, nah, it was only an afterthought here.

Not necessarily her calling. She could knit instead or do embroidery while watching soaps here.

38227. We still need 100 words or so here.

123
Page 123.

She is veering off of the original story here. The writer who writes a book. That too is a too thin

story. Even without the move from country to country.

Writing about a writer, that is basically a big selfie. 38277 here. On the telly, an ad for a

breakfast croissant. Just saying here.

Maybe just some fifty words here. We can stop then, we have reached the magical number: Five

thousand here.

Some mere twenty and then it will be all finished here. The allotment for today here. Maybe ten

words and then we can easily stop. 38335.

It is not really a novel, more a journal, a logbook. A log here. The minutes in writer land. The

clear descript here.

So we looked it up on google maps. Santa Rosa is north of San Francisco. Napa Valley, that area.

Sonoma, Napa County here.

12:13 after midnight. FRIENDS is on. Some reading and then some writing here.

Eight and twenty-six in the morn. Wednesday, humpday. For her there is no dif. She was at the

coffee house already, while the rain was coming down. Well, technically, the world is all rainy

and wet, but there are hardly any drops. And boy, is it dark, it is daylight but really grey. The

wetness makes everything looking crisp, looking sharp. Refreshed. The cars are all coming

down, all lined up, their headlights on. The commuters. There is a man behind her in the coffee

line, fortyish, red fleece hoody. Construction but sans hardhat. Though he could be anything, just

like the others here. There are two men talking over papers, in the end, they do some

124
conversation, they shake hands. One tells a story that seems to be secret, he looks around and

lowers his voice. It is bout another country and its policies.

Now, back at home, it is LEAVE IT TO BEAVER on the telly, when she left, it was MY

THREE SONS here. So this is what she does, writes against the songs of old sitcoms here. She is

that kind of person, a sucker for sitcoms, a rejecter of soaps. Uncle Phil is boring, the drama of

love and emotions, who cares. Marriage, who sleeps with whom. Salacious stories are boring and

too ridiculous.

Her writing ah her writing here.

And her reading.

Later she could venture out, after all, she is wearing the same outfit for three days straight here.

This better translate into an ample amount of words here, all her poor hygiene should morph into

many many new words here. Innovation has its price here. The innovation of new passages, new

word configurations. Insights here, philosophical ones. A writer and her ideas, her words. The

preposition she uses, the adverbs here. The woman Asa, the woman Gallia. Reluctant alter egos.

All writers here.

There are other professions. But writers write about writers. Thomas Wolfe did. For 900 pages in

OF TIME AND THE RIVER; and LOOK HOMEWARD ANGEL is pretty long too. The trials

and tribulations of Eugene Gant here.

It is forty minutes after eight. It is rainy outside. And the date is October something, October

eleventh maybe. The year still 2017.

She has 38770 words here. Stop and spellcheck spellcheck here.

125
The coffee house in the morn. The woman said, are you taking grande, nope, tall. Mundane

conversations. Each and every day here. Later, the gym, the mall. Nothing ever changes. She

could be sixty or sixteen, seventy. Her days are the same, only staccatoed by the way she types.

The place she sits. Usually the kitchen table is by far the best, it has this quality of being a start-

up, entrepreneurship. Just like all the big businesses start in ones garage, this is the narrative of

the twentieth century, the late twentieth. It is all about LOOK HOW FAR I HAVE COME, a

multibillion enterprise that started out this small. The fast run, the marathon. The going to

everything from nothing. It is all about the steepness of the ascent. The leaving failureland to fly

extra high. And then there is the plummet, lots of times, like the unfolding story of Harvey

Weinstein, from Miramax to zero. The up and the down. The moral behind this is kind of like do

not try out, do not fly next to the sun. Icarus, do not be an Icarus. It will come and bite you, hunt

you down. Stay average. The people who tell these stories say so.

So much for philosophizing at eight forty-nine in the morning here.

There is nothing to it, anyone can make up interpretations of the world around here. Nobody

knows where the truth lies, your guess is as good as mine here.

39023.

Next to forty thousand words. No story no story. On the telly, the beaver in a rabbit costume.

Black and white rules. Black and white TV, that is here.

9052, 39053. There is a problem with the three, when she pushes it down, it does not work at

first, you have to push several times. Weird, the cranking up of the machine here.

126
She will google where are they now. The beaver used to be in MARRIED WITH CHILDREN,

the adult version of him. Where are they now, though it is now about a WHERE ARE THEY

NOW for MARRIED. TV-land and its rules, its idiosyncrasies.

It is nine forty. One hour and forty minutes since she left the house for the coffee place here. It

was exactly eight on the clock, the digital one on the nite stand. Now author here is not quite sure

if that was when she woke up or when she left for the coffee place. But she pretends that it was

eight and she just basically killed time in the last two hours and nothing productive really came

out of this, out of her efforts. She just ran in circles, basically surfed the web. She sent a query to

a woman in nyc, a woman named Kim who seems to have an interesting twitter account that

brought her to the online literary mag that she publishes or co-publishes in Brooklyn and where

author here came upon this article by a writer who lives in Central New York or leatherstocking

New York, a part of New York State where he lives with his wife and child or children.

Anyhoo, he writes about whether you should stop reading a book if it is boring you or whether

you should opt for chugging thru, if you should explore a writers oeuvre and if you should start

with the newer books or the older books and if you will miss upon the better stuff , miss out if

you only read what is deemed as the masterpiece by some random literary authority, some self-

proclaimed authority. After all, there is no Judge Judy in lit land.

Well, he did not really say all this but we are paraphrasing here. Author herself is quite interested

in this, she read two novels by John Upton, two novels by Emma Straub and two novels by

Thomas Wolfe, well, she is still hanging in there and will finish the second one one of these days

here. So, it is basically two books, two texts by three authors, three published authors. Last time

she did that was in 1973, 1974, they had to choose one author in German lit, she chose Max

Frisch, mainly because she had read more than one book, the play ANDORRA and HOMO

127
FABER and GANTENBEIN. But it was that she basically liked his writing, his way of putting

things. The basic message of Andorra. She read several of Peter Handkes works too.

And now stuff in English. It is fun to explore one writer, Emma Straubs first book the

vacationers is just better than the new one, MODERN LOVERS, better put together.

Thomas Wolfes second book is better, though. Mainly because she is more interested in the

making of a writer and Eugene Gant is now older and tries to be an adult.

Anyhoo, on the telly, Perry Mason, she is sitting for two hours in front of a computer, there is a

world outside of here, there is, trust me here. not everything is happening on a screen, what are

you, someone living in NORAD. She is going crazy, physically there are repercussions for too

much sitting in one place, too much staying put here. It is nine and fifty-seven, near to ten.

Maybe time to have the south west wrap with the beans and quinoa here.

39662, nothing but the mundanest of observations here. This is what we do, this is what we do

here. At nine and fifty-nine, while Perry Mason is letting out here, the end music that is so

reminiscent of other, better times.

Ten ay em, me-tv, Seattles tv here. one of these days she will take the bus down there. And now

Matlock, yay. His white coat, suit, him standing in front of the jury and pointing to one side here.

Ten oh eight. Matlock and a woman. He asks her questions. Author feels like going out

and getting a bottle of wine and bringing it home in a brown bag that is shaped snugly to the

bottle. Hugging it here. But it is nine minutes after ten in the morn, you are not supposed to get

all wasted at that time of the day here. Waiting for happy hour is so yucky, thus wed better not

start. We just stay sober, sobriety yay and the boredom that follows. Just like fun Bobby who

becomes boring Bobby in Friends.

128
Author here liked the pic of the five musicians, one of them being Tom Petty, the other one being

Bob Dylan, George Harrison, the one with the high voice and the glasses, the Travelling

something, and the caption that said: and then they were two (or, there were two). She liked this

pic on somebodys Instagram feed that said: now I am in Portugal. Instagram pics can be fun, the

stuff you stumble upon. She always follows this guy, he seems to be a guy, that is called

nixpassiert, it means nothing happens though it is kind of slang. Nix for nichts and it is more

northern German slang, Hamburg maybe. Most of the images are Hamburg-centric, though he

now has images from Bruges and from Portugal, the best ones are the ones that show places in

Hamburg here. nix passiert. Seinfeld, the story of nothing.

There is something to be said for the trivial, the banal, the mundane. She loves to take pics of

grocery aisles, this is where it is at here.

Her writing does that too, it describes the everyday.

So, after all, in the end, we have our subject matter pat down. The poet of the everyday, that is

what she will be, what she is here.

There is a reason why Bob Dylan won the Nobel for lit in 2016. It was long long overdue here.

He is the best. Something like that, something of that kind here. And now back to the reading of

the time and river book here.

It is now Mike and Molly and Matlock, which one to watch. Both of them are at a suspenseful

part of the story. Molly and galsse, glasses. She tries to spy on something. And Matlock is

finding a murderer. There are people in disco clothing. And now an ad for a college that instructs

people in medical fields. They are wearing scrubs. Doctors assistants, something like that here.

129
40163, so, half a book is done here, well, next to half. Once she doubles this, her new novel will

be done. Outside, the bright lights of the shining sun, ten and forty-seven in writers land

readers land tv viewers life here. What is the new gossip on the news here?

40213. Apparently, she misreads the lil icon, it is way too tiny here. The ad for Twix, its time

to deside. Funny huh. There was an ad like that, maybe for Bounty. Or some other chocolate bar.

Two pieces of chocolate with filling that are basically the same.

So, she has 1000 already at ten fifty. Two hours, nope, three and a thousand words here. Three

hundred per hour. Not exactly so very fast here. Fifty words per minute. Or fifty per ten minutes.

Actually, more like one word per minute. Math is not her strong side here. Now, Carl is singing

here.

Nothing but writing in front of her. She could do stuff, go out for a latte. The one with the crispy

salty caramelly crystals here. She could watch more of King of Queens, the one where the

secretary called Doug and said I love yer. You know the one, well, you do if you watch as much

tv as the author here does. Not really what one should do with ones life here. Writing while

watching tv. Typing while the tv is on.

40398 words here. The accumulation of words here. The plot is not there as of yet. But it will

come, like magic here. Which is basically how we do stuff. We wait for inspiration. We cannot

really court it. Do research about how to build a story.

Basically, her inability to construct a plot is because she is not that fascinated by stories here.

So, she is all over the place. Reading parts of the Thomas Wolfe novel, the parts where Eugene is

in Tours, reading about Harvey Weinstein and listening to his interview on The Good Morning

Show, looking at Two Broke Girls on the telly here.

130
40506 words, she could go out and have a latte or go out and have a chocolate bar. Or just sit

here so not to eat more than she should. She had a banana bread already in the coffee house and

then a wrap that she brought with her from the coffee place. She sits hunched over, is that what

writers do? Have bad posture but type a lot here. She has a tummy ache,maybe there was

something in the wrap, something in the beans, the sauce here.

40594 words, who would be interested in reading this all here?

It is eleven and fifty-one minutes here. Four hours of writing, 1500 words here. It is all about the

quantity, running writing, writing as marathon. The Tour de France of writing here. On the telly,

the hoarder in Two Broke Gals here. The hoarders living room here. She is just a hoarder of

words here. Hoarding words ah hoarding words here. How do hoarders live? Who pays for the

hoarding lifestyle here. She feels like boozing but she will not do it here. Better to just type here

type here.

40695 words here. Han on tv talking to Max, now Oleg.

Now FRIENDS. Marlo Thomas, what is new in sex? Author here was in the coffee place and it

was full of the kids from the nearby hi-skool. She did not get her coffee latte, the line was

excruciating. So back to watching Friends here. Now, an ad by the guy who hosts jeopardy, Alex

Trebec or something here.

40765. She wanted to pen something intelligent about people that read and people who write.

But there is nothing to say, it is just stuff ppl do here.

40792. Later on, she will go to the drive thru maybe at three or four in the afternoon. Fish is

always good and the sandwich just has 400 calories and it is delish and we can just have some

communication with real-life-people here, the woman, nope, the man who stretches out the

131
thingie on which one polishes the card and then the woman who stretches out her hand which is

holding the brown bag with the fish inside. The fishy food here, the one inside of a bun with

cheese, yum, yum here.

Now the wedding of the wife of Ross with her lesbian life partner, well, it will be the wife here.

or the husband, whatev. It is all with wedding music here.

40918 words here. She started out with 39000. 1600 words, something like that here.

She feels like having a drink here. Vino vino here.

Ross is having food at the wedding. You know the story, though most ppl have lives, they do not

follow sitcoms just as author here does. Then again, these days, she is reading, so it is all good,

all good here. There is achievement or at least, a sense of achievement after you worked your

way thru 900 pages at a time here. 41005. Yay. Writing, ah, reading here. While listening to the

telly, the background music that marches everything forward. Just like Radio Luxemburg in the

old times here.

Radio Luxemburg was an all-music-station back in Hamburg, well, back in Europe. In 1968,

1970. Sixties, seventies, way back way back here. Yup, we are old here, but we were young once

too. Cycle olife, something like that here.

She hates the i-cloud icon that comes up on her computer ever since last Wednesday, ever since

her new i-fone. And there is nothing one can do, just gotta live with it here. Another Friends

pisode here.

41108 here.

132
An ad with a monkey. Marcel, Malibu Barbie. And now the dancing in the fountain. Scenes from

Central Perk here. The kissing of Ross and Rachel here. And an ad for liposuction here. Usually

there are ads for mypillow here too. It is twelve minutes after twelve here, she wrote aand wrote

and rote aand wrote here. The constant pushing down of keys.

Later, way later in the day here. The sun is setting, outside here. There is another rerun on the

telly, Two and a Half Men, the one with Bertas sis Daisy. This is the second time this is playing

in the day or maybe even the third one. Who is counting, after all. She could go outside, do the

drive-thru thing. It is not six yet, there will be a line. There always is a line, but one can see

things, streets with orange leaves, streets with orange leaves on the ground. October ah October.

Fall again. Just like the inscript on the door of the coffee place says here.

Five and thirty-nine here.

Now the yelling of Berta and Daisy while Charlie is caught in the middle here. The roar of

laughter.

Author here ponders, other writers have better stories to tell, she just says it as she sees it here.

Five forty-one. 41327, which means that we now have two thousand words in a day. Ah, whatev

here, whatev.

Maybe she should sit somewhere in a smoky cellar where liquor is flowing furtively, freely. That

is where the artistes are apparently, judging from the videos that she is watching, where there are

singers on the stage, where there are readers or plays in places small in nyc. They all are

somehow glamorous, glamourous in a very exclusive way, all those places have just like very

small audiences of five maybe four. That is how her writing is here, it is not for the mass market,

but for people who have slept all day and then are gathering together while there is artificial light

133
and darkness outside, streetlights and fog. Authoring is a toughy, there are tings like lit crawls in

nyc, in San Francisco here. She has 41471 words, it is October eleven, it is two thousand and

seventeen here. She reads thru this book by Wolfe which keeps on giving, such a long long book,

long story not short, and she is writing writing herself into oblivion here. Filet o fish has to wait,

the drive-thru has to go on without her here.

On the telly, still news about Harvey Weinstein here.

Reading thru the reviews of something called The Secret Theatre which is on Long Island,

Queens, six minutes from the MoMa PS1. A woman complains because she was not cast as an

actor. She called them racist.

Author does not need to fly to nyc, you can live it up just sitting inside the room with the green

couch. Be a shut-in with a screen. Not good, there is life outside of these walls here. On the telly,

the making of Chicago pizza. Author found this very very big bag of nacho chips that somebody

got from Costco, you cannot really have something else after that many chips here. Well, not the

whole bag but still.

41650 words here. Time for vino, tea or something here. It is that time of the day here. Half of

the novel is finished, a novel that still does not have a story. It is all about writing, typing up stuff

since late August here. Gallia, Asa, author here, whatever the name is, there is a time in ones

life when you just write memoirs, weird ones, winded ones. You can roam the planet and find

other places to write, food places, cafes, pubs. Computer labs in colleges, something like that.

She misses her studenty days here, but she is sitting at home these days here. The commute is

way too much, but sitting put is not good either here. Maybe she will go to the gym, the problem

with writing is that you are your own boss which means that you are constantly scheming what

134
to do but in the end you sit put and push down keys so that you have a certain wordcount in the

end here.

41815 here.

Pizzeria Uno, they show the history of this restaurant apparently. Deep dish pizza here. Ginos

East. It is something like a Chicago Mafiosi story. The plot thickens here.

Pizzeria stories. It is all about tomato sauce and dough here. Uno, Due.

The i-cloud icon is annoying, always appearing out of nowhere on the monitor here. A film about

pizza fights here.

Watching this pizza movie, author feels like going out to the pizzeria next to her house here, the

one on West Boulevard that is always filled to its brim.

41907 here.

Baelli, Batelly, Batelli, yup, maybe that is the name here.

Six and sixteen here. 41923.

It is all about deep dish pizza, the deep dish landscape. But isnt deep dish an aberration. Looks

more like a quiche.

It is now seven minutes after seven, well, actually five minutes after. She read thru the time and

river book, now it is about Eugene being in Nice. All the descriptions are very painterly, very

visual. He is such a good writer, nobody can do what he does with words. He is like the German

writer Heinrich Kleist. Sentences that are pages long. On the telly, something about Chicago,

apparently something about a soda tax here. 42020 words at ten minutes after seven here.

135
Twenty minutes later. Tomorrow there will be an Art in Odd Places thingie in nyc. Sense, that is

the theme this year. Author here did that in 2012 when the theme was Model. It was great, her

only art project since finishing art school in 2010. Her only art making these days is writing.

Two to eight. In two minutes, Seinfeld will start up. She left home at eight in the morn, twelve

hours and writing reading here. The output is a tad less than 3000 words, she needs some 200

more and then she will have 3000. 3000 in twelve hours here. It is all about numbers, all about

how many words. The number of words she read thru, the number of words she wrote down

here. The Harvey Weinstein scandal intensifies, so the man on the telly. It is the news for BBC.

The man is thin, the suit he is wearing seems too big, he is swimming therein. His hair is not

grey and not brown, it is somewhere in the middle. He has a long face like a horse, with big eyes

that gulp out because of his hollow cheeks here. He has a British accent but he does not have that

typical British air here.

Now, it is all about Santa Rosa, where the fire just came so suddenly in the urban area. The

houses that burnt down, seems, it is like the Oakland fires here. Apparently even worse here. A

brutal fire that smoldered up everything here.

Eight oh five here.

October eight here.

Two men in Castro Valley, a father and a son.

Now a woman who talks to a reporter. Author has seen her before, she is important, powerful.

Hardly wears any make-up, that is why she is so memorable here.

136
42327, six words and we have 3000, the 3000 words of October eleventh. The minutia of a life

here.

It is fifteen minutes after eight here.

So, the time and river book is finished here. Finally. This was quite an undertaking here. Just like

Moby Dick, just like, The Swamp, wait, The Jungle. Like Homeward, Look Homeward, Angel.

These are the four books: THE JUNGLE, MOBY DICK, LOOK HOMEWARD ANGEL, OF

TIME AND THE RIVER. Quite monumental tomes here. They were all online, which is kind of

awkward here.

Anyhoo, we have 42420 here. Nine and thirty-one, still October 11, 2017.

The question really is, how do I make it in bookland, how do I make it in coffeeshopland? So,

that is basically what the literatureland is today. The laundromatland too.

So, you are a writer now? It is a cocktail party and her former painting teacher grills her. He still

has authority over her, he is the big cheese, she is the little cheese. It is New York City, he is

retired. A writer? He seems not to approve, he taught her how to use paint, not words. He

disapproves of her choice, one can see that clearly.

The scenes in the life of a writer. That is what her subject matter is, just like Thomas Wolfe

writes about that. You have to write what you know. And what is really real, is this land, the land

of typewriters and fingers tapping away here. Basically a very uneventful, very sedentary world.

In-between it is the Y on Forty-ninth, where seventy-year-old women with beer bellies sit in the

dressing room place and take off their clothes, all of them and yell at each other in Mandarin or

Cantonese. They all have short white hair and no inhibition whatsoever here.

137
Author here sees it a tad as an affront, apparently, she is very prude. Or is it more like in

Seinfeld, I am not ashamed of my body, that is where the problem lies, you should be. For some

reason people who have a lot to hide are arguably exhibitionist, these are not Victoria Secret

models, nope, they are plump and roly-poly housewives who walk around being proud of their

bodies, god only knows for what reason. The place in the Y, now there is something one could

write a book on here.

She was in the coffee place in the morn, it was weird, there was something wrong with the the

register so the barista stood way back and did not say good morning, which kind of caught author

here off-game, you are an automaton at places like that but if they do not give you the right

password you are definitely off your game, nothing functions, everything stalls here.

It is rainy outside, drizzly, she is back in the car at eight and eighteen. Her novel ah her novel

here. She will read the book about gambling, the one by the writer of Motherless Brooklyn. It is

not a long book, well, compared to the time and river book that was 900 pages long, this is

nothing here, a mere 300 pages. Should be done by afternoon if we get to it here.

Reading and writing while the rain is coming down here. Sedentary sedentary. But we have to

write this up, gotta yup, gotta. The home office, that one ah that one here. No talking to

colleagues, no social interaction. The mere typing ah typing here. We can check what the lit

agents said, the two that live in nyc, or work in nyc. They might live in Upstate and merely

commute here. The woman lives in Brooklyn, the man in Long Island City. Or somewhere on

Long Island. Or in Westchester. She tries to figure out who these ppl are, who will reject her on

Gmail. And reject they will, they are that kind of people. The ones who want plots and she does

have no plot here.

138
Plots suck, are for da birdz, that kind of thing. We dont do plots out of principle. She feels like

hard liquor at eight forty in the morn, mainly because she read somewhere that this is what real

writers do, they are drunk all day, wasted, they stagger thru life and that makes them into the

wordsmiths that thy are. They are uninhibited because of the amount of ethanol that roars thru

their veins here.

43064.

She has two pages already, she could stop. But these days it is all about doing the unthinkable,

doing more words a day then others do in a year. It is about the October rush before the

November novel. She has to do it do it here. Work her fingers off, do this ah do this every day

here. The writer, the person in search of a plot here. There are people who cheer her up, cheer for

her. Her husbands aunt, she liked her writing. Unluckily she just praised her writing and then

left, that is not enough here. there have to be others, maybe she should do readings here. With

readings it is tricky because you have to choose which pages to read. And author can never make

up her mind here. In her book, everything she pens is superb. There are no lesser passages, no

better passages. They are all equally great here. And the rain is coming down and coming down

here. 43223 here, for now and for now here.

Author here should concentrate on the persona of the writer here. Should an author read her stuff

to the people next to her? To family members? Or should she hide her stuff because family

members might be biased whereas strangers are more objective, they tell you what they think, in

a non-biased way, there is no emotional baggage, they have nothing to gain from lauding or

dissing your writing, your work here.

139
Author should look up if the lit agents have answered but if they do not answer immediately it is

pretty obvious that they are just waiting it out, after four weeks they will say thanks but no

thanks. It is the agents who answer immediately that count. They usually react to something in

her words, some glimmer of a new potential rising star. The person that has been found by the

agent, the new Hemingway that Perkins discovered. The one that makes you forget that you have

to get out at the subway stop, the one that makes you miss the stop. The one who is able to write

like that, whose words are intoxicating, like scotch, like old scotch here. Like crack cocaine. The

words that are vexing and mesmerizing. Author ponders, are anybodys words like that? What

can you really say to vex a person, to make her forget her surroundings here. And is not each

individual different and has a soft spot. Some like spy novels, some like erotica. Soft porn,

mystery. Political insights, books about space travel. Books about how to be an animator here.

Each literary agent is different, each one has different things that they like here. How many lit

agents are there in nyc? How many interns here? She has 43626 words, nope, make that 43526

here. She mistyped the six, a six instead of a five. Is it even important how many words we have

here, is it not more important what is said. Author here is reading the book about the gambler, it

is becoming interesting. The writer reminds her of Orwell, Lethem is just as single-minded as

Orwell is. They stick to one very clear story and to only that one, George Orwell does it in Let

the Aspidistra Fly and Jonathan Lethem does it in this book that has two dices on its cover and a

backgammon set. Author tends to forget the titles of books, she is much better at remembering

the names of the writers. Why is that, why is that here? Is it the latent jealousy, why were you

published and I am not? Is it because you have an English name and I have an exotic name. Does

my name give it away and rightly so that I am not as good with the language here? Is it the idea

that we cannot really learn a second language, the language that you author books in should be

140
the language that you used when you were in your terrible twos. Everything acquired later is not

that good here.

Ell, that is weird, UK people call French fries chips, there is no homogeneity at all, she had her

British English teacher not understand her Americanish wordings mainly because of the

geographic difference of London and Vancouver here. People speak differently in different

locales, let us face it, they speak differently on different blocks of the same city. Language is

such a weird and strange communication tool here.

Anyhoo, 43800 here. She has some 2000 here, not quite not quite here. nine and fifty on a so

very rainy day here. she took the newspaper and put it somewhere where it might dry out, it was

all so very wet here. ah the rain the rain here, on twelfth of October in two thousand and

seventeen here.

It is ten fifty-five. She read to page 56 of her new book, it is not good enough, it is a book that is

geared to being produced by Harvey Weinstein well before his fall from grace here. But, yep, it

really is a book that wants to be immortalized in Hollywood, that wants to garner an Oscar as a

script. Which is weird, why should words be on a screen. There is a difference between literature

and movies, writing should be poetic, it should translate into theater, a play on a stage. There is

something less celluloid in the written word and the spoken word. A certain immediacy, a

mobility. You can take a book with you into a coffee shop, you cannot take a movie screen with

you here. But there is something about books about the written word even if you read it online

here. You can see if the writer wants to be in the movies, the stories are dramatic, there is the

gambling world and the Mafiosi world, the gangster world, hints of Chicago. Underworld,

danger. It is far away from nonfiction, far away from scholarly writing. It is more like yellow

press, purple press. Autor here wonders, where does hard liquor fathom in here? Her writing is

141
more like embroidery anyways. Female writing, male writing here. The writing that you do while

watching FRIENDS or KING OF QUEENS. Suddenly it thunders, very very loud here. It is good

that she is indoors here, this is so very loud, if youre on a bike it might kill yer. Lightning here.

Now it is Arthur and Doug, they are talking about baloney sandwiches.

44145 words here. Her novel ah her novel here. Lethem talks about Berkeley, he mentions Chez

Panisse. Author ponders, does one have to use real world locations, does one have to mention

them by name when one writes? Can one not make up stuff as one goes? Fictional places,

fictional cafes, fictional organic restaurants. Is Chez Panisse even organic or is it just basically

the quintessential restaurant from Berkeley, the one that made it and that everybody raves about.

The celebrity chef versus the noncelebrity chef here. 34232 here. 44232. She misreads the icon,

she should have a looking glass here next to the laptop, so that she can read the wordcount in

here. It is eight minutes after eleven here. October twelve, a rainy day in vancitay here.

A west coasty novel. Versus an east coasty novel. An Oregonian novel, a novel from

Portland. She ponders if the locale of the writer will skewer the novel one way or the other here.

It is thirty-five minutes after eleven. Maybe it is time for a coffee in the coffee house.

Though it seems that the thunder is horrible, roaring here. Maybe one should stay put inside and

wait out the horrible weather. On the telly, it is Two Broke Girls, she is reading thru Graham

Greene and the end of an affair and listening to an audio about a restaurant at the end of the

galaxy or the end of the universe. The audio is read by a British actor who apparently plays

Watson or Sherlock Holmes and who is separating from his wife, she too is an actor. And then

there is Harvey Weinstein on tmz and his saying that his fall from grace was a tad too swift and

one could really say that, nobody had even heard about the guy and now he is all over the news

and there is not even legal action, seems the media is prosecuting him, so is all of Hollywood,

142
even Clinton and Obama, they are lawyers, have they ever heard about the Miranda law, is

everybody going insane here?

And now an ad for lipo and a woman who cries because of her weight, a grown up, a mature

person, now, how weird is that here?

Coffee in the coffee house, maybe that is what we really need, because sitting cooped up is not

normal and not natural here. Imprisoned life is the wrong kind of life here. You cannot imprison

yourself just so that you write an amazing novel here. What is a novel anyways here? A poem

that is way too long here. You need three words to say something, like boy meets girl, there, that

is all of Romeo and Juliet here. Boy hates girl, boy leaves girl, boy does something. See, it is all

about what boy does, apparently boy is more important than girl. It is always framed as boy

meets girl and never ever as girl meets boy. Seems that in academia, in literary criticism the boys

call the shots, they make sure who will be published and who will not be published, academia is

a mans world and the girls are mere newcomers, after WW2, they were not even allowed to vote

before. Yup, make no mistake, the patriarchy is well established, as a female writer you have to

be very clear in what you are doing here. You have to know where the obstacles lie. Who wants

to play you and for what reasons?

She might go out after all and have that coffee with whip and crumbs on the whip here. It is

eleven and forty-nine, once she is back, there will be Friends here.

So basically, she writes a book while watching FRIENDS. She was out to have a coffee with

whip in the coffee house, and it was really really rainy, one could hardly drive through the

pouring rain. For some weird reason there was snow in the parking lot, apparently somebody

came from Squamish with snow that melted. Or is it hail, no, it is snow, it has the appearance of

143
snow, hail does not look like that. Hail does not smoosh together into a soup of goo. Anyhoo, she

does not park, so there is no coffee with whip here, no standing in line with kids from the hi-

skool. It is back to the room where the telly talks and a novel should be written, will be written.

On the telly, the court drama with the three judges here. 44891 here. So near to 45 thousand

words here. Her writing ah her writing here. She sucks at writing, whatever she writes here does

not make sense. Nobody wants to read about the life of a writer, nobody wants to know. It is too

banal here, way too banal, too work-a-day, too everyday. There is no drama, none, nothing

sensational. At the most, there will be a drive-thru moment, the thoughts about junk food versus

organic food, ruminations about health and what here is healthy. We will all die, btw, gotta let

you in on this fact here. She is totally irritated by this icon with a cloud, the i-cloud icon that

should not be there and is now on the monitor since a week ago, the week that she started using

her new i-fone here. her computer is compromised and there is nothing we can do here. Her

writing will suffer, will suffer here. Silicon Valley is eating up her novel here. Somebody in

Cupertino, in Palo Alto, whatev here. Her novel is stalled ah so stalled here. It is sixteen minutes

after twelve, after noon. Sixteen minutes in the afternoon. She is getting it all wrong here, that is

how it is how it is here. 5103, 45104, here. She will go back to reading the book that meanders

between Berlin Singapore and Berkeley here and that is written by the famous author who made

a name for himself by writing about the Motherless Brooklyn here, yup, not about the fatherless

one, no sirree here.

Or she will watch Friends, nothing but Joeys insights to make you feel grounded somehow. The

antics, ah, the antics here. It is a world before face book, those were the times when facebooks

were mere real books bound with spines, usually found in ivy league places here, colleges, the

like ah the like here. Facebook, huh, huh here.

144
She could write bout the coffee place in Itzehoe, the one that she used in her other book. The

Bahnhofstrasse 30 one, no wait, it was Bahnhofstrasse 20. She has never been there in real life,

well, she has been to Itzehoe some twenty years ago or so, but the coffee place is something that

she saw the image of online. There is a hotel above it, a small town one here. The coffee place,

the curtains, the writer in the corner. Where does fiction end and where does nonfiction begin

here? Writing ah writing here, poetry, songs. 45306, her book here sucks ah sucks here. They all

suck, reading in itself sucks ah sucks here. Literature, what exactly is that anyways here? When

did it even start, with Gutenberg?

Author here is listening in to this lecture by a woman named Jill Lepore, it is great, she is a good

talker, a good speaker, she looks very affable and her talk is about something like Sim City, the

board game of The Game of Life and Milton Bradley. Author came upon this wrire because of

something, an article in The New Yorker though she now forgot what the article was about. This

always happens when u surf the web, your attention span is just not there but you can go back

and retrieve your former search here. It is weird but these are weird times. Apparently, the

speaker on the you tube clip wrote about dystopias and utopias and that this is a golden age for

dystopian fantasies, books like 1984. Author here was actually doing research about Melville and

Jules Verne, the fascination with stories about big monsters, she is not a writer of utopias or

dystopias or anything like that, no sci-fi movies, no sci-fi writing, it is way too made-up but there

is a market for that whereas there is no market whatsoever for what author here writes, literary

fiction, basically a logbook of the everyday. Nobody wants to read about what happens when

you order a cup of macchiato, everybody does it all the time anyways, we want to read escapist

stuff, about grander stuff, things that are bigger than ourselves. We want to read about heroes,

superman, ppl thinner, people that look like Sharon Stone or Julia Roberts not like the puffy

145
faced woman in the mirror that has a blot and a pinmole, that can hardly hold her eyes open and

that is overdrunk, had too much vino in the nite before here. The regular human being next to

death, the sixty-five-year-old pensioner that now has time to write down her memoirs here.

On the telly, Monica, when she was a big gal here. The going to the prom, Ross and the flowers

here. She is your lobster, he is ur lobster. The friends lingo, the secret language here

Five and fourteen in the eve. Still afternoon, actually. But the weather is so dreary, it could as

well be night. Such a grey day here. she was at home, except for a short spurt to the drive-thru

which was actually quite harrowing. So much traffic, does nobody cook anymore? Tsk tsk here.

Besides, the hi-skool had just let out, so a lot of foot traffic. Lots of cars, one could hardly drive.

The car behind her honked, apparently, she drove too slowly which means she took precautions

to not drive too dangerously here.

45775.

She still feels very isolated, she should go out again to the coffee place and have a coffee with

whip. But we have to watch calories, she had enough food already. 1500 calories easily, maybe

more like 2000 here. With her bodyweight she does not need more than that. So, what do we

want here, isolation or calories, or both?

45837.

So apparently, there is something called graphomania. But she said that already here. Too much

rambling will not take you anywhere here.

Five and twenty-two here.

146
The news outta Boston on the telly here. Driving down to the coffee house is better than sitting

in here and typing. She is basically inside these walls since eight in the morn. It is now five

twenty-nine. Nine hours inside. Drives yer insane here.

She fashioned some words though. Not quite sure how many here. Maybe she should write it

down. The start number.

42400 is the number at which she started out here. So, some 4000 words were written. Maybe

3500 here. She read and she wrote. Listened in to a talk on you tube and to a podcast. Watched

Mike and Molly. But the real thing, the moving thru fresh air was not done here. And she is not

that good at calibrating the wordcount, the number of words that she did write on October twelve

here. It is all so confusing here.

46009.

Any 4000 words will not do here. They have to make sense, apparently.

Rain outside, rain outside. A writer is just a person who is way too chatty and cannot find

anybody to listen. That is what writers are. Chattomaniacs. If they write, then they are

graphomaniacs. But they definitely overdo it. They ramble. It is what it is here.

On the telly, an ad for a weight loss medication. Weight loss out of a bottle. I think not. Weight

loss is all about sensible eating. No Big Macs allowed. She had a Big Mac and is still hungry.

Could still have a macchiato in the coffee place. The one with whip. Salted caramel something.

She does not like people staring at her. Not that anyone minds what the old woman in a hat does.

She looks like death anyways, much older than she really is here. An old overaged woman here.

Somebody ripe for the garbage disposal here. On the telly, a man talking about the weather in

Boston. Apparently, it is gorgeous, everything that the weather is not like here.

147
46188 here. Northern New England, well, in the end it will be much colder over there here. Five

and forty-seven here. 46209 here. five and forty-eight here. In the PM here. Two and a Half Men

here. The mom is always funny. Drinking poo. 46232 here. Valerie Harper. With the guy who

married Mila Kunis here. Ashton Kutcher.

Author here is ah so bored here. 46254 here.

Cheetos and pee jays. That is what people do these days for entertainment. In the old times they

had to dress up and venture out, go to the theater, be entertained somewhere outside of their little

rooms here.

46294. maybe we should write this all up and then we have it done here. 46308 words here.

46311. She counts each and every word here. It is all about the accumulation of words here. All

of these amazing books that will flow over the market. Fat chance, she does not write that kind of

genre. Genre that sells here. Her books suck, they are unsellable. The subject matter, everything

here.

If she fashions four thousand more, she will be fine here.

The coffee house at ten, the coffee place at eleven. Three women at the other table, each of them

saying stuff that starts with my husband. They do not wear wedding bands, because one of

them seems to be from South America, one is Japanese. Lots of countries are not into wedding

bands, it is no biggy.

The neighbor woman is going out for lunch. There is a whole world out here, one that starts at

ten, at eleven. Social events that are of the ladies doing lunch kind of category.

148
Author is back at the typing machine typing here. There is a writers fest in town that starts up

today. Author here can either write all day or read all day or go to the writers fest all day here. It

is a working day, a Friday. As a writer, every day is working day here. You live where you work.

Just like when there were longhouses. You live where you work. Nowadays there are offices.

And now they are not anymore because rent is way too high. All these lil screens make us go

back to the time of the longhouses here. She writes, writes, they were out of wraps in her coffee

place. What to do, ah, what to do here?

She is like a dogwalker except that she is walking words here. On the telly, King of Queens,

much better than General Hospital. There are the sitcom watchers and then there are the soap

watchers here. She should write bout that. A dissertation about the people that watch tv during

the day here. Books about that have to hang out in the bookstore instead of the grub you usually

get here. Doug and Carrie in an Italian restaurant here. Carrie starting a fight here, while they

have their red wine, there should be more to read into this here. writing about laugh tracks, that is

basically what we do here. Outside the sun is shining, in here it is either reading, watching tv or

writing here. Producing a body of work here.

4000 words have to be produced here. This is how Friday here is running. Just like each and

every day here. 4000 words per day, all of the rest of October, so that in the end we have 100

000, and we can start up the 50 000 of November here. Later, in December we will iron out the

glitches here.

Feverish typing ah feverish typing here. A plot might crystallize or it might never be there. If not,

then the days of a writer is all we have here. And that should be enough here. If we manage to

choose the right words, the best words here, then this will be easy okay here. Who says that the

life of a writer is not enough of a subject matter. All her days are wasted by defending herself

149
against the allegation that the description of a writers life is not enough of a story here. It is, it

should be. Thomas Wolfe basically described a writers life, so did Hemingway. Except that the

writer was living in Paris. George Orwell describes the life of a writer in Down and Out, and the

times in between writing here. Writers have to write about writers, that is all they know here. The

existence that they can follow, that they know inside out here.

The coffee houses where one writes, the pubs where one writes. The strangers that one sees here.

all the eight billion on this planet here. The world ah the world here. 46971 here.

Today is Friday the thirteenth, one of those days here. Friday the thirteenth, better stay inside

here. So, this is why they were out of wraps here, because the day of course is cursed here. 13

hours until the new day will start up here, the better one here. The one that is not the thirteenth

here.

On the telly, Arthur, Carrie and all of the laugh tracks here. 47072 here.

There is a movie called THE WORKSHOP at twelve, she can still get there. It is about, what

else, a literary workshop here. Or author can just keep on typing, the stuff you do after finishing

a literary workshop. The writing of a book here. BTW, King of Queens is finished. Time to read

for half an hour here.

She clocks herself, yup, exactly one half hour of reading here.

So, this is the life of a writer here. The half hour read, the one that is clocked. About Telegraph

Avenue, author is nostalgic. Books do that to you. Though she never even walked thru Telegraph

Avenue, but she knows where that is. Well, she must have driven thru, maybe that is where she

got her drivers license. Ages ago here.

150
After that read it is drive-thru and now it is the second Friends episode for the day here. The

drive-thru, was interesting, people in trucks, roofers, glass companies. There are divers inscripts

on cars. The people from the high school. Author here took home a Big Mac, apparently 502

calories, nope, wait, 520. Just as much as the wrap here. It is different, has pickles though. Two

pieces of sliced pickle or maybe just one here. The anatomy of burgers here. One burger, not the

meal here. The woman at the drive-thru, the other that gives you the burger, hands you the bag.

47279. Phoebe and Rachel at the tattoo artist.

Monica, the Twinkie here. Tom Selleck and the woman who married the brother of Roseanne

Arquette here.

Now Ross and Chandler, well after the scene in the birthday party here.

47316 here.

Mon, are you ok? Well, do you remember the video I saw of mom and dad? Yeah, well, I just

caught the live show.

You have to live in rerun-land to get the gist of authors writings here. The stuff that we type

while being bombarded with tv, audio, video. The words that come, automatically. Just like what

you would write if you are a reporter covering a live sports game. The commentary that is just

so, just there. While something is happening, in real time. Though of course this is all

prerecorded, edited, rerun ah so many times here. Dubbed into other languages. She has watched

this stuff, in French, in German here.

Elliott Gould, and now, the tattoo that Rachel has here.

151
47442 here. she has to edit some ten thousand words here. between 37000 and 47000 here. ten

thousand words here. all tis typing ah, all this typing here. now it is joey and chandler here.

outside, sunniness, in here nothing but typing, tv, reading of words here. about Telegraph

Avenue and stuff here.

Apparently, authors get seven figure advances. Seven figures which means one million bucks.

How many Twix bars is that? Author here is hungry, a huge Big Mac does that to yer here.

All the minutes of a life here. hamburgers, Twix, the coffee that has whip and sprinkles thereon.

The women who talk about where prints are inexpensive, the barista says Staples but author

knows that there are places where the printing is less. Less than ten cents per page. But the prints

smell, because of the inexpensive ink here.

No Mike and Molly, now the writing about the coffee house at lunch time. It was pretty empty,

that is because it was one already and the hi skool has started up its afternoon program here.

Author here did not see the biker but luckily, he was watching here. He was on the pedestrian

way, author here was doing a turn. He was old, her age. Luckily, he was biking so very slow

here. there are always problems with that particular crossing, author herself had problems when

she was a pedestrian here. The cars that turn did not see you, nobody knows why here. They just

do not expect people on the pedestrian walkway and that is why there is a problem here. They

concentrate on turning here, on the street with all of the cars here. The pedestrians are

afterthoughts, they just come out of nowhere here.

47773 here.

The writing ah the writing. Apparently, the writers fest starts on Monday, the film fest in

downtown is finishing up today and the book fair in Frankfurt is in full speed, well, only today,

152
tomorrow and the day after. We are in here in this small place with the telly and we are typing up

the masterpiece. It is all about the number of words and apparently, we can write whatever we

feel like here. It will not be public, there is no publishment. The love for book publishers is

unrequited. We love to be published but publishers do not love us here. Nobody wants to put

their money behind the printing the marketing the storage of the words of yours truly here. We

might as well wear white, the woman in white in Amherst was not published. Everybody has her

inner Emily over here. On the telly, laugh tracks here, author here feels like barfing. Later in the

day we could venture out and come back with vino, white one or red one here.

47904 here.

Yahoo, she could save this on the mail thingie here, or somewhere in some cloud here.

Twix and Big Mac and banana loaf and macchiato, obviously that is a tad too much here.

It is three and eight. Eight minutes after three in the afternoon on a Friday in October. Friday

thirteen, which is not good. Everybody feels kind of weird. Author here once lived in this house

that had the number twelve plus one. Apparently, they wanted to make sure to not use the

thirteen word. That number. It was a long time ago, in another country, on another continent.

But, let us face it, the apprehension about thirteen, that is a global phenomenon here. It is what

binds us together, we hate what we hate here.

48037.

She needs some 52000 words, then and only then can she stop here. She will type up fifty

thousand words, but that is nothing here. All in November here. She has twenty or so days to do

the 52000. 2000 words per day should be ok here, should cover it, over this here. she will read,

she will write here.

153
Different writers in different places. How about that as a subject matter? The description of the

way they work. Not more than three. She did that before, described one in Itzehoe and one in

Reykjavik, one in nyc and one in Vancouver. Ok, make that four. One went to a writers studio,

the other two to a coffee house. The Vancouver one did not really have a place, she was mobile,

often just sitting in a room with a telly.

Author wrote that and then queried lit agents but all rejected the idea, the story. So now we can

either revisit that idea and make it better or go for something new here.

Plots, plots, huh here.

It is now fifty-six minutes after four. She read the part of the story of the book by Lethem which

was the descript of the surgery. Made her sleepy.

She reads about the Weinstein saga, apparently, he is now in a restaurant in Scottsdale. Paparazzi

taking pics here, feeding the saga.

8265, 48268 here.

So now we have edited this, it is ten fifteen, still Friday the thirteenth, still October, still 2017.

On the telly, once more King of Queens here. We could read some more or flip thru the book

with the New Yorker cartoons here.

48343.

No more rain outside, seems it is nice again here.

48353 here.

Four oh nine here.

154
48360 on October fourteen in 2017. A Saturday, drizzly, a tad. Definitely grey. Oakridge and

fourth Avenue. Now Ms. Pelosi and a reporter. Axelrod or something here. CNN. Author here is

way too tired to type up stuff here. She should get out and vote, apparently the voting place is

open till eight. The city hall by-election. A city councilor and a school board member.

48425.

She has to go back in here and change words here. Names. Everything has to be just so here.

There is an art book fair in town but author here is way too tired. There will be the second part of

the fair on Sunday here. Maybe for now it is just sleeping here. These days she is always always

exhausted here. Only enough energy for sleeping here.

4894.

Sorry, 48496 here.

Five and one minute here. She is typing this up here. Mainly surfing the net but not going

anywhere specific. You live in an armchair, you travel the world in an armchair. That basically

makes your writing a lesser writing. You have to live outside with the three-dimensional people.

You have to breathe reality. More so that you get a person to publish this here.

The big five. The big five publishers all based in nyc here. There is something called self-

publishing, there are zines here. You can go to a copy place and print up your work here. 5he

binding costs five bucks or so. 300 pages cost 30 bucks. So, you have 40 bucks and then you

have the book as an object here. A real book. Paper, ink, spine. Hold it in your hands. At this

point most of her stuff is online. A file on the computer. Something that you read on your laptop

here. How will you ever be able to make this into a volume that can be put on a shelf? And do

you really want to do that? Well, yes, let us face it, digital is not better here. Yes, digital means

155
democratic but it means obscure too. It is somewhere, somewhere online and nobody will find it.

For writing, you need the physical object, that is for sure here. The physical object, the book. The

in-person reading in front of an audience that might clap or might throw rotten eggs at yer here.

48790, nope, 48750 words here. Five and twenty-three here. Outside the greenery is waning

here. Darkness will come sooner here.

On the telly, a woman and two men talking about Donald Trump here. 48782 here.

Three hundred words here and then we will have 49000. It is all about the numbers, the

wordcount. If there are enough words then this will fly. She feels like boozing, how can you do

this without being intoxicated. Making up stories while being of sane mind. Is it not weird to

invent stories about persons that do not exist? Is it not surreal? Is it even a job for any serious

adult? Kids make up stories, invent fairy tales. But adults? It is all mirrors, smoke and mirrors.

So is the movie industry, Hollywood. Actors, people that pretend to be someone else. Wear other

peoples clothes. I am not a doctor but I play one on TV.

She now has 48906 and she is making a case for why there is an innate inability for everybody to

write a novel. You can write fiction because fiction is just that, fiction, and it does not exist in

reality. The only thing that we know for sure is that these characters in a story are all made up

here. Any resemblance to real life persons is mere coincidental here.

There is no Gallia who writes a book, no Asa who writes one. Let alone those characters at the

beginning of this text here, the Detlefs and Mandanas here. Pure speculations, pure mirages here.

Wow, this is heavy, she just dissed the whole business here. Storytellers are fakes, phonies,

charlatans here.

156
Author ponders, this is not the attitude that will get her anywhere. You cannot bite the hand that

feeds yer, though, technically it sure did not feed her as of yet here.

49055 here.

The problem is that she is not able to construct a believable story here. most good stories

nowadays are well-researched. The locations of a city, they really exist. You cannot really write

a story that is based in nyc without the real names of the real streets. You cannot suddenly invent

parts of the city. Or maybe you can. Maybe you can make up city parts. How do others do it,

other authors? Other scribes here. Do they suddenly place Google in Hells Kitchen instead of

next to the Meatpacking? Literary license, artistic license, well, yes, but only to a certain extent

here. Maybe, it is ok to make up restaurants that do not have yelp reviews here. How real do you

have to be, how fictional can you be? No wonder that schools charge you a quarter of a million

bucks for an MFA in Creative Writing here. It is a science, it is a science here. Maybe that

should be her subject matter here, how much can you lie and get away with it? Fake news, fake

fiction here. Well, fiction is supposed to be fake after all, so everything is just the way it should

be here.

And now it is six and eight minutes here. Late, late in the afternoon. Still, there is time to go to

the voting place here. She never ever missed an election, she knows her civic duty and she is

nothing but dutiful here. If she does not vote today, how will she be able to live with herself here.

There is a problem though none of the candidates seems qualified, and the ones who are, are too

young. They are kids hardly out of high school here.

On the telly, a movie about Madagascar here. A cute animal, a monkey that looks more like a

bear here. A black and white monkey here. The person who shows us around is a young kid with

157
a British accent here. It is a CNN documentary here. Actually, the reporter is American, the

person he talks to is British here. Both are male here. The boys still rule, still rule here.

In other news, still the Harvey Weinstein story here. The preoccupation is weird, so very strange

here. In this world, this is news. Why?

There are wars, hunger, wild fires, earth quakes. But it seems to be all overshadowed by some

story about a random producer in Hollywood here. Wow. Salacious stuff always wins out.

4970 here. Sorry, 49474 here. There is a movie about Christopher Robin, though, apparently it is

not showing in town as of yet here.

Outside, darkness at a funny cusp. Not really dark, not really light. The time in between. If she

could write like Thomas Wolfe, she would be able to describe this here.

49525 here.

The book that is half way is lying on the coffee table. The font is really tiny so that is annoying.

You do not have that problem when you read online here. So, at this point, tv is winning out

here. the audio, the moving pics. You really hav to force yourself to read stuff. The bookfair in

Frankfurt has one more day left here.

Asa lives in New York. She came to Penn Station at night. She is walking down Seventh

Avenue, or is it Sixth? She always loses her way here anyways. Where exactly is FIT, the

fashion institute? It is dark, nighttime. She has a coffee, the Starbucks is still open. It will close at

eleven. Ok, it is a quarter to. He has a Mocha Frappuccino with whip, no caffeine. Decaf,

apparently that is how one is supposed to say it. Decaf is easier to say anyways if your mother

tongue is not English here. She feels disorientated already even though this is the city she adores.

158
In a very weirdly madly way. The honeymoon will be over soon but it definitely is not yet here.

The whip is nice, the sugary salty yellow crystals melt crunchily here.

Author ponders if this is how one should start a novel like this here. Maybe she needs a writing

workshop here. Just like the contestant on Jeopardy did. Seven and thirty-nine here, Alex is

asking his questions here.

Seven fifty-two. Night outside. Darkness that is. 49774 here. The book without the plot. The

book that will not make it. There is always self-publishing. Self-marketing, self-storage.

Everything self. No publishers. Why bother, they will be dead against this here.

The first half of the novel here. One minute to eight here.

The novel where the author cannot even make up her mind how to write this. Reflections about

novels, about literature in general. Ah, this better be good, better be good here. She still needs

150 words until 50 000 here.

On Wednesday or on Thursday, maybe Tuesday, this writer will give a talk. The ticket is some

thirty bucks or so. She wrote a book about Manhattan Beach. She is on a book tour, she will even

read in Danville.

And now, it is Seinfeld here. The opposite. That episode here.

Eight and six minutes here. 49915 here. Kramer is going on a book tour. First stop: Regis and

Kathie-Lee.

49929 here. Once she has fifty thousand words here, she just needs fifty thousand more. By

November first. She will just describe what she sees on the telly here. Or the goings-on in the

159
coffee house. That will fill the pages here. just ramble, just wax on here. In the end, it should all

fall into place here.

A job with the New York Yankees. George Costanza, baby, George Costanza here. 50000

exactly.

On the telly, Fareed Zakaria here. He talks with Hillary Clinton here. Author was outside, she

was in the coffee house, that coffee house here. One could watch the persons who were going

into the Hellenic center on the other side of the street. They were lonely figures, walking like

they had weights bound to their feet. They were walking while thinking, walking reflectively.

Nobody was storming into the place. Solidly, patiently. A kind of walking that negates itself,

more like standing than moving. A very slow speed here. the person who is walking into the

church is wearing a trench coat, one more brown than beige.

There are other things to see, a man with a dog in front of the window of the coffee house. A

baby that wants to touch the doggy, the puppy. The mother tells the baby to wave, to open and

close the hand. Do not touch, just make hand signs. It is the mother with the three kids, though

today she just has two kids. The one that is strapped to her and the one in the stroller. The older

one is not here, is at home. The mother comes to the coffee place here, for her too it is a routine

thing here. The barista smiles at author, tries to guess the drink. She smiles, and author fetches

herself as not smiling back. She is kind of embarrassed to come here every morning, it is like

confessing that you are not able to brew your own coffee here. Which, yes, she is not, she is after

all a tea drinker at heart here.

And now, it is Hillary and Fareed here. They are talking about ballistic missiles. Hillary looks

much better since running, losing becomes her. She can be criticizing what somebody else does,

160
second-guessing him instead of being second-guessed here. Everybody is s a critic. Hindsight is

twenty-twenty here.

I find that so disturbing, and let us face it who does not find Trump disturbing? It is his face, the

weird hairpiece, a seventy-year-old that looks like a cartoon figure here. It is more about the

aesthetics. Hillary looks good with colored, dyed hair, but the Donald looks just ridiculous with

that kind of hair. Never mind the politics here.

50382 here, on a day in October, a Sunday, Sunday the fifteenth here.

Later in the day, there is this book fair at the art gallery here. We could go there, stroll thru it. It

is nice, like a farmers market. A farmers market of books. A craft market. People make their

goods themselves and then bring them to market. It is more the flirting with the idea of selling

stuff, stuff that cannot really be sold. The buyers are more the people who just stroll. The

window-shoppers here. The weekend shoppers. Buying as hobby here. not as a professional

endeavor, a serious thing here. Her observations ah her observations here. Useless insights or

something here. 50497 here. One more, 50501 here. The words that accumulate here.

Doing laundry, that is what this day is for. The fast Monday, where the man rushes in to get the

coffee that is prepared, that is waiting. The one that he ordered beforehand. The one that he

texted about. He is walking though, so there is one good thing, it was not texting and driving

here. Then again walking and texting is just as bad here.

The dreary Monday, even though it has all the newness of Monday it is still dreary, still grey

here. Everybody is in there for seconds and rushes out with the coffee. you are part of something

when you are in here. You too feel exited, all worked up, you rush back home and start atyping,

161
the masterpiece, the greatest, the one in a million one, the written document that will outlast,

outdo all other written documents here, the one that is penned on a Monday in October here.

The day before she finally made it to the art book fair, two talks, one better than the other. A

residency in nyc, in midtown, something in a copy shop here.

Now the laundry is rushing around in the machine. The grating sound. The being here with the

wash. Later still more excitement, the dryer. Writing, while stuff gets washed. The immediacy.

The water, soapsuds. And you thought there is nothing to write on. Philosophy at the laundromat.

Though technically this is not a laundromat. It is a lesser laundry place here. No urbanity, more

suburbity. The washer in the suburbs. You cannot leave, you have to wait till the circle is done.

You have to mind the machine. The water that is encapsulated in there. You have to watch out

for leaks. The dryer is even more fickle. Sometimes it acts up here.

The machines of the burbs here.

The writing about them as if they are persons, real people. Later she will go out to the coffee

place on West Boulevard. Or get a bottle of vino and schlepp it home, with a bad conscience.

Will get all wasted because nobody will publish her book here. This very book. The mazing

words, the one-of-a-kind ones here. The long long poem. The one hundred thousand word long

one. Anyhoo, let us read da book. Shattuck, Telegraph Avenue, the like here. The book that is

planting her back in time here.

50901 here, BTW here.

The writers fest is starting today evening in downtown. On the telly, it is Matlock and it is kind

of a cliff hanger here. And she is still at the book with Telegraph Avenue and Shattuck here. It is

162
a Monday, the load of laundry is swirling around in the belly of the dryer here. He has to be in

here and wait this all out here.

Some more words here some more words here.

51000, so near ah so near here. On the telly the ads for the International House of Pancakes here.

There is this other pancake place in town here, it is really good here. Next to the Canada line

station in midtown. What goes for midtown in this city here. She still has to be here, waiting for

the dryer to finish its twirling. The machine will make a noise, thrice, when it is all dry here all

dry her. Outside, there could be drizzle, though she does not know. The curtains are down here.

Once more the commercial about the pillow here. Mypillow or something here.

51068 here.

Stories of coffee houses and dryers swirling around. Matlock on the telly. The suspenseful

music, we will find out who did the murder. Impending resolve of the mystery here.

51119 here.

She is on page 241 in the Jonathan Lethem book. On the telly, Diagnosis Murder is starting up,

upstairs, the dryer is doing its spiel.

She has to invent a woman named Gallia or a woman named Asa. All these writers who do their

thing. Who produce texts, text after text. Somebody will publish it, the Big Five. Then books will

be bound and stored until there are takers here. There are booktours, that kind of thing. The

machinery of publishing here. The book fair in Frankfurt is over by now. Still another year to go

here.

163
Others on the telly here. Later, it will be the latte in the coffee place. Latte and whip. If you have

that in increments, the book will write itself. All around the lattes here. An ad for Alf. All reruns,

rerun galore here. You have come to the right place here. This station outta Seattle here. She is

into Americana these days, Dennys, IHOP. Casinos. Must be the book she is reading, All of the

talk of Shattuck and Telegraph Avenue. Who would have known that there is a time warp

slumbering inside here.

Maybe no more wordcounting. Just the words themselves.

The dryer is still swirling. On the telly, the guy who played in Mary Poppins and a woman. The

first siren of the dryer. There will be two more.

She finished the book, she started a new book. Both books were green. None of them is very

good.

On the telly, Big Bang Theory. She had a BigMac for lunch, from the drive-thru. It was raining,

raining on her sweater, when she paid, raining, when she grabbed the brown bag. Both persons

were young, the one who took her card, the one who dispensed the food. One was male, one was

female.

She later had tea, milk, sweets. All she does is read, write and eat. TV. Well, laundry is done,

later she will make the bed. Outside, greenery, wet greenery. 51451 or 51452.

Her writing is not good enough. Or maybe it is. How would she know here?

She feels sick, too much food. Way too much food. Not the right kind. The milk topped it all off

and not in a good way. This is where you need hard liquor. Bourbon whatever bourbon might be.

What do writers drink? Scotch, Gin, vodka? Dainty tea in a cup with flowers? Tap water? Yup,

164
definitely tap water here. She will read some more, listen to the laugh tracks. Sheldon: I am from

Texas and You are from India. He is talking to Raj. His voice has this weird intonation here.

Some fictional characters in movies talk like that. William Shatner did in the columbo episode

the night before.

She sure knows how to watch TV here. The book that she reads now is confusing but the writer

uses the word TELLY. He is from Northern Ireland, apparently. Though she thought that he is

British, he went to Cambridge.

51618. She wanted to ignore the word count, it is tougher than you might think here.

She still feels sick here. Sick, tired, sleepy. There are dirty dishes piling up in the sink. Writing at

home is not what one should do. Domesticity and writing, your middle-of-the road oxymoron.

Tolstoy did not do dishes. Well, neither does author here but she is no Tolstoy here. 51683 here.

everything goes ah everything goes here. Platitudes rule, they have to do for now here.

There will be famous writers at the writers fest. That is how it is that is how it is here.

51721.

She watches the short film from the Frankfurt book fair. It was over on Sunday, today is

Monday. It must be Tuesday in Germany. One could check, but it seems irrelevant here. We

deem it irrelevant, so it must be. She is rambling, just amassing a number of words here. 51777

words here.

Her book here does not have prologue, epilogue, the way it is arranged is off here. but we said

that already. She just wants to emphasize that this is deliberately. Intended. A play with form.

Not adhering to form. It is all we can do. We are definitely not inventive plotwise, but we can be

165
inventive form wise here. An ad for the new Kia here. An ad for an insurance company here. An

ad for a bank. It is all good, all good here.

Apparently, all writers write about the life of a writer. Obviously, it makes sense. You have to

write what you know. But to have it as your one and only subject matter, it is a tad too one-sided

here.

There is this book by this Austrian writer, she is reading thru the amazon.de reviews. So far, it is

not that good here. Obviously, if all you read are the negative reviews. But it is good as strategy,

you know what is wrong with a book and no book is perfect here.

The problem with reading is that if you come on something really good, you cannot mimic it.

There are lawsuits waiting. One author suing the other. You stole my idea. Is that even

something that happens? Can an idea for a book be intellectual property? Is it intellectual

property? Books are always made into movies. One art form translated into the next. A song or a

book. Boy meets girl, a short song or a long novel. A story like an accordion, you can embellish

or compress, whichever you feel like. She will find the clip with Sting. On you tube. But now it

is the Law and Order episode, one of many. With the daughter of Jane Mansfield and Ice-T and

the guy who knows a thing or two here.

Outside it is ah so dark, though not dark yet. Weird, what kind of writer is she that she cannot

even describe the color of the sky here. The color of this room. The tv, that kind of is all-

imposing, that kind of robs life from everything. The screens that dominate life here.

52133 words, she has to type a lot these days if she wants to finish this up in time to start the real

thing, the NaNoWriMo novel here.

166
Reading and writing and surfing for ideas. Surfing the web, mainly. Getting ideas from a screen

to make words appear on a screen. Not that good. It is like taking photographs from photograph.

Like making video copies from the original. There is a master copy and then there are the first

generation down to nth generation copies. Books should reflect the real world. So you have to

venture out, you cannot just sit in here and type. Watching FRIENDS reruns will not result in

penning a good book. Though you can always try. Practice makes perfect here. So, we just write

against the songs on the telly here and hope for the best here.

The description of the morning drive. The description of the morning coffee place. Lots of

descriptions of the same place. Which changes with the seasons. The coffee place might be still

the same but it now has autumn specials. There is an inscript on the glass door. Stickers. Stickers

of falling leaves, well, images of falling leaves. In different fall colors. Muted greens, muted

oranges. The leaves are in different sizes. They all have a point that is turned downwards. The

coffee is really good today. The right kind of hotness. She finishes it, feels warm and cozy inside

here.

Her writing ah her writing. The job of a writer. There are writers who are higher on the food

chain. People who get paid. She is non-paid as of yet. The money makes all the difference. It is a

measuring device. It measures how good your words are here. if somebody is willing to pay for

this, then and only then it follows that the words are worthy. Worthy to be recited. Worthy to be

repeated. Worthy to be put into a vault so that future generations can read them. They have to be

preserved. Now, at this point, they are only like sand pebbles. There for seconds and then blown

away. Their existence is nonstationary, these words are fleeting here.

167
She thinks about writing, she reads about writing. She produces words here. Later on, there will

be a talk by a woman who wrote a book called Manhattan Beach. The woman is on a book tour

here. There is an entrance fee if you want to see her live.

The spectacle of the writer. The writer meeting the reader here.

Author has 52627 words here.

So, apparently a writer sued Chelsea Clinton for copyright infringement. So it happens. He

accuses her of stealing his idea for a childrens book.

He might be right, he might be deranged. The courts will decide. Singers sue each other. Artists

do. Ideas, there are so many of them. They are there, floating around, awaiting to be grabbed

here.

Author here still feels sick, sick, definitely nauseous here.

She makes mistakes here. With the computer this happens. She does not notice where the end of

her work from the day before is. She writes in-between passages from different ideas. Sometimes

she can figure out how to remedy that, sometimes it is impossible. You can copy and paste, but if

you do not exactly know where to paste it, then you are screwed. A text is like a jigsaw puzzle,

everything, every part, has its exact place here. You cannot end somewhere and stop somewhere.

Or maybe you can, you can wing it somehow. It all will fall into place, all fall into place here.

There is a writers fest on Granville Island. You have to pay an entrance fee. Have to take a

shower. Get dressed. Take the bus. It is a big production here. She has to read and to write here.

inside of her four walls. So that she too can produce words that are out there, ready to be

published. The production of words versus the consumption of words here.

168
There is this writer who writes for children. Which is not what we do here. So why should we go

down there and listen? It is seventeen bucks, too. Maybe not. We will not learn anything. Or we

might, but we will just be jealous of the guy who gets paid for his words here. It is only human.

He teaches research methods for writers at the college in the other city. So, he obviously knows

how to talk, he talks for a living.

Now the news out of Boston. It is eight over there, whereas here it is five. Five and one minute

after five here.

It is all about writing about what you can see. Describing accurately what is in front of you. The

problem, of course, is that she goes into the coffee house at ten to nine in the morning and leaves

at one minute after nine, then drives through the rain and plasters herself in front of the laptop

that is acting up. She does not remember the poetic structures that ran thru her mind, once she is

inside of her own four walls, everything has gone blank here. She has to reconstruct the

experience, from memory. Recall the man in blue and white with the accent that was either

British, Scottish or Irish. She leans towards Northern Ireland, mainly because she is now reading

thru this book that is placed in Ireland, this story, half Melanesia, half Ulster. The village that is

mentioned is actually in the real Ireland, but then everything is fictional in that book by the

husband of the famous author here.

She listens to writers these days, she went to this reading on the island, the day before.

But back to the coffee house, she noticed that not all of the leaves that are on the door do point

down, one points up actually. The stickers of leaves, nest to the writing. FALL AGAIN, on the

glass door that faces the busy street.

169
There is so much rain, so much rain and darkness. Well, it is day time, daylight, but it is arguably

dark. Way too dark, way too rainy. Too much of anything. That is why people huddle together in

this coffee place. The young girl puts a plastic bag over the rolled up paper that comes out of her

rucksack here. A school boy comes in and leaves here. Author usually calls them young man or

young woman, she adopted new ways of describing people all due to the thirty books that she

read over the summer here. Maybe reading is not good for writing, it sidelines yer, the new

words, writers say words like lass and lassie to describe young persons, it is something that she

picks up but that does not go with the rest of her writing which is arguably more American than

that, the sentences do not go well with British words like LASSIE here.

She thinks too much about words and there were persons at the writers conference who were just

like that do. The competition, writers talking shop here. It is distracting, instead, she should have

just stayed put and wrote her words here.

52900, nope, 53900 or so here.

Author here talked to the woman next to her while sitting in the audience in the nice theater at

the writers conference. The woman is a teacher and she did a creative writing thingie. One that

trained her to be a nonfiction writer. Kind of weird, nonfiction and creative writing are opposites

or so it seems here. With nonfiction you have to present realities, what you see. Describe what is

in front of you. Register that so that the reader can reimagine something that he has not seen.

Like a photograph.

But back to the coffee house. What was funny was the discussion at the other table and the

trumpet solo on the overhead. The words and the music. It was very cinematic. Maybe the whole

coffee house has this cinematic effect, the lighting, the yellow green ochre tones. The rain

170
outside, it all registers. It is a Wednesday, hump day. The middle of the workweek though it has

nothing to do with author here, for a writer every day is a potential workday. You are your own

boss which is, after all, the biggest liability. You can work as much or as little as you want here.

it all depends on your hands and how much stress they can weather here.

54087.

The woman who wrote the Manhattan Beach book will be in the Norman Rothstein theater at

seven, the one in the JCC. On forty-first. It is a sold-out affair and an expensive affair. Though

apparently all of the events are some twenty bucks each. There are some 110 writers and you

have to pay to listen to them. It is weird, why not get the book from the library and read it,

instead of listening to the writer just read a short passage here into a mic.

The writers fest is a weird thing and it is very different from the Frankfurt book fair which is

much shorter, only five days, and much more to the point. A condensed affair for people with

little time on their hands here. That is what the Frankfurt affair is, it is mainly for professionals,

whereas the writers fest is not really for writers, it is geared towards reader, towards the

consumer of books, not the producer of books here.

The art book fair, well, that is something in between both here.

The socializing with other writers. The trying to recreate Bloomsbury, or Paris in the times of

Hemingway. The nostalgia that is implicit. What now dead people used to do here.

Author here feels like going down there, it is fun, excitement. A live performance, despite it not

being free. It is 11:11 now, it will start at one in the Waterfront Theatre. She will have fresh air.

She will look at the brouhaha. A person who writes, actually, two persons who write. They do

171
the sci-fi thing which is not what we do here. No batman, no superman. Ours is reality, that is

what we like here. Stuff that grown-ups can read and should read. The target audience are adults.

She ponders, if listening in to a person writing sci-fi novels is research. Is it the right kind of

research? Would that particular writer who teaches research methods for writers, approve of her

kind of doing research? Shouldnt research be targeted. Like if you want to know about houses,

you ask an architect, a construction worker, a user of houses. If you want to do research about

people who write you observe a person who writes for a living. Which is exactly what he does.

So maybe we should get our butt down there and listen in here. It is eleven sixteen, shower, hair,

makeup here.

Seventeen bucks, huh.

There will be kids, classroom fieldtrip persons. Well, she will not be the only one there.

Pbviouslty here. Better hurry. If nothing comes of this, she can still write about this here.

So much later in the day. On the telly, Big Bang and in here, the writer here.

So, she was at the talk, which was basically like a performance on stage. Mainly because it was

in a real theater. There were three persons sitting on nice chairs, on a rug. As if you look into a

room. There was a small small coffee table. There was a podium too, the two authors did

readings. Everybody clapped. After this, there was a book signing,. Author went to a coffee shop

next to the theater, had this cheesecake with pear and chocolate. A peppermint tea in one of those

bodum tea makers.

After that, she went home, downtown, the bus and then she took the bus home. There was an

accident and later the driver said that he is only going up Granville. Author here left, she went

into the bookstore and looked at the book Manhattan Beach, mainly because the writer will be in

172
town and do a reading. Maybe tomorrow, maybe she does it today here. One can go there too,

but she paid already for a talk. Twenty bucks, that is more than enough here.

43312 here. sorry, 53312 here. the one author was really interesting. He teaches research and in

his story, his writing, he makes it all up. No research whatsoever. The opposite of his day job.

And he is an urban planner by education. His reading was good, it was basically like a play, like

Joey and Chandler talking here. A dialogue. The other writer, the woman was more boring, her

stuff was like an essay. So, either dialogue or description of a journey.

Author ponders, how do we fashion a plot here? Who knows here, who knows here? She will go

back to reading her book here, which is actually quite good here.

Nine forty-three. October eighteen. 54302 words here. 2017. All numbers, numbers that are

basically inconsequential here. In the lobby of the Waterfront Theater which was the place where

the reading of the writers fest took place, you know ,the one yesterday, the one that author here is

still reeling from, in that lobby, two persons were talking to each other, it was before the doors

even opened. Author here was sitting, and they were standing in front of her, still in raingear,

waiting. She was very short and he was very tall. He was old and she was young. He was

Caucasian and she was East-Indian. They were both thin. She was a teacher, high school,

English. He told her about his wordcount which seemed very high. 250 000. So we do not know

about the subject matter, we only know the wordcount. He seemed desperate, which comes with

the territory, if you have written 250 000 words, then there is a problem with finding somebody

who will foot the bill for publishing those words, who will supply the ink for that many words

here. It is all very physical, the writing process. It is all about the machines that will print those

words, the printing presses. That is what it is what it is here. The cultural aspect, nah, that is

merely an afterthought here.

173
She is writing in a confusing way here what with all of the copy and paste here. The timeline is

all wrong and this has to be ironed out at a later point here.

It is now fifty-seven minutes after nine, we can watch King of Queens. It shows in the morning

and in the evening, each time at exactly ten oclock. Funny how that works here.

One day she will arrive at her stories, at the fascination with story writing. That time is not now.

At this time, she merely reads interviews with people who are pulling it off, she listens to

readings by people who are published writers. These are people different from her. They are

more accomplished in their craft. She will be there too someday, though she is not quite sure if

she is not there already here. Some seven years ago she did readings. As part of her art class, as

part of an open mic event in the coffee house near the art school. Everybody clapped. She had a

prof say to her this is actually good while reading thru her one page, or even less than one page

about something art related or design related. Everybody is always lauding her writing, she just

needs a publisher, the marketing team, somebody who will pay for the ink and the paper. But she

said that already here, she does exactly what Thomas Wolfe did in his writing, he uses a word

constantly for maybe two pages and then never uses it again, she now does the same, reiterating

an idea and then letting go of that idea completely. If Wolfe did it, so can we here. It is actually a

no-no, and maybe that is why he is forgotten, there are things that you should not do as a writer.

You do not need to mimic other peoples bad habits which is what you tend to do if you read a

lot. You notice the very obvious shortcomings of other writers and then you think that it is ok, if

they can do it so can I. After all, they are world famous, so it is ok to have those glitches, nobody

cares, nobody minds here.

You cannot be perfect, ever, but that does no mean that you should vie for faulty writing here.

You have to strive for very very good wordings, for accuracy, for short and clear. Once she had

174
to write a review of HOWL for an English class, and there was a maximum of words. One had to

rewrite it until one could condense all the ideas into that compact number of words. She got an A

minus, because of some formality, formal glitches. But the writing itself was perfect, mainly

because it was overdone, again and again until it flowed just the right way here. The

condensation of ideas, the description of a poem in a way that made sense to the majority of

readers. To any reader, at any time in history, on any place on the planet. Words are straight

forward, they are malleable, you can do with them whatever you want here. They usually flow

logically, one building on the one that was there before it. At this point, she has55064 words, she

wanted to write a story about a person named Antoine here. That seems to be a good name for a

protagonist, it is a tad exotic but not too much. Later on, she named the person Anthony but that

is too weird, there are too many connotations with a name like Anthony. Antoine is more other

worldly if used in the English language, maybe she is doing that because the cameraman in the

book that she is reading, is called Pablo. Usually what you read tends to influence your own

writing here.

Today the woman who wrote the Manhattan Beach book. She will not go there but that is fine

here. There are many interviews with her online here.

On the telly, the show with the nice judge. The one with red hair. Two people on each side,

sorry, one on each side. One who sues, one who is being sued.

Author watches tv, she writes her book. In-between she watches you tube videos. She reads stuff

about Red Lobster. She checks out a food photographers portfolio. You can surf all day, one

link goes to the next. There is no end. Books are better, at least you have all the info in one place

and you can go to it linearly here. Open the book and read through it and then close it.

175
Everything in-between two cardboard rectangles. A laptop though is infinite, you just never end

surfing here. Infinite info. The voyage is never ever over. There is no end and no beginning here.

The woman on the telly, the judge, the man who is suing. He did work in her house. Apparently,

he did not get paid.

55344.

Eleven and forty-three minutes here. FRIENDS will be on and maybe she should just stay put

and do her writing here. The roaming thru the world will not result in more words here. Just

write just type here, be prolific. Every minute, every second away from the typewriter is just that,

words not penned, words not written. The career as a writer put on ice here. You have to stay

chained to the typewriter and then, only then do you have the work to show for your time here.

Others may be goofing off, those are the ones who are already published. Author here, on the

other hand, has just get to it here. While the rain is coming down on the city here.

55496.

Eleven and forty-seven here. An ad for a law firm on the telly here.

There is another talk but it costs twenty bucks which is too steep, let s face it. The graphic book

author is really interesting here, and her work is nice. But is it worth to go through the rain and

fork over that amount of money? It is twenty bucks after all here. It is an adventure but an

expensive one. And will it really translate into her writing good words here? It is basically doing

something so that you cannot do what you have to do. Just goofing off and calling it research.

Whatev here, whatev here. And the rain is coming down, coming down here.

176
It rains buckets. So the woman on the bus. Author was on the Island, watched two authors and

the master of ceremonies, she then had a tea, peppermint and another one of those pear thingies,

caramel pear, maybe cheese cake. After that, the bus to downtown and the bus uptown. Buckets,

it definitely rained buckets here. She saw stuff. Amazing stuff. She heard one of the authors say

how to write a book, have a story and then just fatten the baby. Like boy meets girl and then you

write an epic love story, 1001 pages long here.

Now, it is Big Bang theory, Sheldon and Horowitz here. sorry, Wolowitz. Some kind of witz

here.

It is four and thirty-one here and still buckets, buckets. Of rain, you know.

55719 here, fatten the baby, fatten the baby here. 55728, it gets fattened quite fast here. The

author, the female one had really nice shoes here. Red ones. Sparkly maybe here. Btw, the talk

was free because the women could not work her credit card. Nice, huh. A free lecture here,

seventeen bucks nonspent here.

Five and twenty-eight here. The news out of Boston. Where it is eight and twenty-eight. On the

other side of the world, well, obviously not quite. Copenhagen, that would be on the other side of

the world. Sydney, Christchurch. Other faraway places here. She has been to Copenhagen once

when she was younger. Twenty. She is now sixty-two. Forty-two years ago. She had a lot of

herring. Different kinds of herring. Different sauces. Light yellow ones. Was all good, all good

here.

Some person named Eric Fisher out of Boston. He talks about the weather which is in

Fahrenheit. Fifty-seven degrees Fahrenheit, whatever that is here. A woman and now Uber.

Milton police is warning people. Where exactly is Milton? A woman in a coat mix of purple and

177
pink. Apparently, there are people that pose as Uber drivers here. It is a crime that is easily to

commit.

55925 here. She can have a latte, but maybe she had enough calories already. What with wrap

and cheesecake and banana loaf. Coffee and cream. Nope, she definitely does not do it healthily

here. Hardly any fruit here. And still writing, still typing here. 55969 here. The novel that is not

novelly enough. That is more like a journal, a logbook. A travelogue, but then again she is not

traveling. A staycationlogue. A log. The minutiae of the life of a fictional writer here. Maybe, it

is Gallia after all. That Gallia. The fictional one.

If she had the energy she would go back to listen to that female author in something called studio

54. Well, not studio 54 obviously, it is another studio but she will not make it in time. The

woman is German and her grandparents were writers. She is writer by heritage here. Writing as

familybiz here. Just like a pizza joint, everybody works in there, the whole family here. You

have a feel of entitlement if your grandparents are writers, celebrated ones. It is in your genes or

something. You are a born artiste here.

56114 here.

A book about a pastry chef. Now there is an idea. Fatten it. Author here came upon the idea

while watching this independent bookseller on Facebook. She went on the Facebook page of the

independent bookshop which is in this place which was two cities over from the city that she

lived in some twenty or thirty years ago here. The bookstore had this author doing a reading the

day before, the author that wrote the Manhattan Beach novel and will be in town next week on

October twenty-fifth. Author here thought that she will be here today but apparently, she is not.

She is on a book tour.

178
Anyhoo, be this as it may, the bookseller was on NBC some nine years ago and he was talking

about his favorite books, apparently by writers that live in the Bay Area.

There was a book about a pastry chef here. Author here wonders if she can pull it off, because let

us face it, she does not know the first thing about being a pastry chef. She has baked though,

although her baking knowledge is kind of rusty here.

Maybe writing a novel is not her thing here, maybe having a glass of wine is more her thing here.

Writers have to be drunk and only then they are writers. Writers who are worth their keep, worth

their salt. They have to be swimming, their minds should be swimming. Though her kind of

writing here is all over the place anyways, it is full of half-baked ideas. She tells stories and then

leaves them unfinished. The readers head must be swimming too here. On the telly, a woman

asking another woman about a murder or something. Apparently the Boston news is over and it

is now a crime show which is always unsettling. Remote control where art thou here?

Chilly clues, we do not want that, Last Man Standing is so much better. Tim the Toolman though

he is kind of right wing here. Into guns or something here. Maybe it is only the persona that he

plays, but chances are that this is his tude anyways here. The show is funny though here. laugh

tracks, that is where it is at here.

56490 here.

Gallia or pastry chef? Maybe Gallia is the pastry chef. How about that here? What about Asa, the

writer from Sweden who lives in Brownsville here? All of these stories mush together here.

56522 words here, at six and twelve in the afternoon here, in October of 2017.

Now it is six and forty-eight here and the debate is on. Bernie Sanders and Ted Cruz on CNN.

She is looking at this Instagram feed hashtag galleybrag. Whatever that is here. She was looking

179
for Instagram photos of the author of the Manhattan book here in Danville, in the bookstore, this

is how she came upon this here. Galleybrag, huh, gotta look into this here. The world of books,

on Instagram here.

It is eight and four minutes. In the evening. Rain seems to have subsided. Then again, we would

not know in here, what with curtains drawn. But it feels cozy and warm, though maybe it could

be warmer in here. The toesies are cold but the reason might be just the material of the socks

here, socks in winter have to be kushly, wooly or quasi wooly. It is more about the texture than

anything else here. The fibers against your skin and the illusion of warmness, of coziness. It is

not about the temperature, it is more about how you feel the temperature in here. Author ponders

if she is right or if she is just bullshitting, plain and simple. Fattening the baby, yuh, fattening the

baby here. The story of the writer, anywriter. Could be Ms. Gallia, Ms. Asa, Ms, everywoman

here. She feels like a glass of white wine, red, shiraz, chardonnay. But tea has to do for now,

maybe the weekend is there for boozing here. At this point we have to do without a shot of

ethanol inside of our veins and arteries here. No intoxication for you here. No soup, ah no soup

here.

56810, she managed to accumulate the words here. She just types, in the end she will edit this all

in one big whoosh here. There are factual mistakes, mainly, calling the woman who played in

TAXI Valerie Harper here. Valerie Harper was in Rhoda and in Mary Tyler Moore here. Get ur

tv data right here, it is quite important here. See, even politicians do it, Ted Cruz said to Bernie

Sanders Curb Your Enthusiasm and everybody laughed. Seems, we are all living in tv land

here, where does tv end and reality start here?

100 words more and then we are done here, done here.

180
Eight fifteen, still October eighteen or nineteen, still two thousand and seventeen here. 56930

here, here, here.

She did not do her reading, she still has some fifty pages of the Modern Gods book here. The one

by the Irish guy, she will finish it later in the night here. Seinfeld would be nice here, who wants

to listen to talking heads here?

An ad for a car, a white car, seen from above. A van, an SUV. Seven more words and there we

are, 57000 it is here.

Joey watching Baywatch

12:00. Midnite. Actually, one minute to. Phoebe and the whole gang singing Smelly Cat. Now it

is 12`:00. Dr. Drake Ramoray and the whole gang watching him. And the theme song, people

dancing in a fountain, no umbrellas, apparently, there are not always umbrellas.

She finished her book, put it back on the shelf. Where it does not really belong, it belongs on the

heap of books that she read this year. She gave away three and read five online. Or four. Maybe

five. The Jungle, Moby Dick, Of Time and the River, Down and Out in Paris and London, Look

homeward, Angel. Ok, five. So, eight books plus eighteen, twenty-six books. She read twenty-six

books in total and she wrote one and a half book here.

The things we do with our life on this earth here. On what we waste our energy. It is a hobby,

yup, maybe we could call it a hobby. A hobby smudging itself next to obsession. It is not really

obsession, obsession is more like addiction, compulsion. This is more like a job, where you do

not get paid. The office but the one where no money exchanges hands here. But there is always

the potential there and that is what makes yer write. The salary that we will draw. The potential

prize here. The potential reward for the time we put in here. Yeah, let us just go with that here.

181
57248 here.

Dr. something, the eye doctor here. Two.- How is that possible, have you seen you?

The Richard guy here. Ok, it is definitely less than a ball park.

57247, it is still October, a wet one. Nineteenth or twentieth, though it seems more like a

nineteen here. Thursday in October here. Still 2017 here. Long time after this, she will read thru

this. Or somebody else will, the story is interesting enough, should be, should be here. If you

have to repeat it, then, chances are, it does not make the cut here.

An ad for cars, a car model, three Lexuses parked next to each other. Lexi?

57355 here. Time to go to bed maybe. Or watch Friends. Either way is good here, is fine here.

She is still doing it, fatten the baby, as the graphic novel woman was saying here. The one who

was born in nyc and who lives in LA.

57402 here.

Another one of all those Last Man Standings here. Thirty-one minutes after one. In the AM here.

October, you know, in 2017 here.

57442, what a mass of words here. Nobody might like it but she does here. Nope, the mantra of

being ones own worst critic does not always hold true here. That is how it is how it is here

apparently.

There is nothing really going on. She catches a glimpse of herself in the mirror, a sculptor a

painter a maker of three dimensional stuff. A cook, chef. Not a mere watcher of General Hospital

or Days of our Lives here.

182
The rain, people she knew some twenty years ago and whom she sneakily avoids as if they are

nonexistent, her coffee, a wrap, a piece of cake on the rainy October day here. Everything has

been and will be. She will type up words. 3000 or so and put them online, she produces words

for the cloud, somebody has to do it, a voice that vanishes, that is somewhere in the cloud. A

singsong that gets roared over by louder songs, higher voices, shriller ideas here.

She writes a tad too pessimistic, nihilistic here. She writes for people who live in the woods,

creatures that shy away from the daylight here. The mass of the population who do exactly what

they did the day before. The uniform, movements, shaving, hair in a bun, coffee run, laptop here.

The telly has this man with an eyepatch, part of a strange ah so weird soap opera here. Music,

suspenseful sounds here. Everything that I said is full of drama here. The drama of a soap opera

here.

There is a reading on the Island. This festival is still on till Sunday here.

Too much rain though, better to sit put here, stay put here. There is Matlock, there is Two Broke

Gals here. She can just stay here and type up against the rain here. Raining buckets, raining

buckets. The woman said so on the bus here. 57754 here.

She finished her twenty-six books, there are more lying around the place, the two that she bought

while being on vacation the summer before here. The one by Jeffrey Toobin, by Tim Geithner

here. Not literary voices but still. Sentences that make sense here. And that is all we want here.

The sounds of the rain coming down here. The boredom that is palpable. A house in a city with

rain.

Shed rateer be on a bus, on a train. Moving in a container, uptown, downtown.

183
And still the two women in waitress uniforms in a diner in Brooklyn.

57585 here. She could have wine, but it is too soon in the day here. Todays date, October

nineteen here.

57877 here.

The theme at the end of the show and now it is Mike and Molly here. She must be the only writer

who makes watching the telly her subject matter here. The documentar of tv.

Stories have to have some action, more action, less action here.

Well, more like more action. 57929 here.

Mike and Molly. Carl and the Senegalese waiter. And laugh track after laugh track. The actor

talks, a pause, a laugh. Very generic kind of laugh here.

She needs forty more here. Typing ah typing here. Ten thirty-nine here.

King of Queens, at eleven in the morn on a Thursday in October here. 57897 here. writing as

marathon, writing as a project. Four more words. Yay, 58000 here.

The job of writing. At two in the afternoon here. While Two and a Half Men is on. A story, a

kingdom for a story here. A commercial for a pill. Outside, no more rain here. 58039 here.

How to spin a yarn, when there is nothing to describe but stagnation. Venturing out, latte,

BigMac. These are the options for the writer here. This is how lives of writers are. No glamour.

Just drudgery. The pushing down of keys. Words, orthographically correct ones. Some stroll

around the neighborhood here.The coffee house might be different at this time of the day.

Different lighting. There are other coffee places, a donut place, a hi-end place where people tap

away at their computers. Americanos.

184
On the telly, Berta. She has three buses to catch here.

58135. Well, at least today she is not in the theater looking up at three persons sitting on stools

on a stage. The festival part that is on today, it was sold out. She could write a story about a

writer who looks up at a stage every day at one. A weird compulsion, a fascination with theater

maybe. The writer thinking about fashioning a play. Something like that here.

The getting to the theater. The persons on the bus. The bus driver. The caf next to the entrance

of the Island. The tea, the pineapple cheese cake slice. The square one here.

Author ponders, maybe she should have pizza. There is this place next to the wine place. Maybe

there is a reason why all her writing has something to do with food here. The description of the

way that sugar and fat is mushed together and baked. The way that hot drinks with a hint of

coffee taste are named Americano here.

She is definitely losing it here. Looking thru the shelves of the bookstore could help. Finding

something new to read here.

Boredom does not translate into new words here. 58327, ah well, ah well here. The weather in

nyc, so much nicer than the weather in Vancouver. 21 grades Celsius versus the 11 grades

Celsius over here. But what is there to complain, at least, no more bucket rain here.

Laugh tracks and Charlie and Jake here. Two twenty in the afternoon here. Two twenty-one.

Watching paint dry and then describing it here.

How about surfing the net here? Looking for inspiration here. Two twenty-two here.

Later she can make up stories, characters. People that do not exist in reality. Other writers,

though there is an ample amount of those. People like her who send out queries and get rejected.

185
Writers who do not make it in Lit land. Those people who do not go on book tours. Who produce

texts that are non-distributed to the world. That are ignored, snubbed. By some random

publishing company. Boredom, your books are sleep-inducing. Nobody dies, nobody gets born.

Everything just stays the same. The barista churns your latte. Puts sprinkles thereon here. The

drive-thru person gives you the bag with the buns, the meat, the cheese. You then go home and

write about that. Find a philosophical angle.

Halloween is near. Nineteenth of October here. 58511, she wrote about nada and filed the page.

Fattening the baby, fattening the baby here.

Two and fifty-one. Listened to two songs by The Tragically Hip. One from 1996, one from 1998.

On the telly, still Two and a Half Men, this time the one with Ashton Kutcher here. Watching

how we type here. Coffee places, that is where novels should be fashioned. Where others are,

strangers. The problem is that rain will destroy the computer, so one has to do the longhand thing

and then the transcribing thing. It is too much, so we have to type inside here even if the quality

of the words might suffer here. A good writer has to be able to do it anywhere, under any

condition. You have to train yourself. Every day two pages, every day 2000 words. You have to

clock it here. You will get better just by doing it day-in day-out here. It is like anything, practice,

yup, that one, it makes perfect here. Platitudinal insights cannot be wrong here.

How to play with the language here.

Three oh two.

The afternoon. Another two and a half girls here. sorry, 2 Broke Girls. All of these titles are

somehow the same, thirty-minute-long stories with laughs. Nothing new, nothing ever new.

58744 here.

186
In ten days, the novel writing will start. The official one. This nonofficial one has to be done by

then here. You can do it, yup, if you keep to it. Keep at it here.

58781 here.

No plot, no story. But we have the will, so that should be enough. Just type on, a story will come.

The story of the writer who is bad at making up stories here. She roams the planet. Just like all

the other artistes who are running in circles here. The romanticism of failure. The

underachievement of a writer here. The poetic words that are way too clumsy. That knirsh

around. The neologisms that liven up the text and confuse the reader here. 58866 here. Three

eleven.

She has finished the book about the modern gods. Somewhere there are other books, non-read

ones. The story of Pattie Hearst. American Heiress. She bought it, but, let us face it, everybody

knows the story already. Stockholm syndrome. Why rehash something that you know the

outcome of. She remembers it being on the news here. With novels, at least there is novelty

involved here. Something new, a new tale, even if it is a tall tale here.

The classics, read the classics here.

Whatever the classics are here.

59, sorry, 58961 here. Author here definitely knows how to fill up the page here. Seventeen

minutes after three in the afternoon here. 58981. Words, huh here. A donut would be fine here.

Canadian Maple. The caramelly glaze, the vanilla cream inside of the spongey cake here. writing

about food, fun here. 59011, now we just need some one thousand here to jump this up to 60 000

here. Word by word, increment by increment here. One thousand words about anything here.

187
Painting would be nicer. Physical. Paint that drops. This is cleaner but not that interesting here.

Especially if you basically have no story to tell here. Except for a description of this room. The

room with the telly here. A commercial for a Toyota model, RAV here. A commercial for

cottage cheese. An ad for a furniture store in Boston. 59100 here.

A rerun. All these shows have several runs per day here.

Still later in the day here. Five and forty-three minutes here. Outside, the dreary day but no rain.

On the telly, the news outta Boston, they sure seem to have a nice October over there here. A

quarter to six here. There has to be a story, not just this here. Numbers that clock the time. The

passing of the day here. A coffee in the coffee house, the foam of the latte. Not enough of a

story, not enough here.

59194 here.

On the telly, they talk about the weather and a woman and her show. That is the news, other

broadcastings. A man who runs after a ball here. An ad for a car here. A red one. The writers fest

is still on, still for three days here. Now an ad for a skincare product here.

The discussion of storylessness, of lack of narrative. Words that are tackled like bricks, but

bricks that are in a heap, that are just lined up without going anywhere here. she needs a glass of

wine, needs a latte. 92, sorry, 59291 here.

An interview with the writer here, a fictional one. What inspires you? Everything. What do you

read? Everything.

There are you tube vids, with different writers here.

188
59322. She should just throw in the towel here, today nothing is happening. She did not go out,

well, except for the coffee place in the morn. That is a constant but it is a mere fifteen minutes

out of her day here.

What about the Asa character? Ah, what about her. You cannot really make up stuff, at least,

author here cannot. There are online courses, Gotham, they show yer how to do this here. 59399

here.

Fictional places, fictional cities, fictional buildings. Fleshing out characters and the scenes of

their lives here. Fictional names. Author here definitely does not have what it takes, in the same

way that she is good with drawing, some things you are a natural in. This is basically a

discussion of what this is not here.

On the telly, Law and Order. Though now it is changed to the news here. 59470 words here.

Some 500 words here to get to 60 000 here. Against Anderson Cooper on the telly here.

Venturing out versus not venturing out here. Playing into the stereotype that one lives in ones

pee jays. As if that is something good. It is not, life is for the living. The street, the downtown.

The city as Petula Clark serenades it. Small stores, strangers walking by each other, rushing by

each other. The dynamic of life, the healthiness. Life is not a retirement home here. It is fast-

paced, images change constantly. Sitting and writing about that, is difficult. Because you are

sitting and typing, sitting still and have only your words to describe something dynamic. Maybe,

dialogue would be good, would fragment the text into smaller bits, into livelier bits. Drive home,

that there is action, action in changings of images. When you move your head, you see different

visuals, different scenes. And maybe that is a novel, different scenes.

189
It is now six and eleven here. She could write about the coffee house in Reykjavik, about the one

in Itzehoe. There is an escapism in writing about places on the other side of the planet. You just

close your eyes and you image that you are there. You travel in your armchair, see, what is out

there in the world here. You can populate the world with little figures and move them on a board

here. Little soldiers and you are the commander-in-chief. Storytelling, huh here.

But for her, it is all about the writer herself. That commander-in-chief. The book tour, the

reading, the interviews. The marketing, the interaction with others, the social aspect after the so

very solitary aspect of the writing. The isolation of the production process. But then, after that,

you have to be willing to face the world, their lauding or their criticisms, either way here.

59783 here, eighteen minutes after six, a woman on the telly talking about politics here.

Six and nineteen here. Outside, darkness, well some shades in green still here. A Thursday in

October here. 59816 here. Anderson Cooper, white hair, dark-brimmed glasses here. 200 words

and then this will stand at 60 000. She will do it fast, furiously, after a while it does not really

matter what the words are here. It comes automatically, it is a reflex here. The sounds of the telly

somehow translate into the words on the monitor here. It is just like running a marathon, not that

she ever ran any here. It is about the gist of the action of putting down small units that will then

merge into one bigger unit. One step of 26 miles here. Or 26 kilometers, whatever the bigger unit

is here. The beads of a necklace, the scenes of a movie, the bricks of a house. The identical

smaller units here. The notes of a song, the steps in a dance here.

59957 here. Leon Panetta on the telly. Former Secretary of State. Down in the States here. Six

twenty-eight here. An October day. In the morn, she will once more make her trek down to the

coffee place here. The description of the same repetitive voyage. The newness of each and every

day. The players might be the same, there are constants, same coffee, same wrap, but there are

190
always ever so slight variations here. There is drama in the everyday, each day is slightly

different. The heat of the coffee is never the same here.

60052, she managed to fatten the baby after all here. The story about the writer here.

The words, the words here. What to write about? Talk about the time of the day, about the

wordcount here. About the governor of Puerto Rico on the telly. On the new book that she will

read here and has not chosen as of yet here.

One chapter of Of Mice and Men. Online, PDF. On the telly, Don Lemon here. Always CNN.

Seven twenty-two here. 60135.

The amount of rain that is coming down on the city here. We can write books about that.

Describing this, enough fodder for a lifetime. Describing each pearl of water, in a poetic way.

The wetness, the sweater that gets all humid, to the bone in here. well, obviously more to the

skin, one feels the wetness on the skin, not on the bone here. Figure of speech, figure of speech.

Can you even feel your bones? The seeping when you crack your ribs, crack your humerus? But

that is a different kind of feeling, or nonfeeling here. Anyways, how to describe the weather in

really accurate terms here?

Author read OF MICE AND MEN, the night before, in one sitting. Steinbeck is good at

describing nature, though only for short passages, after that it is more about Lenny and George

and all the other characters here.

Anyhoo, October twenty, 2017, the raininess, the coffee house, the coffee place here. Two men

sitting and talking, both same height, same age, same moustache. A woman at the coffee station,

she is ordering the Sweetn Lows and she takes forever here. She wears leggings, black ones, the

green apron is over it, makes her identify as one of the baristas here. They all wear black and

191
green to mimic the logo, the color of the logo here. At times around x-mas, they change it up, go

for red here.

The street outside all glistens, the rain is never ever ending in this city here. Author feels at

home, she hails from a city where it is always raining. Hamburg and rain, synonymous. Or

maybe, that is merely the nostalgia talking here.

It is raining buckets, David Duchovny once described the torrents and he got into trouble.

Apparently, the people in this city do not adhere to describing this as a rainy place, what, we

have sunshine too here. It is raining every now and then, sporadically here. Just like it does

everywhere on this planet. It is no monsoon here. Buckets, that was what the woman on the bus

said into her cellphone, buckets. There are terms more lyrical, more poetic, but she did not seem

to be a poet. Her hairstyle was that of a nonpoet. She was the kind of person who would say

buckets, it is raining buckets here.

Author here wonders, is this really how her writing will go here? Rambling forever here? She

partitioned her text into chapters but it is kind of off and decidedly so. 30 chapters in the first

fifty pages, then one long chapter that runs for some 200 pages or so. The asymmetrical

chaptering as aesthetic form. A critique of chaptering, maybe. A revolt against the way that

books are chaptered nowadays here. Anyhoo, this stands at 60599 here, yay ah yay here.

Five hours ago, she was at this machine. She should have something to eat, lunch,

something. A latte with whip in this place. With the crunchy parts therein. The salty and sweet

ones. Salty, caramelly ones. Light yellow crystals that are a tad too light for caramel. A mere hint

of caramel, a diluted caramel. Caramel is, after all, sugar that is burnt and has this tint of

burntness, not as dark as ash, not as dark as the crust of barbecued meat, not the color of charred

192
anything, but still a burnt tint, a burnt hue here. Author here listens in to the woman who is a

lawyer and who is kind of annoying here, she tends to yell at people, and she does this paternity,

DNA Diagnostics thingie. Salacious stuff here. You are a ho, you are not a ho. She goes easy on

the boys. Or maybe not, maybe she sees who is a deadbeat. She never smiles. I do not smile, I

am a judge, that is her spiel. A younger version of Judge Judy here. Slightly on the mean side

when she does not need to be here. TV-judges they are a species in and of themselves here. Are

these even legal? Courts with cameras here? How does this work here? Do they get paid, the

plaintiff-people and the litigant-people here? Is the term litigant and plaintiff synonymous here?

Mr. Tucker, you- pause- are the father. It is all full of suspenseful music here. Personal tragedy

as entertainment here. something just like FRIENDS reruns, but the actors do not get one million

dollars per episode, they do not command that here.

Outside, the train has subsided, which is nice here. But there will be wetness, the clouds

are still there, darkish, greyish here. It is that time of the year here, that part of the planet here. It

never rains in Southern California, well, this is not Southern Calif. here. And actually it pours in

Southern California, monsoonlike, author here was over there over x-mas, Malibu, L.A. Santa

Monica, Pasadena, some place called Calavatras or something like that, Hollywood sign in the

distance, Burbank, Bakersfield, let me tell yer, it poured. Buckets, definitely, buckets here.

Makersfield it was not though, Encino, Santa Barbara, San Diego, Sherman Oaks, San Fernando

Valley, Thousand Oaks, well, it all is in Southern California and the Mamas and the Papss did

not discriminate here. It is southern California versus northern California here, Sacramento,

anyhoo, we are not really writing about geography here. Berkeley, Utica et.al. Maybe, that is

what she should write about here, a story that is located in California. She just read a book which

had parts of California in it. She used to live over there, thirty or so years ago here. 61069 here.

193
 She is at home now and the telly does not work, which is really annoying. So now it is

just white zinfandel and typing here. The computer plays this interview with a writer who was

part of the Vancouver writers fest. It is apparently a live interview, but it is actually not, it was

over some twenty minutes ago, and now it is archived here on Facebook. Seems that they do the

interviews and then they are on the site for maybe one day or so or maybe even just until the next

interview is on here. Who really knows how this all works here? And tics for this are available

on their website because this person who is interviewed here will be at another event tomorrow.

Apparently this interviewing is a marketing tool too, because let us face it, the weather is kind of

counterintuitive, in other words it is preventing people from going out to the Island to watch the

author readings here. There is no parking so people have to trek out by bus and when the weather

is horrible, people just stay home in order to not get wet here. Reading is after all a solitary

confinement thingie that you do with a nice glass of wine while you stay warm and cozy inside

here.

She is looking thru the interviews on the website for the writers fest. Interesting, though

most of the writers are writers for children or young adults so their genre is totally different from

what we do here, our target audience are adults. Period. Author here would not even know how

to write for people who are younger than the legal age here. We want to address mature persons

so if it is bull shit they can hopefully let go of it and be able to address the bull shit in a mature

manner. Writing for younger persons is too much of a responsibility and writing for adults is just

basically easier. They should be able to handle all the glitches. They will not suddenly run out of

the theater with a red flag, they will go home and think about what they just saw on the stage or

what they just read in a newspaper or in a book. Words can change lives, yes, that is true but we

want those readers who can read other voices too and then make an informed decision here.

194
There is something to be said for fully grown-up mature consumers here. Though maybe we are,

just like the car commercial posits, only people with bigger toys. It is a Mercedes commercial

and it basically says that adults are kids, only with bigger toys. There is truth to this, and it is

funny and maybe it is basically true here. Even though it is just geared towards selling cars, but

the basic idea rings true here.

We have some 61555 words here, yay ah yay here. Maybe she should now start reading

her book, Manhattan Beach here. Yup, we bought it in the end, it is very aggressively marketed

and thus we just caved in here. What can you do, ah, what can you do here?

It is nine minutes after nine in the evening on October 20 in 2017. Sinatra is singing my

way, what else can you ask for here? When did she go for Sinatra? She knows exactly when

that happened, when her class mate put a song by Sinatra on his walk cycle in animation 101. It

was the best walk cycle of all of em, nobody ever did one as good as the SANTA CLAUSE.

Animation has its own parameters, author here will always be an animator, even if she does not

do it anymore. Nobody does, animation was her military education, the one that taught her

discipline, the value of sticking to it even if you do not see any results, it is the best education for

any person, whether artist or scientist or in this case, writer. Nobody will ever read this, no

students will ever analyze her insights, she wll never ever be a Sinatra, but let us face it, we did it

my way here, I did it my way and that is what really matters, nothing else does here. Well, that is

not quite true, health, good fortune, all of this is paramount but you need to have the feel of

achievement in order to function, you have to know that you are very very very good at one thing

here, and that you are improving daily. Her writing might always suck but she is doing it and she

herself feels that she is getting better daily. Nobody else might think that, but that is totally

irrelevant. In the old times, manuscripts burned, got stolen, whatever. But the person who scribed

195
her or his words in stone, that person looked at the writing and was satisfied here. And that is

what counts here. the effort, the quest, the status of being forever Sisyphus here. That is what

makes us human or something like that, that is what is the essence of our being here.

61930, October 20, 2017, nine and twenty minutes in the evening in Vancouver, Canada

here.

She is not halfway thru, but she read parts of it. Manhattan Beach. Page 67 or so. It is a

Saturday, the weather wet, but the rain has stopped. You can go out without being soaked. The

telly does not work, something is wrong. Which is annoying, it says press ok to start but if you

press the ok part, nothing happens. It is just this green screen where nothing moves except for

greenish waves, shadings. Author here uses the laptop for entertainment, Sinatra, The New

Adventures of Old Christine. It is not the same but at least it is some noise here. She could go

out, mall, airport, downtown, but lets face it, this is the weather where you should be huddled in

a ball, with a good book or something here. Reading ah writing. Writing as profession, she

notices how different her way of writing is from the writing of the Manhattan Beach book, that is

a historical novel, everything has to hold up to scrutiny. Apparently the Goon Squad book was

the complete opposite, but author is not sure if that is true here.

These days she delights in the laugh tracks on the Christine show, but being huddled up

might be too isolatory here, too weird and strange here. A walk thru the autumny landscape

would be good, interesting, something other than just being inside here. Solitary is not the life

that she likes, we need to be out there, out there here. A latte, maybe, one with sprinkles, one in

the coffee house where you look out at the cars going up and going down here.

Writing ah writing here, writing here.

196
 She has some five pages to edit and so many more words to write here. October 21, 2017,

when did that happen here? She had some Baileys, wow, this stuff is strong here. Nacho chips,

with a slice of American cheese on it. Kind of melts pretty good, the taste is old cheddar. She

was in the market, got salsa and Twix and put it both back here. Had a BigMac for dinner, drive

thru. Watches Old Christine, mainly because the telly is outta commission. Reads thru Manhattan

Beach here. Broke a glass, one of those cute tiny ones, the day before. Now we have to search

the sink for remnants of broken glass here. This is what we do while writing up the bestest novel

here. Tomorrow will be the last day of writers fest here. The city is ah so rainy ah so rainy in

here. Six and seventeen, Saturday eve here. 62375 here, yay ah yay here.

Eight oh six, if the telly would work, we could watch Seinfeld here. So weird to sit in

silence, the only noise being the typing. It is as if one can hear oneself talk here, though the

tapping is overpowering the words. Yup, strange, ah, strange here.

62430. How to drive this up here?

It is eleven in New York City but it is eight and five minutes on the west coast here.

Author here is wasted but not too much here. She can still type. She can still function.

Appropriately here. She is intoxicated, the wine bottle says so, the shiraz after all here put seven

hundred and fifty milliliters inside of her body, not to mention the baileys here. But she si still

so,ehoe functioning, she cannot doreive she knows that here.

It is eight and eleven on a Sunday in October here. A rainy October in two thousand nd

seventeen here.

The telly does not work which is very annoying. The button that one presses is supposed

to get you somewhere and it is weird when it does not work, somehow something is wrong, the

197
button you push but it shows something different than what you expect. In the old times there

were no buttons, but now the world is full of buttons that may or may not work. We live in a

world with buttons. Where does that leave us? As the users of buttons. That sometimes work and

sometimes do not work. We feel that somebody in Silicon Valley knows everything about our

lives. Big Bro. But if push comes to shove that is not how it is. That person in Silicon Valley just

wants to go home to his own personal life. He could care less about this writer in British

Columbia who does not even know how to jumpstart her career as an artist because that is what

she should do because she went to art school here and graduated in 2010 here.

Life is very complicated, and author here is drunk. Wasted here. She had 750 milligrams

of shiraz and the shiraz was what is pretty potent what with 12.5 percent of volume alcohol and

then she had baileys which is 17.5 percent per volume here. She is wasted, she can feel it here.

She is not normal, there is much too much ethanol in her veins or her arteries here. What exactly

is ethynyl here? She is drunk but not too drunk here. She can still function here, she can type

here. Intoxication is weird ah strange here. It makes you woozy but not too woozy here. You can

still function, but you definitely should not drive. You even should be careful if you walk up the

stairs or down the stairs here.

You can write up a story here because writing is ok. Here. She is a bad writer maybe but

then again all writers are sometimes here. She has some 62857 words here. So maybe she is a

good writer here. Who are the people who make sure that she is a good writer here? People who

are publishers. Who would work in publishing anyways? Elaine Benes? Who is Elaine Benes

and what does she know `bout publishing here? She is after all a fictional character and not a

person who exits in real life here. It is all very random here.

198
 There are publishers who publish without intermediaries, but how will they know

because all they want is the first fifty pages. What if the real good stuff is starting on page 187

here?

Writing is like that, you suddenly stumble upon the right words even if you are drunk

here. Stock drunk, that is here, drunk like Herr Beule(c)ke here.

So there was no writing going on here for some three or four days here. It is what it is, a

Wednesday, very much fall, very much autumn. Autumn and fall are synonyms but maybe it is

easier to describe the wet feel, the orange leaves, the yellow tints while saying the same thing

over and over. A picture is worth a thousand words, that is why we have Instagram pics with

captions, funny ones here. How to delve in a lost art, using words to describe the visual? Today

there will be this woman who talks with the famous reporter who is actually kind of retired but

who still has gravitas based on a lifetime of work, of insightful comments on national tv, on the

radio, on CBC.

Author is still at the first fifth of the book, she will not listen in to that lecture, the talk

with the author here, the one on the book tour. On the telly, Mike and Molly, on the computer an

episode of the New Adventures of Old Christine, in here typing ah typing. The coffee place was

weird, well, more the gas station next to it. They had chain link fences all over the place and

white cars, white vans. They are rebooting the place, something is wrong there.

Inside of the coffee place, there were no sandwiches, they were all out, all out here. Later

she will drive-thru for lunch, we do not really need healthy stuff, we all die anyways, whether we

have organic or trans fats. At age sixty-two we are near to the end anyways. Now it is merely

time to pen various books here, memoirs that are not really that. 63279 here, it is October 25, in

199
2017 here. The novel that has to make it, that has to go forward in order to get up to 100 000 in

five days here or six. After that the nanowrimo stuff will start up here and start up here.

A storyline will emerge, and her subject matter is the writer herself. A person who makes

artistic stuffi-muffi, who makes up stories here. On the telly, the Twix commercial, the one that

makes you want to get out and buy, well, Twix here. 63370, ten and forty-six in the morn here.

rainy weather rain rain. Or at least impending rain. It is wet it is nonwet. Your clothes get wet

just by getting into the car here.

The day before, she watched what was on you tube, this interview, this discussion.

Between Harry Rowohlt and Gregor Gysi. It was very funny though we just watched half of it

here.

There was this talk by the founder of the Brooklyn rail, there were these two senators

who denounced Trump. So much on the telly, or on the screen of the laptop. She had too much

wine, red one here. During the day that is. And this does not translate into good writing here, it

just translates into no writing here. There are no office hours which is the biggest disadvantage

of being a writer. You fashion your own hours and that is where it all goes downhill here.

We could go down to the gym, the right thingie here. Something is wrong with those

scales, they show a different number each and every time here. 63551 here.

Watching two sitcoms at the same time here while typing. Well, one cannot be seen

because the typing interface is above the image, but one can hear the sound of the Christine

episode, the one with Todd Watzky here. On the telly, it is Spence and Doug and Carrie in the

backseat, in a car, at nite, in Queens here. Now a new scene, it is Doug talking to Carrie at their

home here, in the bedroom.

200
 So these are two storylines, she is still on the one in Manhattan Beach and then there is

this other book that she started, the one that describes the commotion on the London tube. All of

these stories merge together, we have to slow down here and concentrate onto one linear story,

one linear narrative. You cannot push everything into one story here.

53, sorry, 63696 here.

Now FRIENDS. She had a BigMac, the drive-thru. The biggest adventure of the day, the

burger run here. Later, a latte maybe, the one with the whip on it and the caramel swirl here.

These are the things that we describe, slap a cover on it and call it a book here. Ross and Rachel,

in a restaurant here.

And still some more tv here. On a rainy day. Or what looks like rainy, drizzly, grey, wet.

A November day in October here. The writing is not going well, she is still so much behind in

her word count here. Writing as a profession does not become her. Not your thing here. The

person who wrote all of her life and never made it. No talent but we are hanging in here. The

effort here. The road to nowhere here and the songs that we sing to laude exactly that. The

human condition. Of trying out for what you are not good. Courting the stuff you suck at here.

63866 here, we are tired. Physically. One bottle of vino the day before does not help.

Apparently fermented grape juice tends to knock you out here. Especially if it is consumed in

one sitting or what seemed like one sitting. Too much ethanol to the system, it basically knocks

yer out cold here. She did not barf, but she does feel exhausted one day after. Twelve hours later,

twenty-four hours later here. She is making all of this up here, does not make sense here. Poetic

waxing. Belletristic, as they say in German. Beautiful words that actually suck here. She should

look at what is new in DC, Trump and his adversaries. Author here looked at the do you have no

201
sense of decency clip from the Mc Carthy era here. Three more words, 64000. At 12 and 34

minutes, in October, late October here.

Wednesday, October twenty-five. On the telly, the news outta nyc. It is five thirty-four

over there. A dog snatcher in Queens caught on the surveillance camera. Outside, it seems a little

brighter but definitely not much here. Still a rained-in day here.

She should do the reading here. The book is basically boring, author here has to force

herself to do this. The story does not give out too much, there is nothing happening. A

Goodfellas story, gangsterdom. Better done by Marlon Brando.

And somehow a woman talking about gangsters is not substantial enough. Something is

missing here. It is forced. The goon squad book though was good, it got the Pulitzer here. It is

about the music industry and somehow that seems to be a more interesting subject matter to go

here.

64143. Apparently nyc has rain too. The map, Islip, Bridgeport. There could be some

light showers tonight, especially east of the city. Mr. G. on the telly. Sunday rain in nyc. But now

it is sunny here. Halloween looks good.

So how is the weather here in this city here? Rainy rainy rainy rainy here.

She still could go to the interview in the Norman Rothstein theater but it is too much of a

broo haha. Too formal, you have to dress up. Somehow that does not really go for the bookish

crowd, we are into books so that we can live in jeans and sweaters,. That is the whole allure of

artistic, cultural stuffi muffi here.

202
 Today, she was not at the gym. She had a big mac. Just saying and there is not really a

story in there. What you eat and what you do not eat. The world is bigger than this. The food

consumption and the weight that we have here. Weight reduction, weigh gain. Life is fuller than

this here.

The bookstore that dreams are made of. So the yelp review for this bookstore in Seattle.

The persons who read books know how to use words here.

Author here listened to most of the Harry Rowohlt and Gregor Gysi talk that is on you

tube. Too much sitting is not that good. Stationary life here.

There have to be reasons to go out again. A latte and the persons at the latte place. Three

and twenty-eight, wetness outside here. 64395 here.

There was no free parking in front of the coffee place. Apparently, it is that time of the

day here. People rushing home. Three and forty-five. They all congregate in the coffee place

here. Author just rushed home, it was way too short a sojourn here. Back to the laptop, back to

the monitor that is waiting for all of these words here. Once more the Twix commercial, and now

Two and a Half Men here. So, this is where you come every morning. Alan asks Charlie to sit in

his office so that he can go to Jakes school here. This is a rerun, actually it is the second time

today that this is shown here. 64515 here. Five hundred words on anything and we will have

65000 here. Nice round numbers rule here.

Three forty-nine. The cars were one after the other, this is not the right time to be out.

Rush hour sucks, but everybody knows that. We are just stating the obvious here. The next day

will be annoying, a technician from the phone company will come. Two hours of sitting and

waiting here.

203
 64585 here.

Later she might rush out again for the latte. A book filled with observations that are

inconsequential, circular. We could talk politics but who cares somebody will be in power here

and run the country somehow here.

The streets are very painterly, all colors. Fall, you can describe all the hues, all the

tonalities here. It is all very beautiful. Leaves everywhere. The prettiest time of the year. Now

Charlie and Alan and laugh tracks here. Christine, old Christine here. The two meany moms. On

the telly, an ad for sofas, with pillows, throw pillows. Everything in grey, off-white here.

Christines ex and now, well again, him, in a new scene. He is volunteering in his kids

school. He now complains to Christine. And now a short, a trailer for a movie about Vincent van

Gogh. Again, the Christine show.

64725 words. On the telly, the Goldbergs show. When did that happen here? All day tv,

in the old times, tv was black and white and not everywhere, all the time, all day long here.

64760 here.

The principal in the Goldbergs looks like the principal on old Christine.

Like mister, what was the name of the one in Saved by the Bell? Writing, huh? The story

of the watcher of tv here. A very important job, somebody has to do it here. 64808. Wanda Sykes

and now a commercial. An ad for real estate. 64820. The city. All the ads are local. It is about

this city, about national gas here. And now Matthew, he is funny here. 64845 here.

204
 Some highlights on the treetops here. Brightness. Yellow tints. One can see the sky

through the holes in the treetops. The whiteness, not really blueness. 64871. She basically counts

each and every word. The novel that worms itself forward, snakes itself forward, crawls here.

The book tour, the woman who does that has to fly all over the country. Between west

coast and east coast. There are bookshops that are more important here. The one in DC is, prose

and something. Praxis and Prose? It has a funny name like that, something with an and in

between. Quill and Prose? And once more, the trailer of the Van Gogh movie here. I want to

show the world what this nobody has in his heart. Loving Vincent. There still is always this other

ad for a movie, Lucky.

64981. Not many words left to type up here. Fatten the baby fatten the baby. Four more

words, there it is: 65002 here.

On the telly, Modern Family. Six twenty-one. She is on page 200 of the book and there is

no use in listening in to the broo haha about the book, especially when you have only read less

than half of the thing here. It is not that interesting, not that good here. But it is definitely

marketed very heavily, it is everywhere. So is the other one, the one she just started, the Sophie

Kinsella one. Sophie or something. It was really good but first we have to finish the other one

here. At one time she will read Slaughterhouse Five, The Citadel, Catcher in the Rye. Something

by Truman Capote, though she remembers to read Other Voices Other Rooms, a long time ago.

Her foray into American lit. she has to read stuff by Margaret Atwood or by the guy who wrote

the English Patient. Ondaatje. Being into literature is kind of funny, you venture into pastures

that you never ever knew existed. She likes Max Frisch, all the stuff she read as a kid here.

205
 Now once again the trailer about the movie about van Gogh. It is part of the old Christine

adventure episode, the one with the snake man, the reptile birthday person. On the telly, blackish.

This is what we do, have coffee, go to the gym, then it is all about reading and writing, which is

more like typing here. Words not images. Which is weird when one is coming from the world of

pictures here.

65257 here. Eight hundred words and then this will stand at 66 000 here. Not that it is

even important in the scheme of things. Books that are publishable are better, her writing is more

circular, it is insane, it is just weird here. Stuff you write up while listening to the old Christine

sitcom, without even seeing the image here. Basically, the audio of a video. It is ok, author here

does not really need to see this, she knows the story. All of these sitcoms episodes are pretty

short, thirty minutes, though technically it is more like twenty-one minutes because of the

commercials. Twenty-minute-long stories, with a lot of laugh tracks here. The story is even

shorter because of the laugh tracks. Maybe fifteen minutes. And usually there are several

storylines here.

So now we have 65400 words here, a lot of analyzing of the structure of a sitcom. The

Gallia writes story or the Asa writes story has been abandoned, might as well. At this point it is

just waxing about the days in October here, that will do, should do here. CNN and Trump, we

could watch that, but it is always the same here. Anti-Trump rhetoric. Or pro, depends on which

channel you are watching here.

65499 here. well, actually, author misread the icon here.

It is five minutes to seven here. The end of the day here. Matthew is dating the cafeteria

lady.

206
 Not long until the show with the writer and the reporter will start. In this place on Forty-

first. Tickets are thirty bucks. Who would attend that, at that price point? Just to hear somebody

talk about her book here.

6557. sorry, 6553, or something like that here.

On the telly, Mom. And the New Adventures of old Christine here. 65556.

Inconsequential words here. There is no story so we just have to make stuff up here. a writer tries

to come up with a story but there is basically writers block. A stifling one. She roams the planet

well, she would do that, but it is too much of an effort, too much of a production. Good writers

do not need this kind of stuff. They are inspired, they sit at the typewriter and just pen mazing

stuff. You have to be blessed by the gods or you have to pretend that you are here. Hard drinking

is supposed to help but that is obviously a myth. You just forget stuff when you are wasted, that

is all apparently here. 65677, seven seventeen here.

So now the reading in the theater is going on. It just started. On the telly, people talking.

Don Lemon looks different, did they do something to his eyebrows. They are lighter than they

usually are here. She could go back to reading the novel, the Manhattan Beach one, or she could

describe the woman who is on the telly answering to Don Lemon and the man who is standing

near a map. It is seven and thirty-nine, it is dark now outside, the curtains are drawn here. Seven

forty in the nite here.

65773, counting all of these words here. Not enough of a story except the description of

the slow amassment of words here. 200 words and then it will be ok here. An ad for a car

company with the man who used to play Putty on Seinfeld here. another commercial for

something that we do not know here. Some obscure new app maybe. An ad for a resort. And then

207
an ad for a medication here. Diabetic heart disease. Home Depot, an ad for that here. Though

apparently for banking with Home Depot. That does not really make sense here. An ad with an

owl. Another bird doing advertising, a talking bird? Weird, who are these people who design

these ad campaigns here? Four more words here.

359000, sorry, 65900. Still one hundred words into sliding into 66000. Historical novels

are a different animal all together. The Manhattan Beach one apparently is what one might call a

historical novel. A story anchored against the backdrop of real stuff that happened. A long time

ago here.

65948 here. a Wednesday in October here. Don Lemon and four other persons here. Now

the four persons side by side here. 65970. This has to wait until the coffee in the morn, when she

will venture out into the real world here. At this time, it is all about staying put and typing here.

66003.

Still later in the day here. Eight and forty-eight. On October 25. Still 34000 words are

needed to finish this till November one. Wow, six days. Which means some six thousand per

day. Well, good luck with that. What will we even write about here? The coffee place on

Arbutus? The cars that go up and down the street. The colors of the parked cars? The people

sipping coffee? The persons ordering coffee? Leaving the place or coming in? The baristas? The

rain that comes down on the city? The program on the telly? News, courtdramas sitcoms? The

drive thru near the hi-school? Who wants to read about all of this? The book that we are reading

here and that is arguably a toughie. We can dis it, but that is more what reviewers do here.

She looked at Instagram pics from Prose and Politics. And then a book, then the author,

then his wife, another author, then a look inside of a book. Well, better to watch FRIENDS here.

208
Funny stuff. 66176. People are making fun of Chandlers old girlfriend here. And then the

neighbor died. 66191. Phoebe and laugh tracks here.

Ross and laugh tracks here. Seven minutes after nine. 66206. Eight hundred words and

we will have reached the next obstacle. Well, the next round number here. If we want to get to

100 000 in time, there has to be constant typing here. 6000 words per day. Means that there have

to be 600 words per hour. I00 words per ten minutes. That does not seem to be right here.

Anyways on the telly, Chandler who thinks that he has a lot in common with the neighbor that

passed away. And now it is laugh track country here.

66296, a bunch of words that do not mean that much here. 700 words till ten here. And

now a pregnant Janis in the coffee house, the Central Perk one here.

An ad for a car, see your local Chevy dealer. An ad for, who knows? A man and his feet

traipsing thru a puddle. And an ad for Ivanhoe? Nope, it is an ad for the lottery. And an ad for

a deodorant though it looked like an ad for washing powder. You never really know what the ad

will be about. Apparently this is for a car but it showed an air conditioner thingie. The stories

tend to change out of nowhere, fast little novels, each a contained story that is full of sudden

turns here. anyhoo, now back to Ross and Phoebe here.

66434 here. This is going well here. 600 words of poetry, anything here. 550 words here.

about anything. Phoebes face. Her grimacing here.

Chandler, Monica just broke my seashell lamp.

Nine and twenty-four.

209
 Page 209. So many pages since beginning of August. Or late August here. Even the

counting is off. The spinning of the yarn here. Like yarnbombing but without a plan. Five more

words here, 66500. 501.

Five hundred small little inconsequential words, while the music is playing on the telly

here. A commercial for a car named Santa Fe, a Hyundai, apparently, Santa Fe is the name of the

model here. And now and ad for Sealy and other mattresses. An ad for an internet company. Or

something like that. Another ad for a car. An SUV. An image of a forest. A Honda. Chandler at a

date. On a date. She thinks that she has a big head. We can just see her from the back here.

And now Charlie and Jake. It is the second time that this scene is on here. He makes

noise with his mouth, Jake that is. Laugh tracks. They say stuff and then it is a pause and then it

is the laugh tracky thing here. The theme song now. An ad for a medication for fibromyalgia.

66650. And now Alan is coming back home and yelling at Charlie here. And the

obligatory laugh tracks here. Scribbling words or typing, it is all the same here. One day she will

do a reading, people will clap and buy the book. She will sign it. And if not, she is happy that the

words are amassing here and pretty fast at that here. It is a dirty job but somebody has to do it

here.

66727. Nine and thirty-six. October twenty-five. No rain anymore, no drops on the city,

no noise on the roof here. Laugh tracks and the like here. 250 words and then this is over here.

Sentences, mainly about the wordcount. It is not a very fruitful theme and there is nothing much

to describe than the numbers of words here. We have to find stuff to describe, historical stuff

maybe. The coffee house but it is not happening right now here. 200 words here.

210
 Alans mom, Rose, they all talk to Alan and tell her not to date Judith again here. Berta is

there too. They are all sitting in the kitchen at the table. Well, except for Charlie who is standing

here. 150 words here and the doorbell is wringing here. Jake and Judith here. Still funny. We

should still finish this up here. 66872. Which means, that some mere 120 or so words will be

enough to drive this up here. Home stretch homestretch here. Near to ten in the evening. And

once again, an ad for a car. A black car or a midnight blue one. J.C. Penney and now still another

ad for apps maybe. A new app named draft maybe here. A baby. And a woman singing. Es see

Johnson. Baby care here. And an ad for a car to lease. An ad for Mazda. So there were three ads

for cars here. In one sitting. 66976. An ad for FiOS fibers something network here. Streaming

whatever that is here. An ad for a woman who talks and is very serious and in control though it is

not clear what this ad is for, the lottery maybe here. 67009. Time to wrap this up, wrap this up

here. Nine and forty-six here.

So, now is the time that we have to wait here. It is none, not quite though, eight and forty-

seven to be precise. The phone person will come at eleven, so we have two hours to kill until

then. Or we can venture out and be back here at eleven. Between eleven and one, the phone

person. Which is actually a technician for the tv, which is not quite needed, the tv works just fine

here, they want to change the modem or something, whatever that might mean here. Old modem,

young modem, nobody knows what that means. It can mean anything here. All that she knows

here is that she has to let a total stranger into her place for two hours or a certain amount of time

between those two hours. The person might be longer here. Authors whole day is ruined, what

with sitting here and waiting. She was at the coffee place and at the gym and at the market

already here. Now she sits and waits here. Writing, yup, we can do that. The masterpiece that

never will. 67206 here. How about driving this up to 70000. But it flows much easier if you

211
venture out, you look at people and then you have stuff to write about. Faces, grimaces. Different

hairstyles, different hair colors. Tall persons, short persons. Old young. In here there is nothing

to see, nothing to describe here. The same, all the same here. Boredom personified. Calcification

of time. The inventing of phrases, of sentences, of stories here. Love stories and stories of hate.

She could go out to the wine store, she is out of red. Polished off a whole bottle of vino, red, two

days ago. Did not even take her that long, during the day. To be wasted during the day. That is

what winos do. In Santa Monica, there were drunks at ten in the morn. Very polite ones, no mean

drunks here. The winos were so much politer than regular folks. Well, this one was. He said

something to author or asked for something or for an info, an address, maybe money. And when

she refused, the face of the wino was very polite, ok, very accommodating as if he did not want

her to do anything but brush him off here. Very funny, but then again there were others too, what

you do is, you go to the other side of the street, after all that person is not steady on his feet, he

might be potentially dangerous, though, let us face it, the person can hardly walk what with all

the liquor inside of the body here. Drinking and writing, drinking and words. Put that glass

down, stop waxing here. Well, author can ramble sans drinking, she is pondering what she

wanted to talk about, oh, yeah, the idea of drinking during daytime. When people should be at

work. Well, her work is writing and reading, a profession that found her and that is more a hobby

than a job. With a job you know that you will be compensated, with writing a novel, it is a mere

shot in the dark. This might stick or it might not here. Somebody in nyc will miss her stop

because of ur amazing words. And then take yer on here. The romanticism of that, the

implications here. Maxwell Perkins was not interning, he made kings. Nowadays, people with

three PhDs in literature are trying to get into publishing, working long hours for no money, living

the life with two roommates, one of whom wants to be a dancer and the other one is an aspiring

212
actor. The world of FRIENDS, which is good and nice if you are a kid and good looking, not so

romantic, not so bohemian when you are old and wasted and with one foot in the grave here.

New York ah New York here. Every citay has its New York, where people come to make

it in the big city. With all the debauchery, all the liquor stores lining up at the strip malls in the

Bronx, in Queens here. Her writing really sucks, the verbs do not go with the nouns. There is no

Gallia and no Asa and no Detlef with a v, all these persons are made up and not well-defined

here. Writing is tuf, making up people that do not exist. You have to stick to the facts, if you

build an imaginary creature, you have to be consistent all thru the story. The name has to be the

same. Usually there is just one person with a certain name in order to not make it confusing, one

Doug and one Carrie and one Arthur here. This all goes back to the story of Arthur who lives in

the basement and is Carries dad, trying to sell his script to the next door neighbor. If you watch

as much tv as we do here, you know the story and if you do not watch tv that much, well, then

you are lucky here. You have a life after all here. 67671, sorry, 67800 something here. It is

eleven minutes after nine, she might go out for still another walk here. Another venturing out, the

gym, the coffee house, the market was not enough. Gotta be back here at eleven but there is still

time to see the world, the fall in Vancouver here. The yellow leaves, that kind of stuff.

The sun is out, but the ground is still reluctantly wet, full of puddles here. People walk

their little dogs first thing in the morn here. Fifty words and we have the first one thousand for

the day in the can here. 67973 at nine fourteen on October 26 in 2017. All these numbers ah all

these numbers here. Ten more words and we will be there, two more, 68000 it is, straight, neat

here.

So, this was exhausting. Change of modems, whatever that is. The old modems are bad,

so the phone company. Nope, they were perfect, the new ones suck. We had to sit here for three

213
hours, from eleven to one, the phone person came at two, and then it was another hour of

technical stuff that nobody knows about and nobody cares about. Three hours of my life, that is, I

will never get back here. And the new modem just sucks, it is vertical instead of horizontal and it

has two blinding lights, whereas the old ones were tiny and discreet. And blue and these ones are

bright and yellow.

The old modem was better, whatever a modem is here.

It is two and seven here. She is at the end of the Manhattan Beach book, though the story

is not resolved as of yet here. It is basically a gangster story but not a good one. Give me

Columbo any time, now there is a mystery worth watching. This however is a long book that is

definitely meant to be made into a movie, at least it seems that this is what the writer is vying for

and it is detrimental to the story. Literature should be just that, no action, but a lot of

introspection. A lot of watching paint dry and starting to daydream. What can you think of when

you watch paint dry? What is paint? Existential questions. Why are we here? what is our

purpose? What will we have for dinner? How many calories are in a Twix bar? Who polished off

the Halloween candy? You know, the works here.

One day, she too will go on a book tour. It is in the stars. Author here ponders, does

everybody go on book tours? Every author? Or do a lot of em just fizzle away here. After all

everyone can sign their own copy of a book. Why the fetishism of the autograph here? In this

time and age. Put ur John Hancock here. Nope, dont feel like it here.

Outside, it is brighter, in here she is falling asleep. The staying awake for the phone

person was too much here. We had hardly any sleep. Sleepless nights because of the phone

person. Just like Kramer and the chubby phone guy. Never ever have an appointment at your

214
own house because of something. If it works, do not fix it. The telly did not work, they rebooted

it, now it works. This modem changing stuff was extra. And it was annoying. They think that

they up the competition, but they do not. They drive yer away from using your service. Besides,

everybody uses different servers for different appliances. That is how it is here that is how it is. It

is all a marketing scheme. First, they send a solicitor to your house, then they just randomly cut

off the supply of the tv, then somebody has to come to change something called a modem, and

wait for signals, whatever here. Now her phone does not work here. ridiculous here.

68519 words two and twenty October 26, 2017. Just type here, just type and just type

here. 2:22 PM here

Im achzigsten Stockwerk. It is a song that plays on her phone, with a sound that is way

too silent, the audio can be turned up, but author here does not know how to do that and is kind

of reluctant to do it anyways, a telephone should have a quieter noise, a silent sound, after all you

do not want to be overwhelmed by the audio when you are on the bus. On the train, in a public

place, when you are a mere number that has to behave and fit in without making a wave here.

She is typing still typing here. Now In dieser Stadt, all kind of German songs here. After

Massachusetts by the Bee Gees, but first and foremost by The House of the Rising Sun, The

Animals circa 1963. Maybe 1966. He still sings, Eric Burdon. He still has the chops. Wow. Ich

war noch niemals in New York. Quite a song. Though she is not quite sure who is the singer.

This one is Udo Juergens here. Every song is there in so many versions, so many different covers

here, even by the same singer. And even at different times in their musical careers here.

68740. That is not much here. this has to go up to 70 000 by the end of the day here.

author here was in the coffee house at five, lots of people. Happy hour sans cocktails, happy hour

for teetotalers. For women who want to go home to their families, the group of polite school kids

215
on their way to the elite universities of this planet of ours here. Talking in foreign lingos,

laughing out here to take Manhattan or whatever here. The dream of the immigrant here. Author

ponders, she herself immigrated and emigrated, a lot, to different countries, continents here. She

now writes, not really a career here. This happens when you go to art school after you raised a

family here. You cannot make it as a designer, obviously, you make the youngens

uncomfortable, who wants to work with their mom? Which is a mere excuse, the kids were very

normal, they could care less who their colleague is, can be anybody, they just care about the

merit of ur artwork and hers was always pretty good, as strange or as normal as anybody elses.

In art school you tend to produce a lot of stuff that runs the gamut from yucky to exceptional. It

comes with the territory here. One day she will waltz back into fart skool, but not now, not as of

yet. At this point let us give literature its chance here, its chance here.

She finished Manhattan Beach, now it is on to Sophie Kinsella here. The book was, well,

soso, too long in the tooth, lets face it here.

It never rains in California. The Hammond guy here. Albert Hammond, maybe. The

Mamas and the Papas sang a different song. She totally mixes this up, she did so in this very text

here. And then you cannot fix your glitches because it is ripped outta context and the other

sentences dont make sense anymore, they are ripped out of their surroundings, the quips do not

work anymore here. How do translators do it? Can you even translate stuff or does everything

get lost in translation here?

Got on board a and it shows the Hollywood sign here. The romance of going out to

make it, to leave and the aftermath here. Author did not quite sure if all of these stories really

ring true here, All these stories of leaving home and not making it. Staying put and not making it

is more likely. 69154 here. give me Cat Stevens any time, go and see the world but be careful.

216
 Author here ponders, is this how we write books here? Listening in to songs? Now the

boss, Bruce Springsteen. Born in the USA. Author here had this keychain with a picture of ALF

saying Not born in the USA. Or maybe it was a fridge magnet, it was eons of years ago here.

Long long before our time. Our time as a wannabe writer here.

It is six and fifteen in the evening here.

BTW, born in the USA is actually an anti-USA anthem at its very core. Author here just

read thru an article on The Daily Beast that states exactly that. And yup, that is how it is, the boss

talks about what is wrong with the States. And if push comes to shove, everybody knows that

kind of stuff, and that is why Trump won even though he is now on a different course, he has

done a 180 and maybe that is what every politician has to do, you do the absolute opposite of

what you ran on. Once you are on that side of the fence. Revolutions have shown us what

happens once the rebels are in charge, they are worse and not better, it is a story as old as

humanity. Power does that to yer. Read Animal Farm. But you do not even have to read, power

makes you do strange things. Luckily, we aint powerful, writing is for the powerless.

69406 here.

600 words here. the i-fone sings all of the tunes of the boss here, they all sound alike.

That makes a guy a boss. You have only one spiel, that is more than enuf here. Like Picasso and

persons with 3 noses. Show me a 3-nosed person and we know who painted it here.

The coffee house tomorrow in the morn here. We will sings its songs, praise it, laude it

here. frap, cap, whatev here. The day is letting out here, but the lowly writer still has to feed her

words to the machine here. This German guy outta Hamburg, he says that 80 percent of writers

are men. RIP Harry Rowohlt.

217
 Author here sends out her words to all of these publishers, but they will not publish what

we have to say here. Which is not important, we do the writing here, we provide the words, at

one point they will be published. Maybe once they are publishable. She tries to use no expletives,

make it squeaky clean here. Politics we stay away from here, police states cannot find us. And let

us face it, they all are police states. It comes with the territory of having a government. People

are corrupt. Or something like that, something of that kind here. She gathers quips, one day she

will have a list of all the funny quips that people say, especially about politics. Stuff like if the

melting of the two Germanys would have gone the other way, Angela Merkel would still have a

job. She was trained for both sides. Translators of nonfiction books make more money, because

they have to make sense. She got these Stilblueten from the talk between Rowohlt and Geysi.

Three more words here, 69701 here. sorry, 300 words here. Let it be 70000. Seven oh three in

the pee em.

What to write on, what to write on here? CNN always gives us stuff to write about, but let

us face it, it is politics as usual here. The coffee house is more interesting here.

The phone sends her a message to not use it anymore, you have used up your data that we

bill you for here. Ok, fine, apparently the company itself has blocked the additional use of data,

whatever that means here. Technology, huh.

Seven and thirty-eight minutes here. 200 words and this will stand at 80 000 here. Sorry,

wishful thinking here. 70 000. On the telly, Don lemon and a person from the University of

Virginia. He has a moustache. He talks about the Bay of Pigs. Trump releases some but not all

JFK records.

218
 120 words or so here. CNN is still on here. Author here could start up her new book to

read here, by Sophie Kinsella. The other read that she just finished was quite a slog, but this one

seems to be quite good here. Anyhoo, this is not the place to review books or ice cream for that

matter here. That is what we have yelp for here or amazon.com. 66919 here. Eighty words on

anything here. Something funny maybe, something serious maybe here. Writing ah reading here.

69938 here. Presidents plummeting numbers. That is what is on on CNN. Well, that is

their spiel anyways. Just like Fox is pro-Trump here. Each channel has its favorites. But

anyways, this is not the place to discuss politics here. Let us stick to the descript of coffee places.

And especially the one near the house here. Coffee places, donut places, diners. Drive-thru

windows, junk food. Malls. Americana, in short here. and 70007 it is, it is here.

So today it is October 26. October 27, 28, 29, 30 and 31. Five days to write 30000 words

here. 30000 divided by five comes to 6000. Six thousand words per day. What kind of life is

that? What kind of life could it be? No showering, no combing of hair. Becoming a flee trap

here. Looking like a writer with no personal hygiene. Alcohol dependent. And for what? For a

book that is unpublished here, totally rejected by anypublisher worth her salt here.

There is of course something called an MFA in Creative Writing. They are all over the

place here. Every campus worth its salt has one.

The overuse of the term worth her salt, his salt, its salt here. Thomas Wolfe sure is a

good writer, well, was a good writer, but one thing that he tended to do is use a phrase or a word

for maybe two pages only to totally abandon its use after that. But she said that already here in

this text. 70183 here.

219
 Hazelnut latte. With whip, that is what she will have tomorrow. At five in the afternoon

here. The coffee place at five.

And now it is FRIENDS. A kind of strange time for FRIENDS. Must be a different

channel here. Phoebe and Terri Garr. The actress who was in Young Frankenstein. Apparently,

she plays Phoebes mother.

Stephen Colbert, funny like always. Eleven twenty, still October twenty-six, wordcount

70251 here.

FRIENDS, the one with the football. Her name is Margha. She is Dutch.

Apparently, the actress is not.

A commercial for Chevy. A Chevy truck.

Still writing ah still writing here. Six thousand words per day here. Nobody can do that.

Nobody can keep that up, not even you. Oh, I think she can. There is more to life than Seinfeld

and typing up random observations here. More to life. Like ice cream? We are definitely losing it

here. And only had one glass of white wine. The bullshitting is stress related, writing does that to

anybody. It comes with the territory here. Enough here, enough.

70359 here. The Dutch girl chose me. The important thing is, the Dutch girl picked me.

Thank you, Amsterdam. Well, actually it is way more convoluted, it is all about how it is not

about who wins or who loses or something like that. This is why we should never paraphrase,

never quote. Everything gets garbled up, watch it on you tube and then you get the gist. We are

killing the joke here.

220
 The end of Friends here. There will be still another episode. So many words here so many

words here.

Now the episode where Rachel trains a new waitress, apparently. Gunther tells her to do

so. And, btw, it is one minute after twelve here on the west coast here. Too many heres, but

that is ok-here.

An ad for an SUV. An ad for a Broadway musical with Steve Martin, coming to Los

Angeles here.

70507 here. Later still, we can start up the Sophie Kinsella book again here. Or just get

on with the reading from the place where she stopped here. Page six or page eight.

It is fair to say that I am writing some kind of dissertation.

Coffeehouses in the morning, it is fair to say they are all like coffee houses in the

morning. This is the idea that she brought back from the coffee place. She paid cash, which she

usually does not. She overtipped, for a drink that costs five bucks and twenty-five cents, she

rounded it up to six, which makes the tip standing at seventy-five for five bucks. Maybe that is

about right, twenty percent or actually, less. Five bucks, one tenth is fifty cents, two tenths, is

one buck. So she tipped somewhere between seventeen and eighty percent, and twenty is the

norm anyways.,

She sits next to these four women who speak in a language that she does not understand.

A foreign kaffeeklatsch. Four women, a coffee clatsh if there ever was one. One of the women

has a jacket on her knees, something mohair, black, metallicy. The other one wears a pink parka.

These getting togethers are very well-planned, the day before there was one with older women,

at five. They too all looked alike. There are dress codes for this, the groups all wear the same

221
apparel, like uniforms. They either all dress up or all dress down. The ones the day before spoke

English, they were smallish, old but not too old.

A book club. Though they seemed to be more like PhD candidates.

Author here rambles, mainly because she parked her car too far from the curb, because

the sun is shining and because she cannot find something better to do with her time left on this

earth than putting down little words on a sheet of paper. There are works more monumental than

this, there are cities waiting to be built, bridges to be strung over rivers, oceans. There is space to

be explored. Working in words is so pedestrian, so inconsequential. Even grave digging seems to

hold more cache here.

She is burying words, maybe that will run. She misuses words, mainly because she is

illiterate. Her language skills are so-so, her English is better than her Finnish, so maybe this will

do here. She has 70903 here, she needs 5000 more just for today here. It is ten and one minute,

there must be something on the tube here. She ponders, who uses the term tube as an expression

to describe a television set? Brits, Americans?

The language is there to be played with here. Fifty words and this will stand at 71000.

Shed better get to it here.

Gallia writes a book, still the title of her text. A woman named Gallia, brown curls,

sunglasses in her hair, silvery hoop earrings. A green skirt, a black top. She is sitting in this

dainty coffeeshop, more like a tea room, the one on thirty-fourth here. She has tea, orange pekoe

and the big sugar cookie here. She takes notes in a black book here. It is nine in the morn, the

store just opened here.

Author ponders, how is that for a description?

222
 Anyways, 71052 words here, yay.

Author here ponders if that is what she should do now. Go out to the bakery that is like

the one that she just described and order exactly that, the big sugar cookie and orange pekoe tea.

Do what the fictional character does. The time of the day is not the same, it is ten and not nine

and that place actually opens at eight and not at nine. So, there are some differences but not

many. There is another bakery within walking distance, on the street off West Boulevard. It is

very dainty too, actually, it is the original dainty tea room. There are always old ladies there, the

waitresses know them by name. The coffee culture in this city here, the tea culture. People meet

in coffee houses, go to bookshops, then go home. Culture light. Culture lite.

Something reminiscent of Vienna in the nineteenth century, Turin in the twenty-first

century. Palatial coffee houses in Milan.

Author here is way off, her writing is veering off. There has to be one story and the

author and the writer are not the same person here. Sorry, the author and the writer are, but the

protagonist is different. If we invent a person, the descriptions have to stick. How about Gallia

being a tall blond woman in the food court of the mall having poutine?

Author hates this, making up people that do not exist in reality. Puppets that just perform

in a book. How do you make these people get to becoming live in the time of tv. The screen

makes them alive much more than a text ever can. You are basically competing with another

artform that is so much better, so much more realistic, so much more engaging. Hollywood killed

the radio star, nope that is not how the saying goes. She is losing it here and losing it here. Better

to do her reading, the book by the acclaimed author who writes really good here. Who lives on

the other side of the pond and uses a very lively language here.

223
 She listens to Joseph oNeill reading his story the sinking of the Houston. But then she

aborts it. She reads about different authors, listens to them talk on you tube, on clips from CUNY

tv, Irish writers in America. She has never read Faulkner and she is not sure if she can be a writer

if there is such a vast amount of non-knowledge of what constitutes the canon. A writer who is

illiterate. Maybe she should face that, embrace it. Maybe that is what makes her prose better,

lively. After all, she can write and she is writing for say the last twenty years here. Essays in the

community college on Forty-ninth, gallery reports, where she described the pictures in the art

gallery on the ground floor of the now defunct art college down on the Island. She has put words

together in funny sentences, in a language that she encountered first in Frau Kruses fifth grade

class, when she was training how to say the tee eitsh by contorting your tongue.

And now this might as well be her language of choice. She has 71585, she is sitting put

and writing and it is a weird profession, sitting still and typing here. Nobody pays yer, at least

not yet here. One person once bought a book at an art fair, two bucks for 100 pages. Author here

got one buck or would have if the seller would have taken half the money, Your cut.

Author here feels like liquor, but it is eleven in the morn and no-goods are the ones who

have ethanol in their veins at this ungodly time here. Eleven exactly.

The King of Queens, which is much better than those people sitting on a couch at if they

have a lil get together in public here. This King of Queens episode is not the best, she pushed

the off-button here. 300 words and we are at 71000 here. Time for lunch, early lunch maybe.

On the telly, CNN. The speaker of the White House. Huckabees daughter. And now a

man who is always on the telly, a very serious guy, what is his name? He is the one who is on

NPR, too. He looks older. Last evening there was Lou Dobbs with Trump. Lou Dobbs has

224
changed. This journalist on the telly has changed, too. All these faces age, they age on the screen,

before our eyes here. Though they sure have powdered faces, after all they are on tv. Grown-up

men and make-up and hair dye. And we who listen to them. What has this world come to here?

Now I have seen it all here.

Her left hand is acting up, even though she does not use it that much when typing here.

The right hand does the majority of the peckings at the keyboard.

Author here had cheese sauce and macaroni and feta in there. It is a ready-made food,

you just microwave it. Microwaveable entre, apparently that is the right, the accurate term. She

buys it at the market on Forty-first, and it is a store brand which means it is less expensive and

has better quality control and well, it is all vegetarian what with mere cheese and pasta here.

Later on, she might have a glass of wine, the white one that is in the fridge. Once you open a

bottle you have to finish it, maybe over a week, one glass per day. Those screw tops are better

than old fashioned cork, they just are easier to handle, modern here. This is the world of

refrigerators, not a world of wine cellars any more. Wine wine wine. The elegance, the

femininity. Betty Ford et al, though in those times they drank stuff called highballs, whatever

that is. You can google it. They drank a lot of high balls in that historical novel that she just

finished the day before, the one that took her from Friday to Thursday to read. One week, seven

days for a book. The woman who wrote it is now in Minneapolis on her book tour. She is busy

with crisscrossing the continent for her book tour stints here. Author has to look at David Sedaris

and his book tour. She met him here in Vancouver at the signing which he did on Granville and

West Broadway here. Granville and eight. Broadway becomes Eighth, apparently, it merges, it

morphs here. 71, sorry, 72 138 here. We need 4000 still till midnite here. Author is busy with the

Kinsella book, basically fluff. Page twenty already here. It is like a magazine article, nothing

225
special. Bridget Jones meets the Prada book, the Wintour tell-it-all. A book good for making into

a movie here.

So, yes in British slang the tube is the subway in London mainly and in American slang

the tube is the television. See, everything becomes crystal clear if you have google.

72218 here. On the telly, Mike and Molly. It is one and twenty-eight and the twenty-sixth

or twenty-seventh here. More like the twenty-seventh. But these are all numbers, random ones

maybe. She had this omelette with tomato and onion and bell pepper in a wrap. Two glasses of

white wine. Wow, we are pooped here. The weather is so nice which is definitely

counterintuitive to the fashioning of 5000 words here. And we still need some 4000 here. Words

about stuff here. One thirty-one, the second Mike and Molly for the day here. Though they have

it on a different channel too apparently.

The woman who writes her book. That Gallia person. That damned Gallia. How old is

she. Married or single? How much in the bank? What are her physical handicaps. Did she bruise

her left thumb because she slid in the mall and fell on her back and basically held up all her

bodyweight with her hand that she straightened out to ease the fall. Did she not go to the doctor

because who wants to wait for an x-ray or a CT-scan just because of your thumb? Too small a

body part here.

So, this is Gallia? Is she beautiful or butt-ugly? There is no middle ground in literature.

One of these days she will read Faulkner but at this point she is the girl that is only versed in

German lit. It should suffice here. You do not need to read each and every book ever written

here. Nabokov, Tolstoy. Dostoyevsky has to do here. 72478 here. Page 226. One and thirty-

seven here. October 27, 2017. When you write the month, the word interface shows exactly what

226
day of the year it is. Writing in the age of WORD by Microsoft here. She needs chocolate here.

At seven in the eve she will go out and get a Twix here.

Write what you know. Well, at this time it is watching tv. Something about a crisp pinot

noir. October letting out. The novel writing month starting up. There are meetings to start up the

novel writing extravaganza here.

The novel writing meetings in town. They are usually a distraction from the writing

process. And Michael Ondaatje did not do those here. Maybe just typing is more than enough.

TV again. Three and one minute. She is reading the book by the Kinsella woman, she is sleeping,

well, did sleeping, had two glasses of white vino, and she looks at the laugh tracks. Two Broke

Gals. She is kind of too tired for typing here.

72647 here.

Somehow those interviews on you tube seem so much more writerly. People who are

Irish. Who know how to do this. Who stand in front of a class and make them think they know

stuff.

The woman is sitting in this crepe place in Amsterdam. She has this big pancake, very

thin. With sugar on it and lemon juice which comes in this small, very tine silvery can. You can

put it on the pancake in increments. It is so nice in here. A tad darkish. Nobody is in here, well,

no customer. The waiter is very very tall. Dutch are the tallest on the planet. He has a very loud

voice. An actor maybe? He yells at her? Coffee, crepe. He is dressed in black and white. The

white is the apron, it goes down to his shoes. Author here writes with a BIC on a yellow pad.

Once she is finished with this, she will get a new writing pad, a Dutch one. She feels very lonely.

Which is very good for a writer. You put in a lot of words here. She does not have a story as of

227
yet. But she can describe the laces on this planet where she sits and writes. The coffee is nice,

she pours the cream into it. Watches it muddy up the dark brown, making the whole beverage

milky beige. She ponders, there was a time her heart used to beat fast. Now she is so accustomed

to caffeine here.

She toys around with the laptop. Listens to the audio of The Sound and the Fury or

whatever the title of Faulkners book is. Not a good idea to start up a new book. First the

Kinsellas book has to be finished here. She is on page 50, there are 400 pages or less or more

here. 72955 words, the first 2 Broke Girls for the day is in the can. Well, it is over. In the can

means actually that it is filmed not that it is shown on a screen. But maybe we can do this, play

with the language, use it incorrectly here. It is called artistic. 73007.

She read about this family who lives in the Hotel Chelsea. Sometimes they have dinner in

this place downstairs, the Mexican place. Author has been on that block many times. That is

where she always stays. Well, not the Hotel Chelsea, but in that neighborhood. It is three and

thirty-three here. 73058 here.

On the telly, something about Catalonia. A roundtable on the BBC. The man who is the

MC is this famous reporter. A British guy, some British guy. He always asks the right question,

he has this aura of being impartial and logical. A thin white guy with a British accent. Around

fifty years ago, his hair is not grey as of yet. A long face. No facial hair. He has the aura of a

Viking. A skinny tall Viking with a British accent. The typical brit. Who went to Oxford or

something because that is his intonation, his way of pronouncing, enunciating here. He is not too

loud, though he is pretty loud. But he does not yell into the mic like Trump does. Actually, you

do not need to yell because you have a mic in front of your mouth here.

228
 Later in the day. Saturday, a dry Saturday. Maybe even a too warm Saturday. You dress

up very warm, go for a walk and come back drenched, sweaty. There is no way to dress right for

this weather. It is the weather when people catch a cold. They are either dressed too hot or too

cold. It is the end of October. Halloween will come. But not this weekend. Somewhere in the

middle of the week. People flock to the bookstore. They do not have the book that she wants to

buy. It is this book by this Irish writer who used to live in the Chelsea hotel. With his family.

With his young family. Apparently, people still do that. In the end it costs less than renting a

place. Apparently. She ponders if she will do that if she wants to pursue another degree. It costs

as much as a dorm but is much comfier. Cozy and comfy here.

She was in downtown. Had ideas for plots. Forgot them here. In the very morn she was in

the coffee place. Two men were sitting outside. One of them moved his hands a lot when he was

telling a story. The other one told his stories very stoically, though it seems that after a while he

started to mimic the other speaker. He too moved his hand but way more reluctantly. Much more

contained. Like a very stiff ballerina. The other one though was a natural, a storyteller. He even

moved his head up and down after he said something and looks at the person who listened until

the other one reacted in a positive way, like I understood what you just said. The person who

moved his hands a lot expected the other one to nod, he wanted to make sure that his story was

understood. He moved his hands up and down, side to side, but mainly he opened his arms as if

to exaggerate what he says or as if he is Pavarotti and hiving his voice to the world, as if he is

belting out AIDA. There were others too to watch, a young man in dark blue, Chinese, with a

white towel around his legs, like an apron. He was very young and very thin and very

determined. He went by the coffee house down to the gas station and then came back. He looked

as if he was on a mission. He was definitely school age, this is the working before you start

229
college. On Saturdays the coffee house is full of very young baristas. But the one with the apron

worked in one of the other stores, not in the coffee house. Inside of the coffee house there were

two women who were telling each other sob stories. Sad stuff, emotional stuff. They spoke either

Japanese or Mandarin or Cantonese or Korean. Or Spanish, or English though they did not have

that kind of look. Author here tries to figure out people from far away, even on the train, she saw

this one guy with a suitcase, everything about him screamed I am German. She was about to

follow him to YVR to make sure that he boarded Lufthansa or Air Berlin or something like that.

She always wants to know if her hunches are true, though, lets face it, they usually are. People

act like the nationality that they are. Evn dual citizens walk a certain way. Reading people is

easy, it is a science. Mainly, you have to have lived all over the world. The two women are

definitely Iranian, though they seem to be the kind who would say I am Persian. Even though

they do not dye their hair.

Professor Higgins, played by Rex Harrison, he got it all right. He pronounced that he can

figure out peoples background, the school they went to or did not, the block they lived on, their

family dynamic, middle child or else just out of the corner of his eyes. Well, he did not go to that

extent, but you get the picture here. Basically Sigmund Freud did the same. Which makes one

think is psychology just the stuff that people study who did not get into med school?

Anyhoo, we have 73909 here, it is twelve minutes after five in the afternoon of a

Saturday in late October here. The last Saturday in October. Author picked up a book in the

small bookshop, and she picked up another one in the small bookstore in downtown. Both were

written by female writers. Both writers apparently live in the wilderness. One in Scotland, one in

New England. Their flavor of writing is similar. These are the female writers of today. Their

stuff is poetic. The female voices in literature.

230
 Voices of women who have dedicated themselves to writing. The Big Five, formerly Big

Six make sure that they promote certain voices. Feminine voices. Subdued voices. These are not

the voices of a Kurt Vonnegut or an Erich Maria Remarque. Not a Nothing New on the Western

Front or whatever the English translation of IM WESTEN NICHTS NEUES might be. Nothing

pacifistic. Nowadays everything published is more like war mongering. The female voices are no

Michael Moores who say that war is bullshit and that the US is to be blamed for everything and

anything. The gals are basically patriotic in a very perverted way. Author ponders if Gloria

Steinem would agree? Do her words pass the litmus test, the one administered by Gloria? Was

Gloria Steinem named Gloria after Gloria Swanson?

74125, still writing and still writing here.

The book bird, this was the idea for a plot that she had when she was downtown. A novel,

a book titled THE BOOKBIRD. It had something to do with an avid reader, something like

George Orwells Let the Aspidistra fly. Something with a bookish mothy woman who has her

hair in a bun. A librarian type or more a blue stocking type. A Blaustrumpf. These are words that

nobody uses anymore and she came upon this when she was in this place that tries to recruit

people to study in Germany for undergrad or graduate school. There were all these pieces of

paper on the table that said hashtag and then a word that is kind of obsolete, which is from a

bygone era, the fifties, the sixties. Author here knew exactly what they meant, mainly because

she lived in Hamburg until 1967. Stuff like Backfisch or Fraeuleinwunder. These are terms of a

time when Konrad Adenauer was chancellor or Erhardt. The JFK, Nikita Chrustchow, Charles de

Gaulle era. When TV was black and white. Hashtag backfisch fraeuleinwunder blaustrumpf. All

of these are words that describe females though.

231
 Anyhoo, another plot was about a writer who lives for exactly one month in the nicest

hotel in the city in order to write a novel. Kerouac wrote ON THE ROAD in three weeks, the

nanowrimos are supposed to write a novel in a month. So, the idea is that this person lives in the

hotel and pens her novel. Either in the hotel on Burrard or in the other one. Actually, there are

three hotels on Burrard, maybe four.

And how does the Y play into all of this? And dieting?

So, author has to be able to crystallize a storyline with some subplots but not too many.

Like the two men talking outside the window of the coffee house with one being the more

important person, the main actor, the other one being the reactor. One sings the main aria, he is

Pavarotti. Th other one whimpers silently, in unison maybe. The two women are a subplot, so is

the young man with the apron.

That is how stories unfold, very physically. We watch the two men who are in front of us,

we see the two women if we turn our head. They are behind the viewer, to the side. They are not

in pure sight. One of the man has a turquoise shirt and a tweed hat that he has taken off. Which is

weird because tweed and biker outfit do not go together. By biker we mean a joggingish stuff,

spandex, not biker the tattoo kind here.

All this is very visual here, we need a storyboard.

5:42 here. 74587 here. The sun is trying to go down here, sunset ah sunset here.

17 minutes ago, she stopped writing, so the app tells her. Author ponders if one could call

WORD an app. Is not the thing on your phone an app? Is WORD an app. What is the exact term?

WORD is a program, for word processing. Though word processing is an archaic term in 2017.

232
And you cannot really call this a typewriter, this is not an Olivetti. Nor an IBM, you know those

with the round kugel.

Author here type up her masterpiece here. She looked for this book by this writer named

ONeill, an Irish writer in nyc. She said that already. He teaches, Bard or Brown. He says in this

video that nobody he knows read his books. Just his family. Or in other words that he never ever

met somebody who has read his books. He never came upon a person who read his books, the

people that he meets in his daily life are people who did not know that he was a writer. Or

something like that. Author ponders, it is very difficult to retell something, some other persons

words. That is what Perry Mason is for? Hear-say is never good enough to stand up in court. So

why is it ok to quote people in scholarly texts, to paraphrase somebodys words. If you do not

exactly use the same sentence, you are changing the context here. Author ponders what to think

about writers who write historical novels and swear that they did their research. Isnt it

technically all hear-say. Or somebody elses fiction. That is why she likes the idea that non-

fiction is somebody elses fiction. She is not quite sure who said that, but one thing is for sure, it

rings so very true here, it is the truth. History is somebodys version of what has happened.

Every time something is retold it is muddled with the speakers perception here. There is no

absolute truth here.

Thus, we can make it all up here. The whole story. She liked when this guy said that he

makes it all up. Mainly because his day job is teaching teenagers how to do research. So, when

he writes he goes the absolute other way, the complete other way, he lets go of the facts. He

disregards the facts, he does a 180. You cannot really do that, if you write a story that is situated

in areal place here. If you write about Oakland or Berkeley or Portland, the streets have to exist

233
there. How about Vistaria road? You remember, the soap opera. Apparently, you do not need

with suburbia.

Later. She ponders, there are at least 5000 books that she would like to read. 5000 titles.

How can any one person read that many books, how could one do that in a lifetime? It is an

undertaking that is way too big here. She has to let go of all the books that she would like to read

here. Nobodys lifetime can accommodate that many books here. You have to streamline your

intake of reading material here. When she was walking downtown, between Smithe and Burrard,

sorry, between Granville and Burrard, by the law courts, she passed this young woman who was

wearing a thin green parka, the color that soldiers wear it. Tan. Olive. She was smiling to herself.

She had short hair, not that short though, brown hair, not that dark though. Her coat was waving

in the wind it was very big for her. She was holding a bunch of books stacked on each other and

was kind of hunched over so that the books will not fall, because books are all in different sizes.

All the books were travel books, like Lonely Planets, pocketbooks, travel guides. About 30 cm of

books, that is how high the heap was. And all of those books are shiny on the outside, they tend

to glide away from each other if you stack them. They are glossy and glossy items do not have

that kind of surface that will adhere to the surface of another item. Hardcover books would have

that kind of texture that adheres, like sandy stone on the pavement, but glossy travel guides, they

do not stick to each other. Author ponders if she is getting her idea across, it is very difficult to

describe something if you are not using your hands. To show stuff. That is why the guy in front

of the coffee house was using his hands to clarify what he was talking about here.

Anyhoo, travel guides, author ponders if she could make the protagonist of her novel a

travel book writer. The advantage would be, that the person just lives in airports and thus it is ok,

nobody can really factcheck. It is the Altamont of locations, if Altamont was fictional and not the

234
real city Ashbury or something, in North Carolina, then we can make up stuff here too, besides,

one can google anything nowadays here. if Karl May could write about the US without ever

setting foot there, then so can we here.

75441 words, the tribulations of a would-be writer here. It is six and fifty in the evening,

dark outside, the curtains are drawn here. On October 28, 2017. Yay ah yay here.

October 29, 2017. Another day, a Sunday, last one in the month of October, in the year of

2017 here. She uses as many words as possible, the opposite of using an extra little amount here.

Her thing is to stretch the story, not to compress it. There is a fascination with the words, always

more than a fascination with the story. That is her thing, the starry-eyed amazement at the poetics

of everyday life. The reflection of the Starbucks sign in the car window, the ARBUCk or

STARBU, where you cannot really decipher what is going on, you wonder why there are big

block letters on some car window and you think that it is some racecar weird ting until you

understand that it is the mere reflection and that is why it looks visually at once appalling and

fascinating here.

Gallia writes a book, we are still at it here. She finished her novel, not the one she is

reading but the one that she is writing here.

It is forty-eight minutes after eleven. 75650. In the morn, in very bright nice weather,

sunny, in this kind of state, the coffee place. Fathers with kids in uniforms, with long stockings

over shin pads. Could be anything, soccer, baseball, field hockey. Always black cleats here. The

sportswoman looks back, one can see the face of the woman thirty years from now. The one that

she will be in the future, as an adult here. That expression.

235
 The book was kind of jumpy, she read all through the nite. She will find the reviews on

amazon.com, see if others point out the same glitches. They usually do, some things are always

obvious to everybody here. 75757 here. She needs a drink but then again, she will vie for

abstinence here. The day is boring maybe. Her left hand hurts and she still has not seen a doc.

Somehow it seems to become something chronic, something she will have to live with. The

tatters that ur body gets while living on this planet. Everything ages every day here until finally

they put you under. Until then you can write some stories, build some bridges, do stuff do stuff.

In the morn, when she came back from the shiny coffee house it was Fareed Zakaria on the telly

with Isacson, the guy who writes biographies of Einstein and Newton or Franklin, yup, Franklin

not Newton. Steve Jobs and now the one on Leonardo da Vinci. It was about a pic of the

Vitruvian man here. Walter Isaacson, that is his name here. He has gained weight, a tad a tad

here. Writing does that to yer. Sitting at a typewriter, hunched over maybe. The day before, she

listened to this guy who gave a talk about conversation in academia, how do academics talk as

compared to how they write? Do they talk colloquially as if they are in a bar? It was very

interesting, and she will revisit it. One thing that was obvious was that he had very bad posture,

the lecturer himself. He hunched over books all of his life here. Being hunched over is not good

for your posture, your spine here. 76000 BTW here, BTW.

So funny, in seventeen minutes this broo haha will start up in downtown Vancouver here.

It is an Aussie bar, all about the land down under. The nanowrimo kickoff will be there, which is

funny because why would a place where writing novels is celebrated, why would such a place be

geared so much towards one location on the planet. Will all the novels have a reginal flavor, will

they all be about Sydney or Canberra? She might go there but it is actually a real restaurant and

you cannot get by by just ordering a drink or a cuppa joe here. On the telly it is Larry the Cable

236
Guy, the movie here and it is pretty funny here. 76122, sitting inside and typing up stuff here.

The amazing new novel, though she just read thru all of these reviews for the Kinsella novel,

apparently the shopaholics stuff was good whereas this one was not. Ah whatev whatev here.

We still need a story for the novelmonth. A person, her life, something like that here.

76178 here.

Yes, she is a writer. She knows that but now it is about time that others know it too. She

picks at her food and looks down over Union Square. It is deserted, and it glistens in the rain.

There is only drizzle and more glistening. Two in the afternoon on a weekday, this is as desolate

as Union Square can ever be. Later on, she will go to her other digs, the bar of the Hyatt, the

second-hand bookstore, the one where she got the red book by Philip Roth. Red with black

blocky type on the cover. And then there is the bar, the Italian one. Pictures of Tuscany, Toscana.

She lives in this neighborhood, well, a quarter mile where all is happening. Her respite

from the world. She still pays the membership for the writing studio on 14th, but all of her

writing takes place far away from the studio. It is more in her head anyways. The thinking about

plots. The plotting.

Author ponders, this is a good start for a book, she might use it in the nanowrimo novel.

Just copy and paste it. Or maybe that is cheating here. You cannot use the same sentences twice.

You cannot steal from yourself, or can you?

She always wanted to be in fashion that is why she moved to nyc. How is that as a first

sentence for a novel? It is weird to write about a writer, it hits too near to home. But the life of a

fashionista, that seems more exotic. Author ponders, maybe she really should write about

fashion. It is a stretch but a nice stretch. The world of fashion, huh. Always interesting here and

237
you can get into it just by walking thru the mall and looking at the mannequins in store windows

here.76481 here. She starts up novels, intros, one about a writer in nyc and one about a fashion

person in nyc. One and twenty-seven here.

500 words here. and then we have 77 000 here. On the telly, the Larry movie. Cable guy.

NEW ATTEMPT AT NOVEL

Chapter one

She stands on the platform of the train station. It is five in the morn, when people should

sleep. But she has to be here to get on the train down to Zurich. Or up to Zurich. The train will

come in at thirteen after. It is dark, dark, November weather in Switzerland. She loves it here,

very exclusive. Swiss. The man next to her avoids eye contact. Everybody avoids eye contact in

this country. She is here but she is invisible. There is a strangeness, a foreign factor about her.

She takes it with her everywhere she goes. She will be in Zurich at about six. She will have a

coffee in the corner of the Hauptbahnhof. It is nice, a train station in Europe. It is different from

Penn Station. Trains in Europe. There are differences, there are similarities. She has never been

to China to know how trains are over there. She registers how train stations are the world over.

She will write a book. A dissertation. She might sell it to a university press, MIT, Yale. Chicago.

University presses are nice, and they are not as selective as the big five. She will pepper her book

with footnotes. Yup, that will be her spiel. Then, the college lecture circuit. How tough can it be?

The train comes in, reality sets in. Daydreams, they are just that, daydreams. A woman gets into

the train before her. The train makes its way to Sargans. She closes her eyes, some zs. It is

actually a two-hour ride, she thought this will go faster. She is train traveling so much in this

place, she mixes up where she is and what the travels are. She had too much liquor the nite

238
before. Her European adventure is getting to her, is going downhill, she has to keep tabs on her

alcohol consumption here.

So, this is another start for a novel, but it is kind of confusing. Because first the travel

time was one hour and then it was two hours. She has travelled with the train, in la Suisse, but

she cannot mix up travel times and travel routes. Or she can be decidedly vague which is not

really good, it is confusing. You have to stick to a story, not teeter around here. One and fifty-

one, BTW here. Still the cable guy on the telly here. The woman who plays in it is the same one

that plays the Nebraska native on terms of endearment here.

Sixty words more and this will stand at 77000 here. Pretty good, huh here. The movie is

over here. She feels like a donut because that is what happens if you watch stuff called Larry the

Cable guy here.

Outside, flickers on the leaves here. Writing is like embroidery or something. She could

do laundry, she should do laundry here. 77000, BTW, BTW, here.

Two PM. Pix eleven news and apparently now it is rain rain rain in nyc. Whereas here it

is beautiful here.

ANOTHER NOVEL IDEA

She sells shoes. Yes, shoes. Shoe retail. Everybody wears shoes. They ask her for certain

models, certain styles. All day long. In different sizes. So, this is her life. Al Bundy personified.

She seems to like it though. Its predictability. There is somewhere where she has to be at nine

every morning. Her store is in the mall. She would prefer to be in the upscale mall, this is more

an everyscale mall here. It is a living, she is a people person. Or tries to be. At lunch time she

239
goes to the food court. Has, well, food. These days it is poutine. You know, the Quebecois

French frie gravy whey thingie here. 77140 here

She will still type this up. Lamentations about books. Hopefully this is not all over the

place here. The insertion of start-up novels in between her journal here. The jumping around

cannot be good here. It will confuse the reader here. The problem is that the novel writing month

is coming up and she has to come up with a plot, one plot. She has to make up her mind and

follow one story and only one. And she should stop reading books. You cannot be doing both

here.

77231 here.

A list of books to read: Lolita, Slaughterhouse Five. Motherless Brooklyn. War and

Peace. The Buddenbrooks. Magic Mountain. The Citadel. The Catcher in the Rye. Catch 22.

Netherland. Rabbit Redux.

None of them sounds that alluring. Maybe her reading list should be just going into the

bookstore across from the coffee place and picking up a book, any book.

She will write a novel about fashion. Something fashiony. Something about dieting.

About fashion diet food. Art. Animation. The story has to be fascinating. An eccentric that does

the same thing every day. Like eating a certain kind of candy at ten in the morning.

ANOTHER POTENTIAL NOVEL BEGINNING

Romeo moved to the big city. He left Asta. So now he is here in nyc. He lives the big life

in the big city. He will be a famous writer. If he just keeps up the wordcount of teo thousand

words per day, he will make it. He is here on a B-1 Visa. After three months it is back to Italy.

240
Or he will extend his tourist visa. I am a writer, I have to stay longer. Take some courses at

Hunter College. Or one at the School of Visual Arts. SVA, he always sits on a bench outside of it

anyways. He knows that Artwriting is on the fifth floor. Design writing on second. Well, those

are not Continuing Ed courses, if he wants to take one of those, he needs to change his visa

status. At this point he lives on the third floor in this street off Eighth. The person who lives here

usually is in Germany back with his folks. So, he sublets his place for one month. After the

month is over, Romeo has to find a new place. Or stay in a hotel. There is this really nice one

next to his place here.

Romeo likes it here. He feels very grown up. Big city, big country. Nobody speaks

Italian. He is far away from home and that is good.

Ok, so this is a story about somebody named Romeo. He hails from Asta. Alba, Asta.

Actually, the place is called Asti. Ok. Maybe we should shoot for Alba. It is bigger than Asti. It

has this nice supermarket where even the regular people talk dramatically, with big hand

gestures. A child in pink and her granny. All italiano, with the accent of the Piedmont region

here. Everybody drinks Barolo all of the time here.

So how about this, we have the story of Romeo in nyc and then the musings of the author

about the home region of the Romeo guy. Author here, after all, has been over there, over x-mas,

some three or four years ago. It was a blast. A red Fiat, stick shift. She was fishing for inspiration

for her novel. Well, not actually, but now it seems to be good for feeding her novel. But maybe it

is too reality based a story.

Maybe we just make up a place in Denmark where everybody always has herring.

241
 Author ponders, maybe, pushing one stereotype into the next is not a substitute for hi-lit.

She started up LOLITA online, ten pages. Too annoying a book here. She left it, put the PDF

into the recycling bin. The icon on the monitor. She looked for the Jeff Toobin book, which is

somewhere in her place, god knows where. Reading does not seem her thing, she loses books.

She should buy this book called LOST IN SEPTEMBER. The name is good, poetic. Reminds her

of that song by Green Day. When September Comes. Or something like that.

On the telly, Penny and Dr. Hofstaetter here.

77841 here.

Latte would be good here. The coffee, the crystals here. Or a glass of wine. Anything but

typing up a novel that does not go anywhere.

Romeo in Italia, Romeo in Chelsea. Walking down Eighth Avenue until he reaches

Fourteenth and has to choose whether he wants to turn down to the Meatpacking or down to

Union Square here.

77901.

Back to this place, the laptop, the 27 books that we read over the summer, well,

technically this all started in May here. Or maybe it was summer, a summer of 27 books. 27

funny books here. She left them here as trophies to her accomplishment of fighting thru all of

these words here. She likes the physicality of a pile of books. A sculpture of books, a three-

dimensional object with 27 parts. Well, actually, these are just a mere 19 books here, the other

ones were either online or as audiobooks or both. And then there were the two that she left in

nyc, and the one that she recycled in the mall because she did not like it here. 28025 here.

242
 Now it is Columbo time here. It is eight and thirty-nine, still October twenty-nine here.

Suspenseful music here. The guy who plays Norm on Cheers is the murderer. Apparently, now

he killed another person after having killed the initial victim here. Columbo now is kidnapped.

And now what do we have here? A police chase here.

78083 here.

Alright, Columbo you havent come here to discuss the scenery.

Maybe 1000 words on a Monday morn. After the coffee house, after pondering on the

drive down there, while swerving into and out of traffic, about the words she writes, whether

elegant prose or substantial subject matter is where it is at, after all that it is back at the

typewriter here, in a very weird and strange way here, there are appointments to be met, there is

only a small window for penning the perfect, well, prose here. It is October, the last day in the

month, oh, wait, one day before it, if we want to be correct here, accurate here. She ponders if

the glitches in some novel will break or make it, the accuracy, the accuracy. If a writer mentions

the weather on a morning, or a mid-afternoon on January first in 1947, in that specific location,

can one not easily prove it all wrong, that this did not happen at that specific time here. The

fictionality of what tries to appear as reality. Author ponders, she should take one of those

Gotham courses, online, they are so very specific, they will show her how it is exactly done here.

But there is no time, nanowrimo will start up two days from now. She can finish this text, the

Gallia text at a later date, in December, in January next year. You can do that, halt the production

of one project to finish up another project and deliver that. Contractors do it all the time here,

though the linear pursuit of work seems to make sense, even from a logistical point of view here.

78369, at eight and forty-nine on a reluctant morning on October 29, no, 30, in 2017 here. She

243
will roam to downtown, has to be somewhere at ten, nope, eleven here. Gallia writes a book, ah,

Gallia, writes a book here. She might pick up the book that was hoarded, piled up in the back of

the tiny bookstore in downtown, the one with the green cover, a mossy green, a story if there

ever was one here. The novel with a plot, after all that is what we are after here. Especially when

the task is to write up 50 000 words within the time constraint of one teeny tiny month here. The

novemberish novel, that one ah that one here. 78287, you know the same novels are penned in

down under and in South America, where it is actually summer or spring here. The weather will

influence a hat and how you write, it always does, it always does here. BTW, seven eight five

two seven here, gotta go and gotta go here. Other stuff is waiting, writing is addictive, but we

have to leave this, leave this, for now for now and for now here.

Three fifty-one in the evening. Sorry, afternoon here. A day in downtown, sugar cookie,

the big one. A wrap, the one with quinoa. And rice and chicken. Half a bottle of vino. Way, way

too much calories here. Outside, the sun still shining, very nice day here. she will go out for a

walk, maybe a book in the lil bookstore. Or writing, writing here. Maybe writing is better, so

much better here. Producing words in lieu of consuming words here. Just practicing this here.

Reading stories, trying to figure out how this is done. The mechanics here. Analyzing how others

do it. Which is kind of counterintuitive, after all you have to be a new voice if you want to make

it. Being able to smurf words together in intuitive ways, that is what publishers want. Something

to change the literary landscape here. Something that Melville House will want to get into the

bookstores here. Melville House, yay, ah yay here.

A plot, there is none. The sheer plotlessness, the complete plotlessness. Embrace it. It is

not a liability, nope, it is what sets you apart from other writers. Not your long beard, not your

funky hair. Or funky glasses. Not your coffee breath. Not your alcoholic swagger. Not your

244
tipsiness. Not your beauty. So, neither your positive characteristics nor your negative

characteristics. Your eyeshadow or your eyeliner. Nobody cares about that here. The only thing

real is that you have no plot whatsoever, but you still pen a novel. And anything is a novel in

nanowrimoland. Meta literature, meta meaning. Anything goes. Poetry, a dissertation about

dandruff. Anything will do. Only the wordcount is what separates the winners from the losers.

And even the losers are not losers, they are called participants. Even if you just write one word

you are a participant here. 78867 here.

Four zero seven here. An afternoon. Tomorrow it is Halloween here. 78880. Four oh nine

here.

Four ten.

Still some more words here, still some more words here. A latte would be good, one with

sprinkles. Anything to leave this room where all we are supposed to do is, typing here. She will

definitely not finish this up, there is no way in hell that anyone can drive this up to 100 000 here.

And edit it too. it would mean disaster, rotten teeth, unwashed hair, vodka and whiskey. It would

mean death, I tell yer, death here. Nobody can produce ten thousand words in thirty-two hours

here. which is how much it takes to get to midnite on October 31 here. And when will we sleep

anyways, when will we go out and get Halloween candy, when will we shower, sleep, eat, have

caf au lait here. all the things that one needs to survive here. The caf au lait is optional here,

though it is fun to say caf au lait here instead of latte here. On the telly she watched these three

women talking to this one actor. The show was named THE SOCIAL. Maybe it were more than

three women, maybe it were four women here. 79079 here.

245
 Four and seventeen minutes here, she could watch Big Bang but maybe that will divert

her attention from the typing process, then again it might be conducive to faster typing here.

Nobody knows how this really works here. Where do the words come from anyways and how

come that they sometimes fall in place and suck at other times? Is it the weather? The time of the

day? The vino? Must be the vino here. Hard liquor and writing. Ovid, did he drink? The stuff, as

they say in St. Pauli. Or maybe they do not, who knows here. People who live in Hamburg stay

away from St. Pauli, it is for sailors and whores. Apparently, it has all changed now, the

bourgeoisie wants to be hip. They mingle, but only to a certain very tiny extent. The

Schanzenviertel or something. Author has no clue here, she left HH fifty years ago here. A lot

can change in fifty years here. A lifetime, wow. Half a century. There is a change of half a

century here. But you know what they say, the more things change the more they stay the same.

Who said that? Let us google here.

Maybe this is what our Gallia should write a book on. The more things change the more

they stay the same. It is a catchy title. An oxymoronic proverb. (more moronic than oxy, haha

here). But everybody can see how it is true, everybody gets the defeatist message. Revolutions

will not bring us anywhere, better safe than sorry, do not rattle the boat, Schuster, bleib bei

deinem Leisten. The idea is to not vie for progress, the message is totally anti-progress. You

cannot better the lot of people, it is what it is. You cannot free slaves, not fight oppression, it will

all stay the same, stuff cannot get better here. And then we all die. A very nihilistic world view.

Very good for people in power, not so good if you happen to be on the non-power side here. It is

a very political statement. But there is more at play. Money and other things. Criminal activities.

If you say anything, the mafia will shoot you in the back. No mutiny please here. Because, as

you know, the more things change, the more they stay the same here. Well, actually, in reality,

246
things change even if you walk a meter to the right. In Antarctica life is such, that it is half a year

of night and half a year of daylight. So, perspectives change, the minute that you move, and

sometimes drastically. You have to keep on moving to venture into foreign lands, upon foreign

cities, foreign paths here.

79520 words here.

People have written about New York even when it was still called New Amsterdam. Its

praise or its condemns. If any writer tries to do the same now, at the beginning of novel writing

month of 2017, they are up against steep competition.

How about that for a first sentence? It is good pretty good. There is the idea of the writer

who knows that he is up against the giants of world lit. Not merely the giants of American lit, the

playwrights, the guys that gave you the likes of Chapter 2, the Seinfelds, Larry Davids, the King

of Queens writers, the ones that write 2 Broke Girls or Motherless Brooklyn or Manhattan

Beach, the ones that sing New York, New York, yup, the songwriters, the Sinatras, the writers of

Goodfellas and all the movies about Mafiosi, even if they are Chicago-based. So, nyc was it and

now its Brooklyn. Bronx Staten Island Queens, not that much of subject matter as of yet here.

Anyhoo, we want to establish that there is a writer who wants to pen a masterpiece. A

guy. We play into that 80 percent of writers are men anyways. So, this generic writer is a guy.

Let us call him Romeo. He is from Asta. Fresh of the boat, just had his papers stamped at Ellis

Island. Well, ok, JFK, whatever. For him it is a maiden voyage, he left home to take Manhattan.

to make it in the new world. He basically looked on the map and circled the place that is as far

from mamas apron straps as possible. Romeo the writer. Which is weird and strange because a

Romeo is supposed to be a lover. Well, not this one, he marches to his own drummer. He is

247
unpredictable, at least for English speaking audiences. Maybe, in Italia, Romeo is just another

John Doe here.

Author here has no clue if people wrote about New Amsterdam but chances are there

were people who were literate and who could write. So even a street map is something written

about New Amsterdam, even if it is mostly drawings and lines. There are still street names on the

map and that makes it, strictly spoken, stuff written on New Amsterdam. Somebody might have

praised it, and somebody might have condemned it. Maybe even the same person. First, he says

what nice weather here in this city, two minutes later, if it rains, he would use expletives. So,

yuh, this is factually right, we can stretch the truth, it is fiction after all, a novel, a purely made-

up story.

Our Romeo sits inside of a room, like on a stage. It is a so very visceral image. Maybe

there are even people in the audience who stare up at the young writer on the stage or on the

screen. He, the writer, performs for an audience. The process of producing art is in itself a

performance. The creation, the creative process is something to be analyzed, to be watched, to be

either lauded or condemned. But it is something that happens in a fishbowl. We all watch the

author, the writer, the protagonist, the thin guy named Romeo. He should be thin, not too

Romeo-like, more on the scrawny side than the Dorian Gray side. Glasses maybe.

Intellectualism. If he has smoldering good looks they should be overshadowed by the affliction

of near-sightedness, we do not want a too perfect Romeo here, because if he is perfect then he

does not need to venture out into the world to prove himself, to prove anything. There is no need

for a quest, for striving, for proving himself to the world. Author here repeats her words, not

good, in the real text she will not do that here, this is just a sketch here. so, our Romeo is well-

read, he knows about the competition. He knows that his is a high-stake gamble. He has to be

248
extra good in a field where there are a lot of extra good ones. All the geniuses who write about

the city, all the ones who do not write about Altamont. Because when Thomas Wolfe wrote

about Altamont, he knew very well that he is the only writer who has a city named Altamont as

subject. There is no Altamont, Wolfe made it all up. But there is a real New York and thus our

Romeo has to find a new angle when describing the city. The Pelotone on Twenty-third. It is a

spinning class place. Has a bench in front of it. Sells bikes. Apparently, you need extra shoes for

using the bikes.

So, this is it here. Author will have a latte here. She feels like barfing anyways here. Six

pee em exactly here

Seven oh three. So, this was exiting here. She cannot believe that she went out for one

hour and three minutes. It seems like a life time, like two days or so. But the little icon shows

that she was out for a mere hour, actually, even less. It was so fresh, the November weather,

well, it actually will be November in two days, so technically it was still October. The leaves all

red and orange, the woman who said hi and sat on the wet floor with her coffee mug, a chatty

friendly lady in a hijab and a strong Arabic accent who apparently did not mind the wetness,

maybe because she was young and did not fear stuff like rheumatism, or maybe the ground is not

wet anymore because of sunshine here on the city. Not everybody is as paranoid as author here.

A small talk about the weather and the coldness, and then it was off to the coffee shop and

ultimately the donut place here. Mainly because the coffee ladies all recognized author here, they

usually work at the other place here. The donut was fine, but the vanilla latte was yucky here.

And now it is Wheel of Fortune, let us watch Wheel here. Ah, Ms. White, you are an American

institution, so Uncle Jessie on Full House here. This was thirty years ago here. The twins have all

grown up now, so it is so it is here.

249
 Anyhoo, back to the story of Romeo, how about that? An outline apparently is ok, you

can do that. Tackle the novel writing with a plan here. Know your protagonist. So, why would he

want to write a novel about nyc? Why would anyone want to do that? Steep competition here. so

many stories. Maybe the reason is that a real writer wants to show the world that he has the

chops here.

Author has to revisit the sentence that she thought of being the first sentence of the novel

here.

The more things change the more they stay the same. This was an idea for a plot, too. A

treatise on some stupid proverb here.

Author ponders, she is way too scatterbrained here. 80691 here.

What to write ah what to write here? Her mind goes blank, it is that time of the day here.

Lots of pumpkins behind the contestants on the Wheel of Fortune show here. One can see them,

and Vanna White in the lower part of the screen. Which is weird, apparently, they cut two

different perspectives into one image here.

80753 here.

Here he is, the host of Jeopardy, Alex Trebek here. Captain Nemo. 80676 here. So

tomorrow twenty thousand words. Oh yeah nothing to it here.

Eight and twenty-five here. Still the story of the novelist who has no clue about anything.

How to build a story (so now it is back to the idea to milk the non-plot-idea) but how much can

you milk this? It is just one person with a problem. What should that person do? Travel around

the world in 80 days? To come upon a story? Read as many books as possible? Talk to different

250
people, interview them? You cannot talk to eight billion persons. It is impossible. This one

person who teaches at Bard, he just wrote a book called THE DOG. Maybe it is a book from the

perspective of a dog. The perspective of animals. Well, this will not work for yours truly here.

How about the perspective of a fish? Sounds more like a childrens book here. 80920 here. so,

we first have to decide if the protagonist is a man or a woman. Which age?

Or we will just sit at the typewriter and start stuff up on November one here. 80954 here.

the desolate writer seems pretty interesting here. A man who sits on a stage and looks desperate.

Stares into space. Has no clue with what to come up here. Author once did this story book, this

story thingie for a short film. Three minutes long. Three and a half. It was called downtowne

here. Eight and thirty-seven. 81011 here.

It is ten and forty here. Let us still write still write here. How about a spy story? How is

that for an idea here? A spy on a train. Well, she kind of stole this idea from a utube vid. How

does this work? Appropriation. Can one say that one pays homage? Or is it pure and simple theft,

thievedom?

Be that as it may, MOM is on on the telly here. A Maybelline ad. An ad for Suburbicon.

With Matt Damon here. Maybe she should make a list of possible story ideas and then make a

shortlist, and then find a winner here. The best potential plot here. She is not a plotter. And she

forgets the storyline. Maybe it has to be like in the movies? There is a story and everybody has to

adhere to it. There is a big team and thus nobody can suddenly go off on a tangent. Somebody is

there to keep all the sheep inline. If you are a writer, then you are merely one person and you

have to play all kinds of roles, different roles, lots of times, those roles are even opposing each

other. But you have to know that and mediate between the roles here. It is very schizophrenic,

how can one person play different roles here? 81232 here.

251
 So, one person has the initial idea. Then there is the person who executes the building of

the original idea into a fuller story. According to plan here. New ideas can be good, but you

cannot go out on tangents and lose yourself there. It is kind of tricky here. There is this idea that

this all grows organically, just like making an animation short here. downtowne comes to mind

here. The endresult was pretty good here. She has the video lying around somewhere here. A

video. Well, that was in 2006. Eleven years ago here. 81330 here. So she has to get Halloween

candy here. Not a pumpkin though. She must have a plastic one somewhere here.

Ten and fifty-nine minutes here.

81357 here. About sixty pages that have to be edited here. Exactly eleven BTW here.

Eleven oh one. This is not how stories are. Not all full of numbers. You do not do that when you

tell a story. It is like looking constantly at the watch here. You cannot do that because everything

gets too fragmented and not in a good way here. Well, at least not in a conventional way here.

We cannot really make this into a fad. Or maybe we can. There was a prof she had who said that

maybe that can be your thing. Well, truth be told, it hasnt caught on yet here. 81467 here, BTW

here.

Nanowrimo, huh. Is it as good a training ground as an MFA program would be? It is

definitely much shorter and it is free.

She reread the book, the beginning. The story is very weird.

On the telly, it is the Colbert show here.

She wrote some 1500, wait, 3500 pages here, sorry, 3500 words in ten pages here. It is

eleven and thirty-two, she is awake since, well, seven eight, she is not quite sure here.

252
 Fourteen hours and 3500 words here. That is how many words per hour? We need a

calculator here and nothing else. It is all about the numbers in writing here, the proportions. The

right amount of adverbs, the right amount of nouns per sentence. Anybody can be a writer here.

The computer can write a novel, a better one than author here.

So, on Colbert is Billy on the Street now. I really like Billy on the Street. It is good here.

It is a you tube show. Gotta watch it. Just watched the Bones show, where he asks ppl. what they

think about the end of Bones here.

He now is an actor in a show. A TV show. And now a woman that Colbert talk to. A

blond one here. 81678 here. 11: 51 here. woo\w, Wheezer performs. Are they still a band?

Apparently. Who would have thought here?

Now it is twelve and thirty-nine. After midnite. On October the thirty-first here. We can

still drive this up to 82000 here. Which makes this stand at a 4000 words per day wordcount.

Pretty good, huh here. On the telly, we have the Goldbergs. Here. the overuse of here here. It is

the filler word of choice for yours truly here. Daddys Home 2. A new xmas movie. With Mark

Wahlberg and Jennifer Anniston here. 81774 hre. 12:43. Yuh, yuh, here here.

It is pretty funny, the show here. It is about this family and what they are up to in school.

81801 here. and now an ad. A commercial here. 12:50. The rest of this treatise will be written

after the novel thingie here. An ad for a taco place here. 81831 here.

What are you supposed to be, what are you supposed to be? Yes, it is Halloween. Wow

here.

The coffee house and all the dressed-up people, from the hi-school, baristas. She will go

out later, to the mall, to the big sugar cookie place. Halloween as a novel, the whole experience,

253
how can you even do that, just using words just using words. The visual translated by utterings,

the photographing in sentences. What are u supposed to be what r u supposed to be? The

adrenalin shock that is Halloween here. When nobody can be a grown up any more here.

Goblins witches and the like here.

BTW, twelve oclock, mwa-hahah.

The ecstasy of the sugar cookie, we will go there and get that. The insanity that is

Halloween here. Still gotta buy those chockies here.

Six oh four, ready for trick and treaters here. Three packs of chocolate fun-sized ones

here.

Seven and fifty-seven here. 81987. Don Lemon on the telly. It is Halloween. Four more

words, one. This stands at 82000 here.

Eight and twenty-four. So now this will stop, tomorrow, the nanowrimo will start up here.

She will just start up. In the morn. Head-on. The story, it will just evolve. Do it by the

seats of your pants, or as the saying goes here.

The funny thing is that she can actually start this up at midnite here. It is now eight and

forty-seven, so, yeah, to the start line. Somebody put it on the regional form site, that one can

start at midnite. Sure, one sure can. People in Tasmania have started, people in Europe. Maybe

even the New Yorkers can start in less than fifteen minutes here. 823, sorry, 82116. No trick or

treaters here but a lotta chocolates. Wow. Wow here.

82129 here.

254
 So nanowrimo has officially started up. Author here describes a woman named Ana or

Anna with two ens. She herself has never been a bookseller. But she tells herself that it is ok.

When she did animations, she used to draw this stick figure who was neither woman nor man, it

was just a figure with hat and dress or coat, a character who did stuff. Anna should be the same,

a character in the world.

Besides, author had a coffee and went to the gym. It is seven and fifty-seven on

November first. Back to novel writing here. 82226 here.

She could name her novel TBD which means to be determined. She has 2000 words

already and it is only nine in the morn on the first day here. She roams the nanowrimo forums

here, she should go and look at other regions and their wordcounts in order to be inspired by the

sheer determination and the subsequent output here. Or maybe she should be just single-minded

and not look to the right or to the left, just soldier thru with steely utter determination. 82310

here, nine and sixteen, November one, in 2017 here.

At this rate you will finish on November 14. Yay. She has 3827 words here. All about a

bookseller named Anna that goes out and has her lunch and then comes back to the bookstore. So

not much is happening here just a person at work, and it is two in the afternoon on one of her

workdays. So, half a day in the life of one person. A very thin story as of yet here. But there are

still 45000 words left, she is just thru one tenth of the story as of yet. What will the other 90

percent bring?

Everything is new in the coffee house. All of the holiday favorites are back. Eggnog

etcetera. There is even a film of snow on the car. It is still very soon in the day, not even seven.

255
People come in, that are dressed nicely. It is November 3 and she will work on her nanowrimo.

20000 words already. Yay. 82481 here, 7:31, November 3, 2017.

It is eight and ten minutes, she has 21020 in the nanwrimo stuff, great huh. And 82504 in

Gallia here. An accumulated 100000 this year and two more 100000s. 300 000 in one year, yay

here, yay.

And now the nanowrimo is finished at 50215 or so words here. It is November seven and

it was finished on November fifth but then there was the editing process so now it is all finished

here. the preliminary edit to make it all spelled right here. She finished the Gillie book here and

now there is one more left. The Gallia woman who writes a book here. And has 82524 words

here. It is November seven at eleven and two minutes in the morn here.

Eleven and three here. Three minutes after eleven on a November morn. She has to still

edit this and then it will be fine here. On the telly, a show with laugh tracks here. Doug

Heffernan here. She can type all of this up here. In the morning it was the coffee house here. She

does not really remember what was going on there because usually she is there and comes home

and writes about it but she did not this day or the day before because of the editing thing for

nanowrimo here. But it was coffee and cream in it and banana bread and a wrap for later. So

much we remember here. She writes up the nanowrimo, well, not anymore here. Now it is the

Gallia book here and she has to get back into that after finishing the nanowrimo novel here.

82755 here at eleven oh eight here.

It is now 5:26 and it is November 7, 2017 and the wordcount of Gallia writes a book

stands at 82869. It is all about editing while the music is playing here. Donovan, Catch the Wind,

an old LP, it is on YouTube. It never rains in Southern California, and The little drummer boy

256
and this songs about Bones. But the most jarring are Donovans songs, pacifist songs, like an

idea from the past that never got anywhere. And we are all incriminated, sorry, here. We are all

complicit apparently here. And on this happy note, let us wrap this up here. For now.

257
258
259