Agents’ lunch today. One of our charter members has decamped to a new social networking company. I’m only surprised it hasn’t happened before now. In case you haven’t noticed, I’ve never spent too much time writing about e-books and the future of the book. It’s not that I don’t find it interesting, or that I’m a technophobe, or that I’m glib about it. I just don’t feel that I can do that much about it. I have to stay focussed on my writers and helping them get contracts, and get their books written, and help them find lecture agents, and publicists, and accountants and shrinks. Okay, I admit it, I don’t give a shit about e-books. I was the last to get a vcr, phone answering machine, word processor (I loved my typewriter), the last to get a computer, cell phone, blackberry (the love of my life). So when I have to read on a Kindle, iPad, Tampon, whatever, I will.

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"I'll light the fire while you put the flowers in the vase you bought today..."

Put my Blackberry away for the weekend. As a result, I got to the end of Book I in Roberto Bolano’s genius 2666, picked up an old project and added some pages,  and read about 150 pages of clients’ work. I also discovered why all the glasses in the dishwasher were coming out with a film of fine sand on them and fixed it. Of this last accomplishment, I am possibly most proud.

The little red light on my Blackberry that signals a new email or call is like a tiny laser that I can see no matter where it is: in the drawer of my bed stand, flashing inside my pocketbook, or in another room. We are like new lovers at a party, dying to find each other and escape so that we can be alone again. Most of the time it’s Twitter telling me someone I’ve never heard of with three followers is now following me. Or it’s a client who feels a pressing need to know her Turkish royalties for the novel she published three years ago.

It was warm enough to sit outside, and I read the Bolano while my dog madly chewed a stick. Once or twice (okay, twenty or thirty times) I patted my jacket for my Blackberry, the way I did for cigarettes when I smoked. So, apart from reading this blog, what technology is fucking with your writing life?

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Today, walking to my lunch date, I had a brainstorm about my first screenplay and how to adapt it for television.  And in the next moment, a scene for the fucker I’m currently “working on” started writing itself in my head. I took out my pad and wrote down the three key words that would help me remember the scene later: fidelity, regression, wrap around dress.

And then I went to lunch and met a new client for the first time. She had a tremendously lusty laugh and it was great to finally meet after months of phone and email. She had to run for a train, but instead of leaving with her I ordered a cappuccino (even though I recently read that people in Europe only drink cappuccino for breakfast, and when Americans order it for after lunch or dinner they appear unsophisticated, drinking a big glass of milk in the middle of the day like a school boy). But I digress.

Instead of checking the blackberry and glaring at the waitress for the bill, I relaxed for five minutes, sipped my cappuccino, and thought more about the two projects. When I was young and wrote pomes, they always started in my head and clipped along in my brain all day. When I stopped writing, the clopping stopped, too. For me, being most alive is cinematic, is my brain away from my cranium, is making up shit that is true, or rings true, or rings twice. It’s usually a good sign when I start writing in my head. However, it may also signal time to see my doctor.

Do you write in your head? More important, do you get it down on paper?

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You’re familiar with the idea, I’m sure, that you can’t really love anyone until you love yourself. God as my witness, I am married eighteen years today and I am extremely capable of loving others while still hating myself. I had a lot of time to think today, five hours to be exact, while retrieving the car from New Jersey. I mostly thought about my idea for a screenplay, never getting past the first eight scenes. I also thought about how much I hate certain people. I wasn’t actually thinking about how much I hate them, but rather replayed scenes and conversations when I felt wronged or betrayed.

Then Freebird came on the radio, and it seemed brilliant as the sun broke through a pyramid of clouds over Bridgeport. Am I really eighteen years married? During a period of severe depression, my mother told my husband that I was a lot of work, but that I was worth it. Am I a lot of work? I’ve always hated the idea that marriage or any relationship is work. Work is trying to understand a royalty statement, or pitching a book for the 29th time, or reading the 6th draft of a book, or renegotiating the Pitney Bowes lease. Am I wrong? Suddenly, I’m starving. Though I know you don’t read my blog, happy anniversary my love.

What does any of this have to do with writing?

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