Day 1

 Have you ever read something so well-written that you had to stop and read it over and over, first to admire it, and then as if you think you’re going to figure out how they did it?  I once read a passage from “In Cold Blood” that was so good I stopped to re-read it many times like that, then thought, goddammit, I knew all those words! Why couldn't I write something like that?

Tom Wolfe affects me in the same way, quite often. The closest I’ve ever come to figuring it out is that these writers somehow manage to create their own context and then fill things in using pure wit—the kinds of things that just happen, things about which you can only later say, you had to be there. 

It's that NaNoWriMO time again, and here I am, half-way through Day 1 and still trying to decide if I'm willing to commit and face probable failure once again. I want to do something new and different, like, maybe Laslo wakes up in the bed of his pickup parked on the levee and instead of stumbling into the universe of the Busy Bee Cafe he runs across a freshly murdered dead body that has drifted into a tangle of driftwood at the river bank, and realizes it is his foreman at the foundry where he used to work--the job that he was just fired from two days prior. Hilarity ensues, etc., etc., etc. I dunno.