That's a Smith and Wesson and you've had your six.

Once the pen I'm using runs out of ink I put it in a drawer with all the others I've used up. Along with various notebooks, I take pride in the pens I've gone through and the ink I've poured over the last 11 years or so. I take an empty pen as a sign of accomplishment.

An empty printer cartridge, on the other hand, drives me fucking bonkers. Such is the case today. I have finished all the latest corrections and just want to print the fucker out so I can read it over again. But nine pages into printing there goes that blinking light signaling a trip to the store. Wish me luck making it there and back before the rain hits...

Mush

I've made good progress in typing up the latest round of corrections and edits, but figure even once that's done that I'll give the whole thing another read from start to finish to make sure 2+2= something around 4. While the furniture I assemble at home routinely ends up with a bunch of extra screws and pieces laying around, I need to make sure that the moving pieces of the novel all jive. Because frankly, the more I think about this book the more my brain turns to mush.

It ain't over till it's...

There are a few words I refuse to use in writing; always, never, perfect and my own personal tetragrammaton, l-v-, among others. Why? Because I sincerely doubt the first three exist. And the fourth? Well, Robert Frost once said that a poet should never use the word "beautiful" more than three times...and that he now had two opportunities left. Well, Bob, I'm Italian and we can't get enough of beauty. (I truly believe that Italians' morality hinges on that which is beautiful versus that which is ugly as opposed to the old good versus evil dichotomy.) Rather, as Yehuda Amichai described in his poem, Stewardess (below for good measure), I more often than not vote with the conservative party of l-v-rs and I pretty much refuse to dole the word out like it might feed the starving. But that is all material for another book.

As for this blog and this book, I'm tempted to add "done" to this list of words. Yes, I edited the final 8 pages and smoothed out the ending, but there are many ts to cross, is to dot and many more eyes to read it all before anything is "done."

Stewardess by Yehuda Amichai

A stewardess told us to extinguish all smoking materials

And did not detail, cigarette, cigar, or pipe.

I answered her in my heart: You have beautiful love material,

And I did not detail either.

And she told me to buckle up, bind myself

To the chair, and I answered her:

I want all the buckles in my life to have the shape of your mouth.

And she said: You want coffee now or later,

Or never. And she passed by me

Tall to the sky.

The small scar at the top of her arm

Testified that she will never be touched by smallpox

And her eyes testified that she’ll never fall in love again:

She belongs to the conservative party

Of lovers of one great love in their life.

Thank you, Twins & Tigers!

Thanks to the Minnesota Twins and the Detroit Tigers, the regular season and my deadline get one more day which should work out perfectly as I have 8 more pages to edit. I can do that before work manana. Then I just need to type the shit up, iron out a couple small items and decide on an ending before the playoffs which start Wednesday in the Bronx at the earliest. While I tell myself I'm just going to relax and veg out on the playoffs for the rest of the month, I reckon that won't happen.

ACYW's old ending segued into Not for Nothing which was to be my next book, starring a couple characters (Mack Brown & Houston More, dudes I first wrote about 5 years ago) who had cameos in ACYW. But now that I'll work on Family next, there is no longer a need to retain that ending. Continuity is nice, but not necessary. I'll catch up with Mack and Tony when the time is right.

Once I'm done with ACYW, I'm sending it off to an agent and a writer who have vowed to read it and work with me on it. The writer's already read it and in some ways I'm going to try to slip a fastball by him. I've taken most of his advice, but rather than completely 86ing one aspect of the story that I find pivotal and he does not, I've tried to bring it in through the back door, if you will. I won't fool him with this approach, but hopefully I can make the aspect more palatable to him.

Lastly, because so much of the story is car-driven, I figured it might be cool to publish ACYW in the form of a Ford car manual. Either that or a hybrid marketing pamphlet-manual. A little Arabic-looking font over other traditional U.S. images could also work. But that's waaaaaay down the road.