Tuesday, December 11, 2001
Another thing they don't tell you about this writing thing - the way all the days begin to blur together, sooner or later. That's one reason I started keeping a journal (not this journal, but the kind you write with a pen and ink and paper), some desperate attempt at maintaining the integrity of the calendar, and all of this is just a roundabout way of saying I have a lot of trouble remembering which day of the week it is on any given day. But this is Monday, and I didn't write. I went, instead, to the Alabama State Museum and the Alabama State Geological Survey in Tuscaloosa, Alabama and worked on one of the never-ending mosasaur papers. It's a lot easier to remember that it's going to be Monday when the Monday in question means sitting at a desk with mammoth tusks and dinosaur bones instead of sitting at the desk where I spend most of my time either trying to convince myself that I'm not one of the worst writers putting fingertip to keyboard alive today, or trying to figure out What Happens Next, or trying to remember what day of the week it is today.
I hope it isn't disappointing anyone that I spend almost as much time talking about my paleo' work as my writing. It isn't meant to. I didn't expect to when I started this Blogger thing. It's just sort of been working out that way.
I recently learned that the mass-market paperback edition of The Sandman: Book of Dreams will be out soon, a somewhat belated five or six years after the hardback ('96). That, I suppose, was my big break, that anthology, and that short story, "Escape Artist" (original title "Exit from a Slow Sort of Country"). It's even been translated into Czech. It's extremely odd, and mildly disconcerting, trying to make sense of something that you've written after it's been translated into a language that you can't even begin to read. And I can't read Czech. I wrote "Escape Artist" in July of 1994, shortly after I moved to Athens, Georgia, the summer I became addicted to coffee and Altoids.
Good god, I'm even boring myself.
Come back tomorrow night. Maybe I'll have something interesting to say. I'm going to go to bed early and read A. A. Milne. You should do the same.
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