Tuesday, December 11, 2001
Today was my last museum day for a little while and tomorrow it's back to Bast Part 2. And getting ready to start Low Red Moon (no, really). By the way, I hereby promise I will have the next novel finished by May. Now watch me make a liar of myself.
I spent the better part of the day in a museum attic. The mosasaur I'd come to see was in an immense wooden crate, where it's been for many years, since being taken off exhibit. A fully-mounted skeleton, about twenty feet of sea lizard, so a pretty impressive crate. I'd only come to study the head end, so one of the maintainence guys had taken the front of the crate apart and left the rest intact, so that the beastie seemed to be lunging out of its crate at me, jaws agape. Museum attics are weird and wonderful places. This one was accessed by an enormous freight elevator (think Aliens, where Ripley's trying to rescue Newt and escape the Queen), up into dust and darkness. There was a Model T Ford parked next to the mosasaur crate. How's that for surreal? Dozens of huge, unopened field jackets. And they left me there with my cameras and calipers and iBook and the mosasaur for most of the day. It was very, very peaceful.
Beats the usual sort of things I do to avoid writing. All writers have things they do to avoid writing. Some have more, some less, but we all have them. Any writer who says otherwise is either a) a liar or b) very deeply deluded. Me, I wake up, have my first cup of coffee (lots and lots of milk and sugar) and read something (Rolling Stone, Wired, The Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, National Geographic, a book on cryptozoology, whatever's lying beside the bed), then have my second cup of coffee while I read e-mail, reply to e-mail, see how my books are doing on Amazon.com, ego surf for a bit, check out the Horrornet forum, check my e-mail again, check the weather (a curious practice, as I so rarely go outside), and update my AOL calendar. Then it's time to brush my teeth, floss, deal with my hair, get dressed, etc. Then I check my e-mail again, because you never know when Speilberg might drop you a line. Then I check for phone messages, since I've spent most of the morning online. Then I return phone calls. Or at least think about returning phone calls, or the fact that I should return phone calls, but after all, it's never Speilberg and I hate phones and everyone knows that and wisely e-mails me if they want a response. By this time, of course, it's almost noon and I'm beginning to have to face the ugly reality that morning routine is morphing into afternoon procrastination. So I check the mail, which means taking the elevator down to the lobby of my building. That's always good for five or ten minutes. And if I'm not feeling particularly inspired after that, it's a good idea to listen to music for half an hour or so, very loudly (everyone else in the building's at work, after all). This is one reason I find it necessary to stay up until 3 a.m. to keep up with all the damned work.
If novelists had a real union, we'd get paid to procrastinate. There would be strikes for longer procrastination hours. We'd be just like garbage men and screenwriters.
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