A Series of Bad Days

I had a bad day. My video card on the laptop went on the fritz, and Gateway wants to take it in their shop for repairs. I'll be without my laptop for at least seven days, and that's with expedited service. That led me to drive out to The Estate and retrieve the old desktop, which had been wiped when it went out of service during the holiday season. My classes are all gone; I'll have to reconstruct them from whatever remnants I can find. Of course my last backup was two months ago. And The Wife and I had sharp words today over the cleanliness of the house (I thought it was just fine, she did not) because the realtor came over and it looks like breaking even on the house is going to be a very close shave.

So that all sucked. I also got a call from my old law partner. His pet lizards died in the care of one of his Army buddies. While I personally would have a hard time forming an emotional bond with a reptile (they're just not very expressive with their emotions like mammals are), they were his pets and he loved them. I know the guy who was charged with the care and feeding of the lizards, and I'm not surprised at the result.

At least that gives me the answer to the age-old question -- we've all heard the joke that some people should not be allowed to have children because they will obviously make bad parents, but how are we to decide who that will be? The answer is, give the applicant an animal, a living, breathing thing to care for. If the animal dies in their care, chances are, you're not dealing with someone responsible enough for a child.

But then I heard my other friends had their house robbed. Their computer got stolen, along with a lot of other valuable stuff, some with sentimental value, others with high material value.

So I guess out of the three of us, my day was the least sucky. But hearing about how someone else's day sucks worse than yours doesn't make your sucky day any better. It still sucks that I have to do all that extra work because my computer flipped out on me through no apparent fault of my own. Hearing about dead pets and home invasion robberies does put things in perspective, though.

Looking about for something positive to come out of the day, I did find one thing -- I listened to an interview with Philip Roth, and it occurred to me that there might be a way of overcoming my seeming inability to sustain narrative and plot arc in my writing and still come up with a novel-length piece of fiction that is actually about something. Roth said two things that were useful to me. First, he observed that being a good writer means being able to read your own work and see what's missing. The work is done when you don't see anything missing that's important, when all the questions worth asking have been answered. Second, he observed that in his novels, which are mostly focused around a central theme his most recent one is about sickness and mortality the story is told in a series of scenes, which in his most recent novel is a story of a man's lifetime obsession with his own mortality. Every major section in the book is about a different episode of the man's various sicknesses. In a throwaway line, Roth described the flow of his narrative as including, "And for twenty years, he didn't ever really get sick, so I glossed over it in one sentence because I didn't want to write about it."

So it occurs to me that the focus of a novel need not be on a single piece of narration; it can be on a central theme. If Roth can skip over twenty years of his hero's life story in a sentence to keep his narrative focus intact, then maybe that gives me a different way to keep focus on what I really want to write about rather than getting bogged down in stuff that eventually is a distraction anyway. It could make the basis of a good avant-garde film, although probably not a mainstream one. If I can come up with twenty pages or so at a time, maybe in a few months I'll be able to put something together that's pretty good.

Now I need to find the time to write. By about 9:00 tonight I was too mentally burnt out to do much of anything but veg out with a video game. Tomorrow will be similarly intense as I get about the business of trying to put my live class together for Thursday and pick up the pieces of my online classes in some way that might be useful to my students (and myself).