This morning I post to this tour blog in the hope that you will read it in November, when my book is released, or next Spring, when we're on the road. That's when, if all goes according to plan, you will hear about my book in the newspaper or online or on the radio, maybe find this blog, maybe like it, maybe like me, maybe get interested in my book, maybe follow the link to Amazon.com and buy it.
This morning I post to this tour blog as a manner of procrastination. You see, I'm hitting the homestretch of what I hope will be my first novel, and what that means mostly is a daily laboring over sentences. I want them to dazzle and delight, but not so much that you notice their artifice and find yourself too aware of them, and lose the illusion of a deep and abiding immersion in lives other than your own. It's terribly difficult, making those sentences, and it is terribly easy, making these, because they don't aspire to art, and because they feed the easy solipsism of self-promotion rather than the painful empathy that walking in someone else's shoes can require of the fiction writer.
This morning I post to this blog as the first of many semi-productive wanderings of mind. I pay my bills by teaching at the university. Classes start tomorrow, four of them: Intro to Creative Writing, Reading Fiction, Writing About Sports, and Senior Capstone Seminar in the Practice of Writing. Later today I will probably correspond with my students about all manner of high expectations, about syllabi and class attendance and other things I don't really care about so much as I care about passions I hope to evangelize this semester: point of view, structure, the intersections between the lyric and the narrative modes, beginnings and endings, middles. It will matter little to most of them, but if past patterns hold steady, it will mean the whole world to one or two of them, will be life-altering, will ruin them like all of it once ruined me, and the challenge will be giving as much as duty and teacherly love require to those good students without giving so much that it, too, becomes a kind of procrastination, teaching for me being easier than doing, and when it is going well, more fun.
This morning I consider all the other things I would rather be doing with my day than working on my novel. Last night I stayed up late watching Joe Biden interviews on YouTube, and hoped he could make as good a vice president as he seems he might when he is at his best. The night before I watched four hours worth of Charlie Rose shows with film directors I might want to be like when I grow up: Martin Scorcese, Francis Ford Coppola, Paul Thomas Anderson, Paul Schrader. The three nights before that I spent with Graham Greene in Haiti, his fabulous novel The Comedians. Now there are some Graham Greene biographies I want to read. Season Five of The Wire, my favorite show, is now available on DVD, and if I gave it the whole day, I could watch the whole season. I've taken the last four weeks off a two-year study of Italian, and plan to stay away until the novel is done, but I fear I'm losing the good momentum that had me so close to reading Italo Calvino and Cesare Pavese in the original. And there are over two hundred photographs I took a few weeks ago in Haiti that need cataloging. Maybe there is a photo essay in them, about a Dominican dentist and a Canadian periodontist I followed for three days in the mountain village of Callebasse. Maybe there is an essay in the memories they'll stir up -- the child screaming bloody murder as his fourth tooth is pulled, the young girl sterilizing the dental instruments on the shower curtain on the kitchen table, the people waiting outside for their third day, knowing full well that their turn with the dentist will likely never come. There are too many people waiting outside for their third day.
The world is full of beautiful, horrible things, and I'm full with the desire to bring them to the page as an act of bearing witness that for me has become obligatory. But it is so easy to want to do, and it is so difficult to do. So this morning I do this, instead.
