On other fronts, I continue to discover the obvious. True fact: If you are a smoker, and you quit smoking, and you have a cigarette, you will start smoking again, and be a smoker. I knew that.

So I'm sitting here, 10:12 a.m., feeling cranky because I'm not writing. This is because I have been up since 3, writing; but that doesn't count, because now it is normal work-day hours, and I am not writing. True fact 2: Writers are fking crazy. In addition to being, well, crazy.

But, yes, I WAS writing, when I was still working like a normal person, earlier today, before I became a failure and realized I would never write again. Yesterday I woke up and dashed into my office and wrote a scene that, ok, took place thirty years after the scene I was supposed to be writing—ach, so it goes. Today I returned to the scene I was supposed to write, wrote it, and wrote another one. Then I read it to Jeff, who is a great fan club, especially when he's sitting there in his robe half-asleep and nodding as if he's listening and then laughs at places where it's not funny. This is when I demand, Are you awake? And he leaps awake and says, Oh, yes! Yes, of course! Great scene! And I say, But you don't like it! And he says, I do! I like it! And I say, No, you hate it! And he says, What in the hell are you talking about, you maniac? No, he doesn't. He's very nice about the whole thing. My painter friend M. and I have husbands who are not writers/artists, and we always marvel at how generously they ignore our weirdness and just go about whistling as if we are not like living with frantic yipping chihuahuas.

On writing a novel: it's hard. It seems so easy at first onset of the idea; this idea is quickly, radically smashed, which when you are a novelist is both problematic and perversely thrilling, so you want to write it even more. On writing a novel that takes place in part before I was born: even harder, but also a good artistic stretch. It is actually a little bit like journalistic reporting; you take a subject you don't necessarily know all that well but are fascinated by (ok, sometimes with journalism, you are not in fact necessarily fascinated by it AT ALL, as in the case where I was assigned a story about "window treatments" when I got my first job in magazines, and didn't know what a "window treatment" was, but didn't want to tell my editor, and had to call my mother, and learned that in fact they are "curtains"), but anyway, with a novel, one would hope to hell you ARE fascinated, which in this case I very much am, and so my days spent doing research are delicious. My friend Lora (poet & journalist) was telling me the other day about the time she heard Michael Chabon (The Amazing Adventures of Cavalier and Clay, the recent The Yiddish Policeman's Union, and the too-rarely mentioned The Final Solution, which has one of the best characters ever, a parrot) say at a reading that he sometimes finds the spark for his writing while he is digging around in his research. I have a similar habit; I'm screwing around reading this and that, digging here and there, and without even realizing it, I'm writing scenes in my head. Of course, my scenes then show up at 3 a.m. and I go write one that takes place thirty years after what I'm supposed to be writing. I wonder if Michael Chabon does that. He's a remarkably normal person. He might not. He and David Foster Wallace are two of my favorite living writers. I met Chabon once, and behaved very badly. I won't go into it. Never mind. This is me crawling under my desk.

Fun with Side Effects! My eyes just went into their morning triple-vision thing. Herewith, there may be typos. Sorry.

Actually, only one thing left to say today. I was reading the stunning new collection of Mary Oliver's, Thirst, which I love so much I may already have mentioned it