Crack of dawn greetings to all. What I'm doing awake is entirely beyond me. But there you have it: woke up at 1 a.m. bright and cheerful. Because I am terribly clever, I lay down last night for a wee nap at 6 pm and slept straight on through like a nitwit. Jeff was kind enough to wake me up to eat dinner; apparantly I was very chatty when he woke me up, and said all kinds of interesting things in my own personal language; I ate dinner and went dashing back up to bed; thus it is now 3 am and I forsee a nap at a totally inappropriate daytime time in my future, but of course can't sleep now. I did try. I got back in bed at 2 and had that weird experience where your cold feet hit a couple of warm miniature dachshunds, and because miniature dachshunds have no hair on their bellies and feel a little like ultrasuede, and are as I mentioned warm and since there are two of them there are eight little legs jumbled around, it feels like putting your feet on a couple of baby pigs. Milton (dachsund) was snoring, as was Jeff; Jeff is louder, but Milton is pretty loud, so sleep was not forthcoming for myself at least.

I am terribly sorry it's been so long since I blogged; I've been crazy. This is, if you ask me, a pretty good excuse, but I apologize nevertheless. I go more or less batsh*t every Feb 1 (this year it actually started Jan 31) and get sane around March 15. So things are looking up now, but I am not quite altogether there, and am still wading through the fog in my head. I am looking forward to being able to put two thoughts together at a time, yes, looking very much forward to it indeed, as thinking one random thought after another gets confusing and significantly inhibits my ability to do anything other than sit at my desk in my robe, beating my head on my keyboard, trying to think in a linear and/or even slightly orderly way and failing miserably. (I am also highly capable of naps.) I think it is positively fascinating in a seriously annoying way how the brain has its own calendar, and mine decides a couple of times a year to totally defect on a rigid schedule. "Why, here it is, February 1 (or July 20)! Time to blow up!" like a little ticking bomb. At least it's predictable. The idea, if I were a sensible person, would be to calmly say, Ah, my brain has blown up. Time to put on my robe and sit at my desk staring into space while the logic and language centers of my cortex tangle up for six weeks! And every year I swear I'm going to do it. I say, No work in Feb/July. Won't even bother. The reporter from People Magazine who's checking in on me to see how my journal is going (I'm keeping a Feb/March journal for People, which is both interesting and extremely difficult, see aforementioned language/logic center situation) said gently to me the other day, "Um, do you ever think about just taking February off?" and I said why yes indeed I think of it annually. And Ruth, when I was gnashing my teeth at breakfast on Saturday, telling her how I couldn't work and was going to lose it pretty soon, pointed out that in fact I had already lost it, just like I did a year ago and a year before that ad infinitum, and it was nothing to worry about. Ruth and I have had breakfast on Saturday virtually every week we're both in town for the last fifteen years, and I begin to worry she gets tired of telling me the same things over and over. But that's the nice thing about friends. They are very tolerant. Thank god.

SO, as for work, haha! So funny! It's gone rather slowly. But it's gone. I'm still puttering away on the new novel, and like it and hate it on alternating days. Entertaining, being a writer, with the liking/hating thing. I think there are people who consistently like writing; I am not one of them. I like it on and off. I have done much considering of giving it up entirely in the last few weeks, but have this sneaking suspicion I will not, because it is pretty much the only thing I know how to do, and a person has to have a job or at least some way to occupy themselves for the better part of the day, and I don't have kids, which is a vastly harder job, so I can't raise my kids as a job, so I have to keep writing. Additionally, every time I've decided once and for all to quit, I wind up back at my desk writing within a few weeks. Actually, this time of day reminds me of writing The Center of Winter. Well, reminds me of the last year of writing it--I was working at a magazine, and worked on the book from 3-7 a.m., and wound up very tired and then very manic, as will happen from time to time, and the upshot was I quit the magazine by moving into the hospital, but finished the book at very, very long last. Lord, thinking about writing Center gives me the willies. It took forever. The first three years were spent writing absolute garbage, in part because I was batsh*t ALL the time, rather than only Feb/July, and in part because I hadn't the faintest idea what I was doing, and kept bombarding my poor beliegured (I am fairly sure that's spelled wrong) editor with massive Kinko's boxes full of paper masquerading as a "book", knowing full well it was garbage but despairing at ever finishing the "book," but eventually I climbed out of the bottle of scotch in which I was soaking and finished the damn book. I like it. If you are a novel person and haven't yet read it, give it a read and tell me what you think. In any event, as I've mentioned before, writing a second novel appears to be vastly more fluid a process than writing a first. At least you can say to yourself, Well, you did it once, you can do it again. And it is certainly going more smoothly than Center, which I wrote for the most part in a closet.

On other fronts, 20 days till I leave for tour. Because of this, I decided on Sunday it was time to make a packing list (I do only have 20 days to think it over, after all). This evolved into making a list of everything I would wear every day for the month I'm gone, which resulted in me realizing I would need at least two outfits a day (why?), which resulted in a far more detailed list of what I would wear each day down to which shirt and which pants, and this led to the realization that in fact it would be easier to wear dresses, as they are less bulky and pack lighter and this would aid in me carrying a suitcase of highly organized and well-planned outfits for the aforementioned month. For a very brief moment, I remembered what I was told on my first tour: pack a carry-on and wash your clothes at the hotels. No no! A giant heavy suitcase! Much smarter! I will have no trouble lugging it around at all, especially since I notoriously wear heels every day because I am short, so skidding through airports and dashing from hotel to interview to reading while lugging this suitcase should be no problem; this reminded me that I should also plan my shoes, so I made a list of those, correllated of course with day and outfit in question. Did I mention I become very fond of lists when I'm crazy? They give me a sense of order. Having made the day-to-day list of outfits and shoes, I made a shopping list; being aware that I have, like many bipolar people, a special fondness for shopping when I'm crazy, I was very conservative, and also careful to plan every single thing I'd need to buy, including travel-sized everything, like shaving cream and soap, which made me realize that I might possibly forget something small while packing that would drive me nuts when I arrived wherever and realized I didn't have it, so I went back to the packing list and wrote down "toothbrush" and "socks," and a number of other things I might forget. Then I laughed at myself knowingly, realizing that of course hotels have soap, so I went back and crossed that off the list. Has anyone ever read the Frog and Toad books? They're the best. They are also the source of my parents' nickname for me, Toad. When they call me that in public, they get odd looks, but it's actually very sensible. Anyway, one of the stories is called something like "Toad Makes a List." Toad wakes up, gets overwhelmed by his day (not an infrequent event for me), jumps out of bed, grabs pen and paper, and begins his list, "Wake up." Then he realizes he has already done this, so he crosses it off. He writes, "Get out of bed." And proceeds with his day. So, on Sunday, it was suddenly 3 pm, and I'd been sitting there making lists for about twelve hours (there were many other lists I am not here including, though I should mention I made a list of what I already had so that I would know exactly what I needed, which necessitated a coordinating set of symbols such as + and * and !! so that I would be able to understand the lists at all, and then I realized I should really be using a variety of colored pens instead, so I did that), and my desk was covered with yellow notepad sheets which were covered with indecipherable scribbles, so after I made clean copies of every list, and then changed my mind and typed these lists into my computer, and rewritten all the lists a number of times, I made one final shopping list and went shopping, obviously taking my list. This resulted in many purchases, and the frequent situation where a salesperson would be trying to talk to me while I scribbled on my list, since I was recording exactly how much everything cost so I could later make a list of how much I'd spent so I'd stay under budget (which, thank you very much, I did), and recording also a variety of interesting thoughts that went through my head, as well as an updated list of outfits, so that when I bought something I would be sure that it was correllated with the correct shoes, because these things are important, and I didn't want to wake up one morning in a hotel on tour with seven minutes to get ready and not be able to consult a list and know what I should wear and with what shoes. The upshot of all of this was I actually spent two days shopping, because I had confused myself mightily, and wound up with 9 dresses and some mascara and five white t-shirts, because I like to have a lot of those, because every time I wear one I spill something on it and ruin it.

For obvious reasons, having spent two days at the mall, which I actually hate, I had to work at night, except for yesterday, when I took that nap, which meant that I worked this a.m. from 1-3 and will work again as soon as I finish this extensive blog. And on malls, stores, and pants: what is it with these clothing manufacturers? Who told them that everyone was very, very tall? The average American woman is 5'4". The average American women's pants are made for someone 8'6". I myself am 5'1.75" (that's almost 5'2", thanks). So: if I am approx. 5'2", and the pants at the store are trailing five inches past my feet, they are made for someone who is actually 5'7", which is 3" taller than even the Av. Am. Woman, which makes no sense, and drives me absolutely bananas, as I go scuffling around the dressing room trying to picture what my pants will actually look like once I get them hemmed, or once I grow 5" at the age of 34. This is made further confusing by the fact that all my heels are different heights; so I bring three or four pairs of shoes with me when I go shopping, so I can sort of somewhat take a guess.

My friends, I've gone on quite long enough. Perhaps I should post this one in volumes. Anyway, as I should be getting less crazier soon--by the way! The birds outside my window are back! They live in the oak tree to the right of my office, and they arrived a few days ago and started singing and that means it's almost spring, not including the three feet of snow on the ground--so I will blog again in about a week. During tour, I'm going to try to blog (briefly) every day, just to give you a sense of what tour's like and what interesting things I see all over the country. In the meantime, wish me sanity, orderly packing, and good work. All my cheers & good wishes to you.

Peace,
Marya