A Million Words

Mike has a fondness for talking about the zombie apocalypse. He figures, since he can live on beans and packet noodles, he's in better shape to survive it than I am, with my gourmet tastes for a ridiculously wide range of foods. My brother and his wife are living off the grid (except that they hop over here to use the shower, washing machine, and internet connection) and have a truly lovely vegetable garden. I want to get in on this apocalypse-prep game, but my way of doing it is to skim about fifty million web pages and a few dozen books on the subject before I do anything that requires physical work or much investment of money. Besides, I don't really think that the apocalypse (zombie or otherwise) is coming anytime soon, and in the meantime none of us are making much money (to put it mildly). So, I have spent the past four or five days calculating our food needs, projecting costs, and figuring out how that all lines up with what kind of food we can produce on our three ac...

So, we have moved back to the Vineyard, back to my parents' house, and are renovating the house that I grew up in, summers, and lived in for a few years here and there in my earlier adulthood. It's all on one big lot. My parents built the original house in 1971-'72, but in the mid-90s, they decided it just wasn't big enough to serve as their primary residence... especially since it had (horror of horrors) only one bathroom . So they built this house, which is about two or three times the size of the old one, and has three and a half baths. The two houses share roughly five acres, most of it covered in scrubby oak and pine. People have always said to me that they think this is a beautiful part of the island, but I've never been enthusiastic about the landscape immediately surrounding our house. I find it dull and a bit closed in. The trees loom over the house, making it feel dark except when the late-afternoon sun hits its more open northwest side. In hopes of remed...

Somehow, a month has slipped by without a blog post here. I suppose I must have been busy. I certainly haven't been working on my novel, or exercising, or getting a real job. I have, however, landed a pretty regular (so far) paid writing gig, doing short articles for the Martha's Vineyard Times , Calendar section. It's been kind of fun. I've written one or two assigned articles a week for the past three or four weeks. They've been on a range of different subjects, but the substance of most of them is doing a few interviews and setting people's quotes, and the information they give me, into a sensible, readable narrative. I have to say it's a lot easier than writing fiction. At least, I find it easier. However, as I remember from last time I did this, I have a really hard time switching gears. In order to make good progress on a novel, I need a solid 1.5 - 2 hours, at least five days a week, to work on it. A reliable 1.5-2 hours, that is, not a half hou...