home stretch…

I’m packing boxes to ship home, clearing out books from the cabinets, sending email announcements to employees and affiliates, transferring personal files to disk – i’m preparing for my last day at my corporate job, august 1. My leaving. and although I couldn’t be more at home with this decision, this dramatic moment almost a decade in the making – doing what i love as opposed to doing what’s financially sound, pragmatic, I’m still fearful, nervous and my house is a complete mess.

I guess it doesn’t help that I haven’t inhabited my home in over a week and the laundry is in piles, the books scattered on the tables, the desk, in mini piles against the towering bookcase, the mail in stacks, the emails yet unanswered. But more than that, i haven’t yet made my home into a space in which i want to work.

August presents itself as the month for some serious work. I have plans (and I am eternally grateful for a friend that has offered up her family’s Connecticut summer home as a quiet, interrupted space) to lock myself away with my laptop, many pens, printer paper and toner, with hopes that I will emerge come fall, with a sharper, cleaner book. Combed line by line.

I also plan on running away with Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and other dead folk.

When I sold the memoir and I met with my editor and publisher, we firmly agreed that we HATED, HATED, the title. It rang of bad Kubrick, so dramatic and meaningless. Then we moved towards the title of my now-dead novel, The Business of Leaving, however, this revision has been met with wrinkled brows and awkward pauses – this title must go too. Now, I’m at Desperate Creatures and my editor and I sort of like it (she thought of Desperate Housewives, I thought of Paula Fox’s Desperate Characters). No doubt there will probably be a few more iterations come autumn.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 18th, 2005 at 11:14 am and is filed under daily murmurs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.