Most of my day is spent on the couch, napping away. I call Heather to see if she was still interested in the Chinatown thing… but the call was more out of obligation than anything else. I don’t feel like doing much today, and caught up on reading.
I’m not sure why, but I feel a bit embarrassed about last night. I don’t feel I said anything untoward or out of place. But I’m afraid I may have made Heather uncomfortable somehow. I dunno.
Today, I switched back and forth between books. Tried to get a bit more into the whole GREP pattern thing for BBEdit. It’s starting to make sense to me, and I can feel myself getting more comfortable. Fluency? Nowhere near. But I can see the patterns a bit.
I was also rereading Here’s Your Hat, What’s Your Hurry by Elizabeth McCracken. I first came across this book at my friend Jacki’s house – I kept staring at it everytime I was over. The first section of the first story in this collection was just awesome to me. An incredible opening few paragraphs, and what those fiction writers refer to as the "hook." My limited understanding of fiction is that the first few paragraphs of a novel are crucial – in that short space and time, you have only a brief moment to capture the reader’s attention (or lose it). They’re standing in a bookstore, they’ve got your book in their hands… what you do and say in those first critical paragraphs determines whether they buy your book… or put it back on the shelves.
Here’s the opening of It’s Bad Luck to Die:
Maybe you wonder how a Jewish girl from Des Moines got Jesus Christ tattooed on her three times: ascending on one thigh, crucified on the other, and conducting a miniature apocalypse beneath the right shoulder. It wasn’t religion that put them there; it was Tiny, my husband. I have a Buddha round back, too. He was going to give me Moses parting the Red Sea, but I was running out of space. Besides, I told him, I was beginning to feel like a Great Figures in Religion comic book.
He got dreamy-eyed when he heard that. "Brigham Young," he said. "And some wives."
I told him: "Tiny, I’ve got no room for a polygamist."
Tiny himself had been married three times before he met me, one wife right after the other. I only had him, the one, and he’s been dead six months now.
I got to meet Elizabeth McCracken when she was on a reading tour that came through Columbus, in 2000. It was a small gathering, but fun to see her read in person.
And she’s a librarian, to boot. How much cooler can you get?
