My eyes are blurry.
I've been reading so much. I spent Saturday and Sunday reading my advance copy of in the path of falling objects. Interesting experience. First of all, while having one book of mine on the bookshelf was cool, having TWO, in less than a year, is really something else.
And I enjoyed reading it, too. I felt detached -- like a reader, and not the author. But I did find three minor things I wanted to change: one, a typo (God! I hate typos); the second, a word I'd like to leave out; and third, a change in a punctuation mark. But that's it. Pretty clean.
And, like I said, I liked the book, too. I almost felt like I didn't know how it was going to end. Maybe I've been doing too much other stuff in between writing this one and finally reading it for the first time.
When I visited the kids at Newbury Park last week, one of them asked me if it was difficult to write my own stuff while I was reading something else. My answer was that reading is the second half of writing -- that writers have to read constantly. So, no, I said, I have no problem with reading a good book while I'm working on my writing.
But I'll qualify that. I can't write something new if I'm reading a project I've completed. There's not enough distance between myself and the voices in my own books, if that makes any sense. I kind of mentioned that in an earlier post about reading a manuscript I'd sent off to Kelly... and so now that I was reading in the path of falling objects over the weekend, I had to table my current project for a couple days.
Again.
Oh. And speaking of the weekend, this has happened to me now for two Saturdays in a row. I thought there was some catastrophic recession on. So, being the rational self-maximizer that I am, on each of the past two Saturdays I tried to take my wife out to dinner to some really nice (and pricey) places.
I figured I'd get a table.
No luck.
What's up with that? Every time I read the papers or catch a news broadcast, it's all economic doom-and-gloom, but just TRY getting a table in a nice restaurant on a Saturday evening and it's like the freekin Gilded Age or something.
And yeah... I have a background in economics, so this observation is purely anecdotal, but... jeez! I actually had to tip just to get a table the other night.
