I’m dashing out the door, so this is just a quick note to let you know where I’m going and when I’ll be back. So you won’t worry.
For a while now I’ve been writing a new novel, called Illusion. It’s a father/son story. Apparently, for me, there is no other story. This one is fun, in part because even though I’m a fourth to a third of the way through a first draft, I can’t see the ending clearly. And perhaps because of that, I’ve dawdled and dodged and done everything else but dig in. My characters are all sitting around a table in a mountain diner, waiting for me to re-join them. They are about to say things to one another that can only be said by people who know what happened. So I have to settle down and figure that out before they start talking.
I’m going back into Hemingway mode, as to process if not result. He wrote five hundred words every morning and fished every afternoon. I even have my own Martha Gellhorn, always itching for excitement, to take me off to new places to write in the morning and play in the afternoon.
As to when I’ll be back to this blog, I’m not sure. When I feel like it, I suppose. Not when I feel I have something to say, but when I feel like saying it. Two very different things.
This blog is called The Dad App. That’s how it started: talking about my kids, about trying to be their father. As they, and their material, drifted off into their adult lives, I wrote about my own father, and my mother. Then I started in on the kind of world I’d like for my children. Inevitably, that led to politics, a most unrewarding subject these days.
So I’m going to leave the politics to the voters. All I have to say at this point is think about it before you pull the lever in the voting booth. Think about the world you want for your children. It’s up to you. That’s a big responsibility. Not quite as big as raising your own children, but not as different as some think. Inputs yield outputs. It’s a law of nature.
Maybe I’ll see you around. Look for the guy sitting in a green lawn chair in the Tuileries, looking serious, but not feeling it one bit.
