Until then, we'll have to muddle through somehow

Talk about deadline problems: this started as my Christmas post, and I'm finishing it on the night of New Year's Day. But, as with The Undressing of America, which was originally due to my editor over a year and a half ago, being late is no excuse for not finishing....

I like this time of year. I like the fact that my son, at 16, is still enough into Christmas to whip his mom and me into some enthusiasm. I like the chintz: the lights, the tree, the wooden Santas, the stop-motion Rudolph, the Bing Crosby, the mucous eggnog. I like the way we draw inward as a family but also go caroling with friends, and I like the fact that the friends we carol with are mostly Jews. (One year an annoyed woman yelled at us, "We're not interested! We're Jewish!" And half our group yelled back, "So are we!") I like my own odd rituals, like wrapping presents at 2 or 3 AM Christmas Eve with the over-familiar dialogue of It's a Wonderful Life running in the background. ("Paste it, Daddy!") Most of all I love the day after Christmas, year after year my favorite day on the calendar, when all the crap is done and I can lie on the couch under the red-and-green knitted blanket and watch something like Remember the Night or Holiday Affair for the too-manyth time and not feel a single stab of panic that there's something I haven't done.

But it's not a simply "merry" time. I've always felt a deep, sweet melancholy around Christmas, too. I loved Christmas as a kid, but for several years they were very lonely: my depressed parents liked to disappear into the high desert, just the three of us in a deserted campground far from anywhere. Sometimes I feel sad for my kid, being an only child (a sadness he doesn't seem to share, fortunately). I wish my mom was still around, and I'm sorry that my dad is so unaware of everything around him now. I'm sorry that it's so hard for me to make myself go see him.

I always feel an end-of-the-year sadness: the sun swings low and the days are short, and I remember so much I haven't done (this incomplete book is huge this year). This year everything's scarier and tougher because of money issues. Nicky's been having a brutal wave of migraines since October, and his winter break is weighed down by academic worries and make-up work. It's a time that the sad and the uncompleted and the frightened stand in sharp relief against the Christmas lights and the shiny new calendar.

All season long I've found myself humming the most melancholy Christmas song of all: Someday soon we all will be together, if the fates allow. Until then, we'll have to muddle through somehow...so have yourself a merry little Christmas now. Hugh Martin wrote it in 1943 (maybe with an assist from Ralph Blane) for Judy Garland to sing in Meet Me in St. Louis. The movie was set in 1904, and the sadness of the song reflected the uncertain fate of the characters in mid-story, but clearly it was channeling the mood of World War II, the uncertainty of the future and the separation of loved ones. Faithful friends who are dear to us will be near to us once more. It's just a pop tune, but it's been a wise advisor.

Where this comes into play in regard to this slow, late book is here: in many years past I'd have responded to a shortfall like this by making frantic new year's resolutions to jump on the book instantly and intensely in January, to push it through to completion as quickly as possible. In fact, last year precisely that about this very book. But of course I fall through. Already these next few weeks will be consumed with catching up on this kids' chapter book I'm contracted to write and staying a stope ahead of the artist on this on-line comic strip I'm writing for Privacy Activism and helping my son get back on top of his school situation. So any resolution to make Undressing happen quickly and immediately is a set-up for frustration and renewed despair. I need to stay with Anne Lamott's advice, to write it bird by bird.

Will it be true, as the song holds, that next year all my troubles will be out of sight? Not likely. But it's a calming thing to pretend at the beginning of the year.

View Blog

So I've had all these blog entries forming in my head for weeks: the researching my book in London one, the post-election one, the what-in-hell-am-I-thankful-for one, the Christmas one. But having too much in my head makes it scary to click on "New Post" and enter this empty rectangle. So today I thought I would just look at the blog. Which I did, and then suddenly it didn't seem that hard to write a post about the effect of looking at the blog.

I think this is a problem with the book, too. I have so much stuff in my notes and my head, but when I start work it always takes the form of "the book." I should think, not, "I really ought to work on the book" but "I really ought to work on the scene where Mary meets Bernarr in the train station." As if that was the whole project, a stand-alone scene were Mary meets Bernarr in the train station. Go back to that Bird by Bird stuff, as Anne Lamott called it.

I met Anne Lamott a few months ago. It was an at Obama fundraiser. Nice lady.

Earth's Grandest Heroes

Speaking of sex...

Which we weren't...but it's running through the part of The Undressing of America I'm working on right now, about Bernarr Macfadden's battle with the censors of his sex-education books at the start of the 20th Century, and suddenly it's running through My Pal Splendid Man too. Will Jacobs and I just uploaded the seventh episode of that silly book, in which we meet that Dusk-Lit Detective, that Calico Crusader, known as Catman. It's an episode I've always particularly liked, but now it also seems to be bringing the two books together. I don't want to give away too much, but it's kind of about sex and innocence and the way we will ourselves not to see things that are right in our faces. It's funny too, I think.

From England

I've just come home from London and Nottingham. The Game City Festival flew me to the latter to talk about video games and the culture of childhood, so I carved out a few days in the former to fill in some research on the birth of True Story magazine. It was in London in 1913 that Bernarr Macfadden published Beauty and Health, mounted the Britain's Perfect Woman contest, and so met Mary Williamson, the Yorkshire girl who would marry him, flee to America with him, and with him conceive a publishing revolution. I got my British Library card and sat there in a pencils-only reading room, pouring through piles of weird old health magazines, and I walked in the frigid wind through Red Lion Court and Wine Office Court and Aldwych, where Macfadden had his offices. All of which reawakened this book.

The English mostly wanted to talk to me about the election. I even got to be a political pundit for a few minutes on the BBC in Nottingham. (More about that in my other blog, The Second Act.) And I still had to keep up with some of my short-term deadlines, my bill-payers, even there. But I found myself able to get past the concerns of the present as I hadn't in months. I could get one foot back there, into 1913. I like that state as a writer, when I'm standing in my own world and someone else's at the same time. It reminded me of something my friend Caroline Paul says: "Writers block usually means I just need to do more research."

Everything but the book?

I'm coming back up from the ocean of deadline-driven work and campaign volunteering to do some blogging again: notes on John McCain's mental state at The Second Act and a new episode at My Pal Splendid Man. Meanwhile, things that readers of this blog have said to me over the past few weeks rattle around in my brain: I am a puer aeternis. This book is kind of like Seabiscuit. Oh, and something Hillary Clinton said the other day: "Bloom where you're planted." These are all sort of...clicking together somehow.

Ed and Johnny Make a Movie

I continue to stick to my regimen of meeting deadlines, campaigning, and resisting the temptation to blog (and it's so hard to resist during this insane election!), but I'm also continuing to upload chapters of Million Dollar Ideas for those who want to keep following the adventures of Ed and Johnny in '40s Hollywood. In Chapter 9, "It's a Minsky!" the boys finally get the chance to make a movie out of one of their anachronistic ideas. I hope you have a chance to check it out.

Will my work be remembered a thousand years from now?

That's the question Will Jones, the protagonist of My Pal Splendid Man, is asking in "Literary Lad," the episode I just uploaded. To answer the question, Splendid Man takes him a thousand years into the future, where he meets that team of heroic teenagers known as the Array of Splendid Striplings and...other stuff happens. It's all pretty absurd, but right at this moment I'm seeing something more than the absurd in it. No, let me say that differently: absurd, yes, but also very true, and class to my heart. Because, you know, I don't worry about whether my work will be remembered in a millennium, but I do think way too much about outcomes that are beyond my control. I find it incredibly hard to give myself to a project unless I can convince myself that it will sell well, bring great reviews, open new doors, something. The simple thought that "This feels like the right thing to do and I have reasonable hopes of a reward" is rarely enough to motivate me to action. And yet, that's the only true thing I can think, the only thing I can be sure of and that doesn't require fantasy and self-deception. It seems like such a simple place from which to start a book: I want to, it seems like a good idea, I'm being paid for it, so do it and find out later what the pay-off is. But I invest so much of myself in the future instead of the present that that's really hard for me.

Anyway, I didn't really expect to get such a slap in the face (or poke in the ribs?) from one of my own humor stories, but it's a good one. I think the next time I find myself wondering why I'm writing this book I should remember what a moron Will Jones is, and then remember that he's me.