Saturday pre-dawn

Saturday 1/27/24

So much of writing is math.

Went back into "Horny Date" and made one change. That should be completely done now. What a finely engineered story. Publishing people would not know what to make of it on their own. It's just so unlike everything. It would seem so...not allowed...to them. I'm thinking of it for Longer on the Inside: Very Short Fictions of Infinitely Human Lives.

Work on "The Ghost and the Flame." Yes. Am now just doing final readings. Read. Step back. Return. Read. Go to sleep. Get up. Read. The ending of "Flame" will wipe out every reader. It will knock them over. All you can say, if you can say anything, is "Oh my God." I've read this ending now fifty times, I bet. Made me cry this morning just like it has every time. Just unreal. And think, "These people won't let the world see this."

But they're slopping Motorollah out there. What diseased, twisted, hateful people.

I've decided that "Flame" will be the final story in The Ghost Grew Legs: Stories of the Dead for the More or Less Living. I'd already determined that "Post-Fletcher" will be first. There's enough material for two volumes. I've done so much work on this book, but there is still a ways to go. The deciding. The fixing. Still works to finish. Others to write. Not to create enough material. As I said, I have enough now for two books. It's to get everything right.

A number of these books contain so many works and I've been working towards these books for a while. That's why they're taking what, for me, is so long. I need to get something done soon. That should be Big Asks: Six Novelettes About Acceptance. Total length might be longer than another of those other books, but it has just the six parts, seven if one counts the introduction, which is its own formidable piece of work. I don't want to say one thing is easier than another, but six parts is different than considerably more than six parts. Each of these stories are individual works, but these are books. They're not collections. In the book, everything has its role, its part, in the whole.

Downloaded a recently assembled and what to date is definitive set of Cream's BBC recordings. The BBC saved, I believe, a single one of about a dozen Cream radio sessions. There is newly discovered material on this set, and a number of off-air recordings. "Toad" is one of them. That had circulated before, but it's one of those tracks whose existence excites me. The same as the early version of "Baby Don't You Do It," from a similar collection of the Who's BBC material, and which was also taped off-air. Ginger Baker and Keith Moon doing their thing.

Listened to Pick-Up Full of Pink Carnations this AM and a 1952 LP of Furtwangler conducting Schubert's ninth symphony and Haydn's eighty-eighth with the Berlin Philharmoniker.

BC men's hockey won last night against BU out in Chestnut Hill. Going to be hard victory to earn tonight when the weekend series shifts to Agganis.

Push-ups and stairs now as the sun starts to come up to help me continue to be strong and do what I need to do.

Sound the mantra: Total focus, matchless art, no mercy when we get there.

Okay. Let's get to it.