On writing and writing and … okay, so I played video games…

It has often been said that writing a novel is like running a marathon, you need a lot of longevity and get ready for a sprint at the end.

Well, I'm sprinting. I can see the finish line. I am winded and I am sore and I am tired. I can't imagine what writing this book in one stretch would have been like and understand fully why I had to stop when I did - I pulled a muscle from overexertion. But I stretched with some acting and I walked it off by writing some plays and I'm back. Oh, baby, am I back!

I wrote some great stuff Friday and I was ready to spend my Saturday hammering out even more pages! Four hours on Saturday! Six hours! Eight hours!

… but then we went to Target and I bought World of Warcraft…

(Okay, so we all need some down time, right?)

I returned to work this morning feeling… cooled off. Like running, you can't just start and stop. You need to warm up if you take too much time away.

And how do you warm up your philosophical muscles? You think? You see, I'm coming to a pretty pivotal scene towards the end - actually, they're all pretty damned pivotal at this point. I had to set it up in my mind. I knew what I wanted to have happen but I had to find the context in which it would. Philosophical context, that is. Context about the Vampire Society, a society whose highest virtue is consumption. I began to think of public policy: the privatization of national parks, welfare reform, etc. But this is a very deconstructionist philosophy - that is: it all comes down to YOU - so government becomes but a scapegoat. You must move beyond that. You must reduce. You go to the scale of a city. You go to the scale of a neighborhood. You go to the scale of a family. You move smaller and smaller and then, finally, as if on its own, it starts to hit you and you get one, single line.

Here's what I got today: Our society is only as ethical as you are when you're given the wrong change.

And then you put that into the context of a love triangle… and then you realize you still have a long way to go...