FBR 110: The Music of What Happens . . .

It's been a noisy week in . . . here.

Item: The tonnage of stuff to do has fairly collapsed my cheap but lovable desk, and there's been no time to read much of anything, but a book due this coming Monday has received a gentle extension to the following Monday, so I'm able to forestall the coming heart attack for at least that long. Whew!

Item: My stacks of new books have grown a bit taller. I'm trying hard not to think of these precarious skyscrapers as an example of hoarding but as building a vast library on not much real estate.

Item: I can see light at the end of the tunnel. In the next few weeks, that book will be done, pages for another will have been proofed, we'll have gone to France for a week, and my daughter will be home for four days then back to college, and I will have something like a month and a half to work on a new novel. It's all worked out — these coming weeks — with the precision of a railroad timetable, with that singular goal: time to write something new. If one element lags, I'm in trouble. But I try not to think about it, so desperately do I covet that time.

So we use weekends. And write short Friday Book Reports.