endings and beginnings

Main reasons I haven't been around lately are (1.) finished a book and (2.) started another.


"Finishing" the book _Earthbound_ actually means finishing the handwritten draft. It's taken lots of hours past that, and I'm still in the final stage, which is Gay reading through the printout and making notes.


"Starting" _Work Done For Hire_ included a certain amount of curiously enjoyable non-literary silliness having to do with the nuts and bolts of the plot and preparation of the books I'll be writing into. I already had 34 pp. of the novel written, and they're incorporated into the 140 pp. of the first blank book (of four).


Meanwhile, we saw a good play last night, END DAYS, by Deborah Zoe Laufer. It's sort of, um, an apocalyptic drawing room comedy? A New York family moved out of the city after 9/11, and are going slightly, or not so slightly, crazy out in the suburbs.


Mom has converted to Fundamentalist Christianity and is convinced that the world is going to end on Monday. Her husband spends most of the day in a depressive staring near-coma at the kitchen table. Daughter is smoking way too much pot and the next-door neighbor kid spends all his time dressed up in a white vinyl Elvis costume, occasionally strumming badly and singing made-up bad lyrics.


The spirit of Jesus Christ, robes and all, follows the mother around during the first half of the play, quietly encouraging her. The same actor plays the daughter's hallucination of Stephen Hawking, expertly rolling an electric wheelchair. Hawking is exasperated and acerbic.


A charming craziness to the whole thing. Good writing, especially.


Joe