"We All Went to Paris: Americans in the City of Lights" by Stephen Longstreet

There are only a few bad reviews on this blog.  These are books I couldn't find a single positive thing to write about.  Some people say it is dishonest to try and "force" yourself to say something "good" about a "bad" book.  I'm not quite sure I agree with that.  While I was teaching, I used to give at least some partial credit (very low at that) to dismally written papers--an "effort grade" as opposed to a "real" grade.  Despite the fact that I have been out of academia for four years, I believe the tradition has continued unto this blog.  Of course, there will always be "those" books that break the mold, and authors who defy and challenge the most basic idea of literary decency.

I don't want to dwell too much on this book because since I have nothing (literally nothing) good to say about it, I will make it as brief as possible.  I didn't know who Stephen Longstreet was before I picked up this book years ago.  It has been on my list for a while, but I neglected over the course of a year or two to pick it up.  The volume is part of a "re-print" series by Barnes & Noble books titled "Barnes & Nobles Rediscoveries."  I am always open to suggestions, even the commercially driven ones by mega-bookstores, but this book in particular makes me wonder about that single person in that perhaps "under-populated" committee that went about selecting titles for this series.  At any rate, "We All Went to Paris" suffers from a distinct lack of coherence, both narrative and chronological.  Stephen Longstreet strikes the reader as Nick Carraway's self-description during the opening chapter of "The Great Gatsby" when in an effort to justify his activities and his move to the "big city" he calls himself "that most limited of all specimens: the well-rounded man."  Longstreet is just that--he changed his names numerous times (he was born with Chauncey as his last name, later changed to Weiner, Wiener, plus others) landing on Longstreet finally.  He had success as a screenwriter, an artist and a writer.  The Broadway musical "High Button Shoes" is based loosely on his autobiography.  Being multi-talented is not the issue here; the problem stems specifically from the way "We All Went to Paris" was written.  First, the book is not listed or credited to him on the various bio pages found during a quick Google search.  There's another volume titled "The Young Men of Paris" and I suspect that "We All Went to Paris" was a late "rehashing" of this original title.  If someone out there would like to put me in my place about this, please leave a comment and I'll correct the entry.

Americans have been traveling and enjoying the city of Paris since long before 1776.  I think the cut-off date of 1776 was a way to declare the title "American" as distinctly political--a tactic that allows Longstreet to begin with clarity and with a strong premise about who exactly he is writing about.  The book's chronology is lineal enough during the first 2/3rds of the book, but right around the period of World War I, the narrative begins a hopscotch labyrinth that is confusing and distracting.  The close reader can see through the confusion, but I must wonder about the "untrained eye."  The segments regarding aerial combat by Americans flyers during World War I doesn't seem to belong in this book (since most of the action does not take place in Paris) and one has to wonder whether it was pasted here from another volume.  Stephen Longstreet writes about his friendship with William Faulkner, and I wonder if this part of the book is not included here in order to cater to that connection (more on this later).  The disjointed chronology continues for most of the 1920s and 1930s, a period which has been written about extensively.  It appears Longstreet tried some type of experimental chronology, a classic case of "remember-this-because-it-is-going-to-show-up-later-and-without-the-reference-you-will-be-lost."  The problems is that he does not allow for enough cultural references to indicate to the reader where the narrative is going next.  Again, the segment on World War I aerial combat is the most clear example of this.

Stephen Longstreet preaches quite a bit on this book, and this preaching takes away from both the credibility and the enjoyment of the narrative.  Early on in the book, he writes about the horrors of war (during the Revolutionary War), injecting some quick Vietnam era "anti-war" lines that are unnecessary and misleading (the book was published in 1972).  He writes about the torment of napalm, of the massacre at My Lai, of how humanity continually fails to learn, etc., etc.  It immediately discloses to the reader that the bulk of the writing of this book was conducted during the late 1960s (all the while he's writing about Benjamin Franklin in Paris).  I am certain this kind and good message has a place in both our history and our literature; I am uncertain that it is here.

One cannot write about Paris without writing about sex.  In fact, one cannot write about anything in particular nowadays without writing about sex.  Longstreet varies between the very explicit and the very censored, and in those passages where his explicitness gives way to pseudo-pornography, one has to wonder whether this particular act or that particular escapade being so clearly detailed is not part of the author's own sexual preferences.  This is not troubling, really, but the fact that the reader can read through it as clearly as that (and I confess NOT to be such a close reader, really) is like opening the drawers of Longstreet's dark cabinet.  I don't want to go there, and I suspect neither does the general reader.  He writes a great deal about lesbianism in Paris in the 1920s but does so from the perspective of someone intrigued by it in a "laboratory rat" way--sort of as in "I wonder why Sylvia Beach and Gertrude Stein never went to be together, or while Alice and Sylvia and their partners didn't do a foursome."  He doesn't detail it that way in the book, but the suggestions and darkness of his assessments regarding lesbians are down-right eerie.

"The Lost Generation" of American expatriates what went to Paris in the 1920s should provide enough material here to yield a good account.  Longstreet manages to foul this part of the book as well.  First, it is during this part of the book that the chronology becomes confusing.  Secondly, Longstreet lashes out against the previous biographers of this era as overly-romanticizing it.  When not romanticizing it, he writes, then academics in their tall ivory towers ruin it by their pedantic, unwarranted ownership of the era and their characters.  This sounds a little too self-serving to me, personally.  Longstreet's long stretch of criticism of other biographers of "The Lost Generation" is childish and irrelevant.  He proceeds, without much caution or dissimulation, to do exactly the same thing in his writing that he blames others are doing in theirs.  The writing about Gertrude Stein is full of holes and misrepresentations taken from books and sources he previously criticized as unreliable.  He surrenders his objectivity to the "academic criticism du jour" of bashing Ernest Hemingway as too macho, too much a liar, too mean and ugly and drunk and (imagine that) not as big a talent as everyone claims he was.  I tried very hard to overlook this childish, schoolyard recess attack because I did want to continue reading the book.  Ernest Hemingway to me is a writer, just that... I am not a fan, or a cult follower, but this type of criticism is not based on objective reading or characterization.  I heard and was expose to a lot of it while in college and especially graduate school.  Longstreet really sounds like the bitter competitor who didn't grow as famous or known as his competition.  Again, this is very childish and down-right idiotic.  He also dedicates a chapter to F. Scott Fitzgerald in which he writes very little about Fitzgerald.  His bitterness shines through in such a poor way it is nearly impossible to tolerate.  Also, the mention of Ezra Pound is so little that if the reader blinks at the wrong moment, he/she might miss it.

The art/sketches that are spread throughout the book are his, I am sure, and just like the epigrams at the start of each chapter they don't seem to belong where they are placed.  The epigrams (often one-liners) have absolutely nothing to do with the chapter that follow it.  Again, if this was Longstreet's way of being experimental, then I'll have to say that it sadly does not work.

Finally, there's a long epilogue where Longstreet quotes extensively from William Faulkner.  The epilogue aims to answer the question, well, "why did we all go to Paris?"  If this is constructed from simple notes on the conversation, then I am (being sarcastically mean here) impressed by Longstreet's ability to reconstruct a conversation at such length.  The impression one gets is that either 1) there was a voice recorder on during the meeting which Longstreet later transcribed, or 2) he made up most of it (a tactic he blasts all of "The Lost Generation" expatriates for engaging in).  I wonder if Faulker (a failed World War I flyer) wasn't the source behind Longstreet's inclusion of the misplaced historical chapters.

"We All Went to Paris" simply fails to deliver, and, as entertaining as many parts of it are, I cannot recommend it as worthwhile.  Sorry.

Norman Mailer: The Spooky Art -- Thoughts on Writing

Norman Mailer was a controversial figure in American letters from the moment he burst into the scene with "The Naked and the Dead."  The rollercoaster ride of instant fame and the literary scene almost did him in as soon as he had arrived at the pinnacle of the New York literary olympus.  One has to let that sink in... this is the same man who survived island hopping in the South Pacific during World War II and saw ferocious action as an infantryman.  Biographically speaking, Mailer grew up middle class, went to Harvard and "put in his time" as a craftsman learning the arduous path of the writer's life.  Fast-forward to 2003, and the cantankerous, loud and outspoken Mailer has become a quick-witted elder statesman of letters, a mellowed grandfatherly figure intent on looking back with an objective eye and speaking from the heart.

"The Spooky Art: Thoughts on Writing" is not the typical book aimed at the promising writer (or even the writer wannabe who speaks of the craft but does little writing), it is rather an open and objective few at Mailer's work and the struggles to define the highly elusive elements of writing such as "style" and "narrative voice."  The book reads with many previously published interviews and written pieces by Mailer with the author's own running commentary.  Divided into sections, the section on "Craft" appears as the most instructive, with the chapter on "Style" finally opening the door into a concrete definition of the writing process and finding one's own voice.  What the writer does is over-romanticized ad nauseum, so coming to writing that is so clear and void of the usual cliches is refreshing as it is instructive.  One of the best passages from "Craft" draws from the introspective power to clarify the obscure:   "Someone who has never tried fiction will hardly be quick to understand that in the study, a writer often does feel God-like.  There one sits, ensconced in judgment on other people' lives.  Yet contemplate the person on the chair: He or she could be hungover and full of the small shames of what was done yesterday or ten years ago.  Those flashes of old fiascos wait like ghosts even appear and ask to be laid to rest.  Consciously or unconsciously, writers must fashion a new peace with the past every day they attempt to write.  They must rise above despising themselves.  If they cannot, they will probably lose the sanction to render judgment of others.... then later in "Real Life versus Plot Life, Mailer appears like a prophet.  In speaking about the limitations of seeing your characters as victims, he seems to be predicting why today's literature is filled with victimhood, a social phenomenon today in the United States that seems to dictate "if you haven't been victimized, you haven't arrived:"  "I'd say try not to think of your characters as victims.  That sort of classification narrows them.  In reality, very few victims ever see themselves exclusively as victims, and when they do, their spirit turns stale.  There is a certain sort of self-pitying victim one wishes to walk away from, and they can be even worse in a book.  Unless one is Dickens."  I wonder what Mailer would say today about the abundance of these types of novels, and how it might be a reflection of the changing moods in America... or is it just a marketing ploy researched and supported by data in many of the publishing houses of today?

Mailer examines the transmission of real life events into literature taking as an example the tragic events of 9/11.  He explains with detail the amount of care a writer must take in filtering what happened into what happened with a vague twist, the effort of not letting all of the proverbial cats out of the bag.  "Certain events, if they are dramatic or fundamental to us, remain afterward like crystals in our psyche.  Those experiences should be preserved rather than written down.  They are too special, too intense, too concentrated to be used head-on.  Whereas if you project your imagination through the crystal, you can end up with an imaginative extrapolation of the original events.  Later, coming from another angle, you may obtain another scenario equally good and altogether different from the same crystal.  It is there to serve as a continuing source so long as you don't use it up by a direct account of what you felt....  Interestingly, I believe Mailer (who lived hard just like his literary idol a generation before him) is the only writer who has really gotten into the real Hemingway psyche.  What I mean by the real Hemingway psyche is the examination of Hemingway's life and work with an objective eye, not with political or academic hog-washing blurs.  Like all of the writers from his generation, Mailer learned a great deal from Hemingway, but he also suffered from a love-hate relationship with the Nobel laureate and did not lean one way or too much the other when being critical of the master.  "I think Hemingway got into trouble because he had to feel equal to his heroes.  It became an enormous demand.  He could not allow a character in his books to be braver then he was in his private life.  It's a beautiful demand, and there's honor in forcing oneself to adhere to such a code, but it does cut down on the work you can get out.  While it's legitimate to write about a man who's braver than yourself, it is better to recognize him quickly as such.  I believe I could put a heavyweight champion of the world into a novel and make him convincing, even enter his mind without having to be the best old fighter-writer around.  I would look to use one of another of the few crystals I possess that are related to extraordinary effort....  Hemingway's death was a cautionary to me.  His suicide as wounding as if one's own parent had taken his life.... Hemingway was a great cautioning influence on all of us.  One learned not to live on one's airs, and to do one's best to avoid many nights when--thanks to Scott Fitzgerald's work--one know it was three o'clock in the morning.... Hemingway committed suicide working on airs.  He took the literary world much too seriously.  His death is there now as a lesson to the rest of us: Don't get involved at too deep a level or it will kill you and--pure Hemingway--it will kill you for the silliest reasons: for vanity, or because feuds are beginning to etch your liver with the acids of frustration."  Writing a little later, Mailer seems to evoke many of his experiences in combat with a thin-veiled allegoric sense of image:  "Well, few of us dare death.  Most of us voyage out a part of the way into our jungle and come back filled with pride at what we dared and shame at what we avoided, and because we are men of the middle and shame is an emotion no man of the middle can bear for too long, we act like novelists, which is to say that we are full of spleen, small gossip, hatred for the success of our enemies, envy at the fortunes of our friends, ideologues of a style of fiction which is uniquely the best (and is invariably our own style), and so there is a tendency for us to approach the books of our contemporaries like a defense attorney walking up to a key witness for the prosecution.  At worst, the average good novelist reads the work of his fellow racketeers with one underlying tension--find the flaw, find where the other guy cheated."

A few years ago, I read and reviewed "The Deer Park" on this blog.  The book was a painful experience, difficult to believe much less read and interpret.  Back then (as today) my fear was always that I had missed something important about the book.  A small amount of research yielded a sea of bad reviews which, at first glance, seem to have confirmed my view.  Reading "The Spooky Art," and most particularly the chapter on the re-write of the draft of "The Deer Park," I came away with a sense of having been unfair to Mailer.  But how is one to know, as a reader, the backstage difficulties of the writing process?  We cannot do anything other than try to be impartial.  The writer/reader relationship remains the mystery it will always be.

Mailer is insightful in his criticism of "The Last Tango in Paris," and offers a view of how the written is translated into the visual, and the complexities of mixing the written, the improvised and the actor/writer/improviser.  I have never watch this film, but I know enough about the controversy it caused.  Mailer is the perfect judge of seeing without eyes the factor of improvisation and how it doomed the film while augmenting Marlon Brando's genius.  He argues that the box office success of the film in America was a consequence of its sordid, vulgar and perverse elements.  He judges this without being a prude, but rather putting it on the public/consumer.  Why go watch a film in which Marlon Brando the actor plays the part of a character through which he is improvising the line if the only purpose of going to see the film is to try and discern which part of the perversity is Brando playing the character being perverse?  Does it reflect on the thousands upon thousands of suburban women who rushed to the theater to watch Brando engage in anal sex with a much younger actress (or was it Brando playing the part of a character who possesses those sexual preferences, or was it just simply "Brando being Brando?").  See the difficulty of improvisation, the written and the art?

Mailer comments on the limitations of art in general.  He writes extensively about graffiti  and avant garde art and the ability of visual artists to go beyond what writers achieve on the page.  He concludes, "But we are at the possible end of civilization, and tribal impulses start up across the world.  The descending line of the isolated artist goes down from Michelangelo all the way to Chris Burden, who is finally more comfortable to us than the writers of graffiti.  For Burden is the last insult from the hippie children of the middle class to the bourgeois art-patron who is their spiritual parent, but graffiti speaks of a new civilization where barbarism is stirring at the roots."  

I think Norman Mailer had gone full-circle by the time he died in 2007.  Shortly after his death, I found "On God: An Uncommon Conversation" and found it to be a sensible book, not a dogmatic or archaic discourse on the metaphysical.  Just like in "The Spooky Art," Mailer doesn't theorize... he doesn't need to.  I am planning now on tackling his longer works (The Executioner's Song and Harlot's Ghost).  Before I do this, I have to write on my perverse habit of taking "literary detours."  With this I mean the habit of drawing up a reading list for the year and then injecting books in-between those listed.  I know some people who detest reading lists because they come to see it as dictating a task, reading as a duty to finish or complete a check out list.  I find this comparable to what Mailer writes about in "The Spooky Art" because one must never find the process too dictating.  I draw my own list and I am the impartial manager who injects a player into the line-up and keeps his opponent guessing.  It's all art, and I suspect Mailer would approve.

The Impromptu Writing Lesson

In the spring semester of 2009, I had a student from my AP English class come up to the board. I told the student to simply "let it rip," and go with the flow and to write whatever she wanted or came to mind--no grammar, punctuation or even sentence structure needed. This is what came out:

"I was seated at a crowded cafe when he came in. My first thought was that he stood out from the rest of the people waiting in line. My second impression was that of the passage from Hemingway's book I had read so many times, but I knew Hemingway to be a terrible liar and the impression he wrote about in the book about watching a girl walk into the cafe where he was writing was probably made up. I had had a vision and mine was entirely different from his. Other thoughts took me back a year earlier to an encounter with a similar complete stranger while running to catch a bus. It was raining hard and he was a real gentleman, and without hesitation gave me his umbrella. We sat together inside the crowded bus and exchanged vague information about each other. I didn't find him defensive, but rather much reserved and I began to think he was probably married. Then he told me a sad story about an ill-fated balloonist whose hot air balloon deflated at an incredible height. While on the way down to his death, the man called his wife on a two-way radio and told her how much he loved her, and the children, etc. I found the story strange and random for having just met him, but it was a story that almost made me cry. Then he rang for the stop, stood up, and said good-bye. The bus began to move by the time I realized he had forgotten his umbrella. The more I thought about the story he told me, the more I thought he had probably lied... just like Hemingway."

We spent the rest of the hour discussing her impromptu story, and the rest of the students loved the exercise and we kept doing it twice a week for the rest of the spring semester. Everyone was impressed at the fact that she DID follow grammar rules--it took her a little under five minutes to complete the story! Boy that was fun!

Not the Same to Talk About Bulls Than to Be in The Bullring

I wonder how many times I've tried to describe my writing process, and the sense of almost euphoria it provokes in me even when writing the most mundane things. But talking about writing, as the Great Bastard once said, is to ruin the writing itself. I've been reading what I call "remediating" writing books/manuals simply because I want to refresh the little knowledge of the process I have. Certainly all of these books are helpful, the more basic, the better. I have been reading "The Power to Write," by Caroline Joy Adams, and I find it to be a treasure of key and important advice, but also one of those fluffy, dream-like, organic, do-it-yourself type of books that will probably give Natalie Goldberg (if I am so obscene as to say) an orgasm. I know I am being ridiculously mean in saying that, and I certainly have no reason to declare the book a 50-50 affair. I've learned a great deal, (as I have learned from Natalie Goldberg's hippie approach to all things Zen and writing). Caroline Joy Adams has a clarity that is hard to match. It was only when parts of the text were "calligraphied" covering entire pages that I felt a little cheated. Were these put in for aesthetic value, or was it in the effort to inspire. I take the latter rather than the former, but it still doesn't explain what the value of those full-page quotations is. Here's an example: "You have the power to write... so take up your pen, open your heart, your mind and your soul, and just let the words start flowing..." Inspirational, yes... to quite a high degree, but a full page worth... I just can't see it.

The sample stories in "Key #2: Start your story with a powerful opening" are excellent. Particularly, "Real Reason" because it explains so clearly the importance of what words evoke in us. I learned how to make the word squeeze the emotion out of me. Openings are covered in detail about technique and style, and the importance to "grab" the reader. It is hard to objectify one technique over the other when talking about this mainly because what is good, as Borges once said, belongs to no one. Mrs. Adams is a great teacher of writing. This books is a great mix of the harsh reality of a writer's work and the ever-romanticized aura of eccentricity that, without discrimination, follows all of those who want to write. It's a hard gig, Jack... Adams got the balance right!

Reading List 2009 -- Written in Stone

Well, the "Frequency of Silence" Reading List for 2009 is now complete. I am going to set in stone the 2009 titles. I've decided not to add any or replace any of the titles by other books throughout the year. Aside from the philosophical twist, I am going to read voraciously about writing techniques. I am doing so because I think it will help me with my teaching and to develop new methods to help my students. The effort for 2009 is then a two-fold (or a two-prong approach): Teach myself to think philosophically again and not obsessively, and teach myself how to be a better teacher to my students. Here's the list: 2009!

After finishing NaNoWriMo for 2008 I always give myself a little treat. Just like last year, my treat for December is to take it easy, write for leisure rather than a word count and read my favorite "silly-little-book" entitled "A Movable Feast," by Ernest Hemingway. It's a book about Hemingway's young days living in the Paris expatriate artist community that included F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, Sylvia Beach, Gertrude Stein, etc. The book is more fiction than fact--as most Hemingway non-fiction is--but it is an inspiring book for any aspiring writer (as long as she or he can keep from laughing at the exaggerated facts). For example, while conversing with Ford Madox Ford, Hemingway states that they saw Aleister Crowley cross the street (or something to that effect). It's been widely catalogued as a lie since, but it is interesting and entertaining as hell. It was in this book that I first learned about Jules Pascin and he fast became one of my favorite artists. Also, there are some fabulous "Hemingway at his best" passages like this one:

With so many trees in the city, you could see the spring coming each day until a night of warm wind would bring it suddenly in one morning. Sometimes the heavy cold rains would beat it back so that it would seem that it would never come and that you were losing a season out of your life. This was the only truly sad time in Paris because it was unnatural. You expected it to be sad in the fall. Part of you died each year when the leaves fell from the trees and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold, wintry light. But you knew there would always be spring, as you knew the river would flow again after it was frozen. When the cold rains kept on and killed the spring, it was as though a young person had died for no reason.In those days, though, the spring always came finally but it was frightening that it had nearly failed.

There are way too many things happening right now in my life, and that's the reason why I haven't been able to write as much as I wanted before, or even finish putting together my reading list for 2009. I am hoping to go back to the gym the rest of the month. The rest of this month will determine whether or not I will begin my year on the right foot. A few more pages from Hemingway and then I'll leave it at that.

Writer... for the first time.

This is the first time in my life that I truly feel like a writer. It's strange to actually come to realize this; I have two degrees in English from highly competitive schools. When I signed up to do NaNoWriMo, the thing that came to mind were all those false starts, plot outlines never taken up again, etc. I remember listening to an interview in the Micheal Feldman show on NPR once--I can't remember who the writer was--but the person being interviewed said that the first draft is always terrible, that there was nothing anyone could do about that. All that one can do is keep on writing. I remembered this but it seems it never really sank in... until now. For NaNoWriMo I went back to my roots, to the first ever plot/draft/story I ever tried writing. I took the plot and revamped it, gave the protagonist a new name, and thought of new outlines. Going with the NaNoWriMo rules, I didn't begin to write until November 1st, but once I did the torrents came and flooded my imagination with ideas, new twists, etc. I am loving this process... and I just broke 40,000 words today!

For a long time I struggled with the feeling that I was a "poser" when it came to writing. I mean, I wrote almost everyday, filling Moleskine after Moleskine notebook, posting what I thought was not even halfway decent on my personal website, and feeling that if I went to write at Starbucks I would just be committing the worst sin of "poserhood." Not now, though. I have been writing at a cafe close to home and I can't even seem to keep track of time as words accumulate on the screen and page. The storyline is so clear in my mind, I can almost feel the warm sun while walking around Oxford (half the novel takes place there).

As a young English major in an undergraduate program full of some of the finest young writers in the country, I felt out of place for four years. Later, at Georgetown University for my Masters Degree, I was competing with the best of the best in theory and criticism. Needless to say, I never fitted in. I love my memories and years as a student, but they left me with insecurities about calling myself a writer. I remember reading Ernest Hemingway's "A Movable Feast," thinking what a wonderful thing it would be to simply realize that one is a writer. Today, while I was writing at the cafe, a young woman entered. She was very beautiful, and obviously waiting for someone (she kept calling on her cell phone). From time to time I would look up and see her reading the paper. Then I remember the passage from "A Movable Feast:"

"A girl came in the cafe and sat by herself at a table near the window. She was very pretty with a face fresh as a newly minted coin if they minted coins in smooth flesh with rain-freshened skin, and her hair was black as a crow's wing and cut sharply and diagonally across her cheek.
I looked at her and she disturbed me and made me very excited. I wished I could put her in the story, or anywhere, but she had placed herself so she could watch the street and the entry and I knew she was waiting for someone. So I went on writing.
The story was writing itself and I was having a hard time keeping up with it. I ordered another rum St. James and I watched the girl whenever I looked up, or when I sharpened the pencil with a pencil sharpener with the shavings curling into the saucer under my drink.
I've seen you, beauty, and you belong to me now, whoever you are waiting for and if I never see you again, I thought. You belong to me and all Paris belongs to me and I belong to this notebook and this pencil."

There are some obvious differences, of course. I was in no way interested in the young woman, and I even went out of my way to display my wedding band by scratching my face whenever I knew she was looking at me. I had no interest in making her "belong to me." I was drinking coffee and not rum St. James. I was using my computer, although I did have my Moleskine close at hand. But the fact that I remember this fine passage from "A Movable Feast" while in the act of writing, and made the connection to it made me incredibly happy for some reason or another. And so I concluded today's work with 3,000+ words and over 40,000 total. I am a happy man.... finally a writer!