So, I haven’t been keeping up with this project, right.  I blame summer.  I blame sunshine and the beach and bicycles.  Basically, I’ve opted for a season outside.  I mean, I have been reading some scattered classics. The Invisible Man, Journey to the Center of the Earth, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.  Nothing against Robert Louis Stevenson, Jules Verne or HG Wells, but I just didn’t have much to say about them.  Basically, I read the books I should have been reading as a child instead of my steady diet of Sweet Valley High and Harriet the Spy ad nauseam.  Good for me.  But I didn’t really get anything useful from their technique. Maybe due to my bad attitude.

I also read more Truman Capote – Summer Crossing.  And I am reading Answered Prayers right now.  And I watched a documentary about Truman, a film he starred in, and two movies about In Cold Blood.  In Cold Blood, by the way?  The only of his books I can’t get into.  It’s too dense, too much to digest.  It’s so meticulously researched; you can tell Capote was loathe to leave out any detail because they were all so important to him.  Which makes me love Truman even if I don’t love In Cold Blood.

I guess part of why I haven’t been keeping up also has to do with a kind of dry spell in my writing ambitions.  Periodically, I feel like everything I have ever written is complete rubbish and isn’t even worth my time to rework.  I feel like everything on my mind and everything in progress is a bad copy of something that someone else did to perfection.  And then I stop writing.  When I talked about my writing problems with my smart boy, he suggested that I re-read my mission statement.  So I did.  And I’m back, for better or worse.  Probably worse until I get my head in the game and a few words on the page.