I'm feeling rather like that moment in THE TWO TOWERS when Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli are in Fangorn Forest, right before Gandalf shows up against all odds and tells them that the battle is on. That may be the stupidest simile I've ever come up with -- I should have just stuck to the old cliches of calms before storms, etc. Or perhaps I shouldn't have drank slowly and steadily (or tortoiselike, to continue overusing overworn phrases) all evening.
In any event, what I mean to say is that tonight is a bit of a lull before the battle commences in earnest. By "battle" I mean making the drive back up to Northern California tomorrow, and then locking myself to my laptop and finishing my book by noon on Tuesday. I have approximately one hundred pages to go, which may sound like suicide -- but I wrote my seventy-page Stanford honors thesis in three days, and that required footnotes, research, persuasive arguments, logic, making a legible diagram of the main connections between fifty or sixty different anti-Nazi conspirators, etc. The honors thesis turned out very well, if I do say so myself -- so writing a bunch of sex scenes tied together with hijinks and dramatic breakups/reconciliations should be a walk in the park (Hyde Park? St. James Park? clearly the park must be in London, but I'll leave it to you to decide which).
But, this will require a level of hermitage and insanity that I have not embraced recently, but am secretly (or perhaps not so secretly, since this is a public forum) eager to dive into. I'm going to throw myself off the bridge of Khazad-Dum, wrestle this fucking Balrog of a novel into submission, and eventually stake its heart on the side of a snowy mountaintop. Then I shall be reborn as human again, and I'll take a couple of weeks to stare catatonically at the television until it's time to reemerge. I shall not, however, come back wearing all white -- it really does nothing for my usual deathly pallor.
And now that I have written nearly half of this post as a direct comparison between myself and THE LORD OF THE RINGS (which, I do realize, is fictional), perhaps I should sleep. I had an absolutely lovely day, though -- perhaps I'm delirious because I woke up at eight a.m., which hasn't happened on a Thanksgiving since I was probably eleven. I spent the morning drinking coffee and mimosas with Terry and her mother, spent the afternoon pretending to write while watching a marathon of "My Super Sweet Sixteen" (oh, the humanity -- spending a quarter of a million dollars on your daughter's sixteenth birthday party seems, oh, a bit excessive), and then ate the night away.
Unfortunately, Terry's mom suddenly came down with flu-like symptoms while cooking dinner, and so while I had been expressly forbidden from lifting a finger (which made my midwestern help-your-hosts upbringing extremely uncomfortable), I finally got tapped to finish whisking the gravy, which made me feel v. proud. Dinner was lovely and v. v. entertaining, particularly as the siblings all discussed the many and varied ways they had attempted to kill each other growing up. We ended the night with dessert and Irish coffees, and then Terry and I came back to her apartment so that she could sleep in her own bed, I could have ready access to my car in the morning, and we could watch two episodes of "Bones".
So now I'm going to go to sleep, get up early, grab breakfast with Terry, and then speed back to Northern California in an attempt to outrun whatever plague is currently attempting to get a foothold in my body. If I'm sick, my novel will be even more epically difficult to duel with through the chambers and chasms of Khazad-Dum -- but I shall emerge victorious. And on that note, after having alienated all of my non-LORD OF THE RINGS friends (which is basically only Katie), I shall say goodnight. Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!
No comments:
Post a Comment