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I haven't added to this bad boy in almost two weeks - perhaps because I've realized the futility ("realize the futility" could be a good name for a "curb your enthusiasm" spoof), or because I've been spending all my time writing the novel, or maybe I just got spooked because someone told me they'd been reading this. Two someones. I prefer writing for the ether. It doesn't talk back, except in the back of my mind, where it sounds a bit like Orson Welles (late-period fat-happy), and it always say, "Good show, old kid!" Then he turns back to his game of baccarat with Scrooge McDuck (voiced by Sean Connery) and Bruce Wayne (future Bruce Wayne from "The Dark Knight Returns.") and Clint Eastwood (Clint Eastwood).

Nothing happened in the last two weeks. I like my new shrink. We threw a party. Thanksgiving came. The Christmas season is starting. I haven't shaved or cut my hair. My novel swelled without growing. Seriously, the entire second part (which I was hoping would be deeply psychological) is a long and vague slog forward. How do you write good traveling? My characters seem to exist separately, each in their own universe. Whenever they don't talk, I write these long elaborate paragraphs that zip and zap and zop from one not-quite-topic to the next:

Andy stared down the rooftops. The landscape had a perverse kind of beauty in its outline. The dull space-maximized square buildings, laid along one after the other - along the middle there were entire low-cost patches owned and operated by cut-rate apartmentiers who promised a number of amenities to supplement the crushing claustrophobia of existence therein. Each tiny room was outfitted with a soundway - a once-popular portway derivation which absorbed only the sound and passed it along through the ether. You could order a beachside soundway and fall asleep to the push-pull of the waves; or a forest soundway, with wind cresting through the trees and obnoxiously undomesticated creatures moaning generic cries of woe and hunger. Andy knew this, because Johnny lived in one of those cheap little apartment blocks. His apartment was large - his parents were the landlords - and yet, Andy had taken many long hours, that first time in Johnny's room, getting over the fact that there were no windows.

Then there will follow a dialogue sequence written like something Hemingway crammed out in a night of hard coffee and cheap wine:

"You think this is transcendence?" asked Johnny. "Those are all the people. The brains. They've been absorbed into this place - whatever it is."
"It's not," said Maura. "Look at them, at their faces. They look so happy."
"They're drugged."
"They're in heaven."
"They're in prison."
"Maybe heaven is a prison," Maura said. "Would that be so bad?"
Johnny said, "Yes."
"What if you didn't know it was a prison?" Maura asked. "If you were happy forever with no second thoughts?"
"It would still be a prison," said Johnny.
"You're just like Andy," said Maura.
"I like to think he's just like me," said Johnny.

People keep asking me what the novel is about. I change the subject and mention that their new article of clothing looks great. Then they comment on my scruff. Well, one person (a girl person) (from work) said I looked scruffy. Other adjectives accrue. Who am I kidding. I look like I spent two weeks in a prison sniffing glue. Also, I think I'm gaining weight. I blame "Curb Your Enthusiam" for all this complaining.

The one good thing about the novel is that it is a novel. It is long and dull and torpid and bland and pretentious and unabsorbing, but it is over 150 pages long, with no end in sight, and so it is a genuine novel now. I just need to keep writing it. I don't have the parachute of "It's just for National Novel Writing Month" or "It's just to see if I can do it." Now it's getting real. Do I like my characters? A little bit. I've killed off a couple without batting an eyelash. Could I kill off the rest of them? I have to. I have to kill off one of my favorites - a girl, an important girl. Looking back, I've adopted a kind of close third person for almost everyone but her - when it comes to her mind, I turn away, embarrassed, maybe even frightened. Nervous, certainly. The other women in the book are either no-bullshit flirty, violently maternal, or insane. My main guys are anxious, amused, adventurous, and arrogant.

This is supposed to be a fantasy novel. They are supposed to scale the top of the world. But there is so little wonder in my book right now. It has everything bad about fantasy and realism with none of the good parts. I'm the worst writer ever. I hate myself and everyone around me. I love the world too much to do so little justice to it in book form. There are too many beautiful and amazing things that appear in front of my eyes every day. Today I walked around San Francisco with a friend and sat near Fisherman's Wharf and looked out on Alcatraz and Sausalito and the Golden Gate Bridge. How do you describe that? I just did, poorly. On a clear day, you can see too many things from the window of my apartment. I hope that heaven lets you time travel. It has to, right?

My best friend thinks I'm a tortured writer. But the torture is entirely self-inflicted. The world doesn't torture me. The urge to capture it does. HP Lovecraft wrote, "I am well-nigh resolv'd to write no more tales, but merely to dream when I have a mind to, not stopping to do anything so vulgar as to set down the dream." That's exactly how I feel. Dreams are much nicer when you don't feel the terrific desperate need to set them down in print.