I’m not sure what to make of this, but I’m writing this, my first blog post, in the dark. Okay, I do have a snazzy flashlight that has a built-in hook that I’ve attached to the lamp over my bed. I live in a remote area, and though we were spared any tragic impacts of the Hurricane Irene, we are going on two full days without power. We played board games and read books and the paper, ate up the food in the fridge and enjoyed a kind of 19th century day. The wind was crazy – the birch trees looked like they were going to fly away, and my dog Gus did a runner. Now, I’m working on a 53% charge on my computer, and since these entries are best served by the spoonful rather than ladleful, I hope that will be plenty to complete a thought, brevity not really my strong suit. My literary heroes, including some modern-day ones, wrote with a pen and paper and sometimes, a candle, unfettered by power grids and their surprising fragility. Every short story I ever wrote was done in longhand. I don’t know how I didn’t change and edit and do last-minute word substitutions and actually end up with anything that made sense. For the indecisive like me, the computer can be a curse, and I’m sure I’ve lost a lot of raw, visceral stuff from the doubts that my Mac allows me, and the ceaseless deleting, polishing, adding, erasing. See, I’ve been rethinking so much, I’m down to 27%. 23. 14. 7….
