Closer to the bone...

Shortly before she died, my mother remarked one day, "I don't think people get older. I think they get more so." I remember feeling startled for, in looking at myself, I didn't much like what I saw. Knowing I'd be a more noxious version of myself as I got older was disquieting and so, with a great deal of difficulty, I changed my life's direction.

Or did I?

In the Gnostic Gospels, Christ says, That which you bring forth will save you, but that which you do not bring forth will destroy you. But within the house I name as myself, there are numberless impulses, desires, and longings all clamoring to be. What should I bring forth? As Theodore Roethke asks, Which I is I? Free in the tearing wind?

It's a property of youth to believe that that the personality is formed like a cafeteria lunch: a little of this, some of that and this for dessert. When young, we like to think think that we can ignore the great forces of our given natures and lives, and simply barrel through any obstacle. It was this idea rattling around in young hippie-heads that shaped the 70's communal movement, and the same notion fuels the self-help industry today.

As it turned out, many of us didn't cotton to subsistence farming or living in teepees, and try as we might, more of us stolidly remain our work-a-day selves no matter how many affirmations we paste on our mirrors.

One of the real pleasures of ageing,--and there are many--is the realization of our being despite everything. If we're lucky, we come to a joyful awareness that we are this and not that. And this is perfectly fine. It's such a relief not to be puzzled by ourselves, not to feel lashed by one societal wind after another. We're suddenly closer to the bone.

At least I am.

It's innaresting....

It's morning here, and the weather is gray and strange: not one thing or another. We're between seasons....not winter or spring. There should be a word for a time like this. Maybe there once was.

Words are on my mind because I'm plugged into NPR. Susan Stamberg, or someone like her, is busily interviewing a words-expert, one who tracks the history of their usage.

While scrubbing out the cat-food bowls, I learned that girl was once used interchangeably to mean a boy or a girl child. As more words arose to mean a young female person (connoting her status as a virgin or not: maid, maiden etc.), girl eventually meant just a girl.

That's interesting, although I prefer the William Burroughs' spelling: innaresting. At his most scathing, Burroughs uses the word to mean something that's more than just interesting: it's horrific.

Any writer worth her software knows that words do more than replace monkey grunts. Besides naming things, words are depth charges constructed to sink into the psyche and then explode. Words can tweak neurons setting off massive human energies for good or for ill: check out the words of Thomas Paine or Adolph Hitler. With words alone, both set off upheavals full of wholesale slaughter and changed the fate of nations.

That's pretty innaresting too.

With this in mind, I've always listened carefully to what the White House's Current Occupant has to say. Although endless fun is made of his mutters, gaffes, and flub-ups, I think it's mistake to believe he's a dolt who doesn't mean any of it. I think he means every word, but like most heavy-weight liars he takes a circuitous route to get where he shouldn't go.

For example, his use of innaresting always means he isn't interested at all. Whenever the Current Occupant talks about his numberless critics, he prefaces his statement with , "I think it's innaresting that XYZ says...." and then procedes to call XYZ a creep in so many words. Maybe he's seized on innaresting as more socially acceptable than sez you. Personally, I think it's more closely related to the way fibbers like to preface statements with, To be perfectly frank, or To be honest. If you have an intuitive bone in your body, either phrase should make you run like the wind.

When the post-surge mounting horror and bloodshed in Iraq was brought to his disdainful attention, the Current Occupant remarked on how the Iraqi people "...were living in innaresting times..." Meaning that blood, death, chaos and destruction are merely banal and par for the course.

Innaresting, isn't it?

The sorrows of the world...

I'm addicted to media of all kinds...Internet, radio, TV, DVD, name it and I'm probably plugged in to one type or another. But I don't have an IPod, I hate my cell phone, and I'm fairly sure I won't ever text-message a living soul. Mostly I listen to NPR on headphones as I go about my day...depending on the client, I can even write copy while listening to Fresh Air.

This morning NPR, which usually tries for balance, lost it this morning and dumped pail after pail of horrific news. Horrendous violence in Bagdad, 75% of the ocean is over-fished, Darfur is ankle-deep in blood, our economy has cracks that go all the way to the basement, and the White House's Current Occupant has taken a whole bunch of animals off the Endangered Species List. A couple of times I cried but I kept listening because I refuse to chicken out over current events. But I was also feeling small and utterly useless in the face of all this: the sorrows of the world.

There are people who are passionate and talented when faced with evil and chaos. I have the passion but no talent, although I've tried to do my bit. Frankly, when it comes to the large and ghastly stuff, I don't have much ability, and the little I have gets swamped by my over-sized emotions.

As a writer I do what I can. Purely political or tabloid art of any kind rarely accomplishes much. All the arts work sideways, rather than frontally, they seduce rather than conquer. It takes decades before the impact of a Guernica is really felt. Yet, on my good days, I believe that images and words are humankind's best hope.

Today isn't one of those days.

Cool n' breezy...

A day spent under the covers, one eye cocked towards Court TV, 48 Hours, CSI, and American Justice. This morning I woke with a fierce sinus headache and ran through my cure-alls before saying uncle and flopping back into bed. Then I remembered the never-fail: Coke and BC Powders. For me it's the equivalent of shooting up; I do my very best to avoid white sugar. I'm also the product of my Oklahoma high school where nearly every teacher had on their desk a glass of Co'Cola (as it was known) in which a hunk of meat or a single tooth was suspended . Every so often my math, biology, or history teacher would lift out the tooth or meat and display the rotted results.

"See that," my teacher would crow. "Now just imagine what that Co'Cola is doing to your insides."

Sitting in our thick guilty silence, we'd stare at the blackened lump dangling before us knowing our innards probably looked just like it. However, the sum total of coke-marinated meat and teeth never put us off Coca Cola, nor did the school ever remove the Coke machines.

So my husband schlepped out, got me a real all-fructose Coke, and joined me in watching pure crap TV. He'd been working hard all day, so he slumped in front of a true-crime murder-for-hire show with a happy sigh.
"Nothing like watching garbage to clean out your head," he noted.
"Sudses it right out," I agreed.
"Makes it breezy in there," my husband said, " and minty-fresh."
We sat together contentedly and minty-fresh. I sipped my Coke and licked up a BC Powder, feeling my headache slide away like a bad dream.

Truth and lies...

Today's Slate has a review of Tobias Wolff's new short story collection, the main theme of which is lying. Anyone who has read This Boy's Life (made into a heart-stopping movie with Robert DeNiro) or his brother's book, The Duke of Deception, will understand Wolff's obsession. He was raised by both talented and untalented fibbers, and quickly learned to lie himself, to survive and escape. Now, as a fiction writer, he's engaged in a peculiar mirror act: telling the lie that tells the truth.

The first building block of art is believability. Stories about either fairies, dragons, or Horton and The Who must first be convincing dragons, fairies, Hortons, and Whos. Otherwise you'd quit reading and paint your toenails instead. When a story is crappy, the first refuge of students, fools, and frauds to bleat that it really, really happened. To that particular whine, you can only mutter, I don't care.

Caring is the point. Good art, like a talented lover, is out to steal your heart.

Alice In Wonderland still draws us in and leaves us with the sense that we know Alice the way we know our closest friend or dearest sister. Ditto for Jane Austin's Emma. On the other hand, we remain indifferent to whomever gets bloodily slaughtered in I Spit On Your Grave.

Watching the HBO John Adams mini-series, I've been reminded of all the reasons I love the 18th century. It was the first century to value comfort and privacy, no matter how frostbitten the John Adams cast looks at times. Luckily for us as Americans, it was also a period that valued clear thinking.

Back then, about the arts of any type, people made a useful distinction between fantasy and imagination. The word fantasy described works that were not based on the factual world, and whose events or characters could not possibly exist. Think of: vampires, unicorns, and unkillable teenagers in hockey masks.

The word imagination was reserved for those works, whose people, actions and events seemed possible. So although Alice drops down a hole in pursuit of an enormous rabbit wearing a business suit, and winds up having conversations with eggs and playing cards, the entire story seems utterly logical. And Alice, as a character, assumes her rightful place as one of the most realistic and tough-minded heroines in literature.

This weekend, hearing that I was a writer, my neighbor asked if I wrote those big, fat,
chunky best-sellers, the kind you see in drugstores and airports.
"Nope", I said. "I don't know enough about serial killers or nuclear weapon-systems."

The real truth is that I don't like fantasy. I'll take imagination any day...any day of the ordinary work-a-day week.

The language police...

"I'm really gonna have to be careful around you," a newish friend remarked.
"Why?" I asked, while my mind raced like a hamster wheel. Was I widely known as a snitch? Did people think I worked undercover?
"Hear you're a writer, so I'll try to watch the way I talk," the friend explained. "I'm not that good with grammar. Just sayin'."

Zadie Smith, a great young writer, once told an interviewer that everyone in her neighborhood believed she was a whore. She said she understood why: she spent most of the day wearing nothing but a slip, got money in the mail, and men stopped by her house at odd hours. Somehow, this struck me as similar to my friend's assumption that I'd spot a participle dangling or an infinitive cracked in two. I guess we've both noticed how screwy people can be around writers.

I told my friend I didn't care a rat's ass about grammar. Just sayin'. But I'm not sure she ever believed me.

I like to eavesdrop though, because I'm always trying to get dialog right in my stories. It's really hard to convey the richness of spoken language. I also pay a lot of attention to everyday speech, because it's spoken language that eventually gets written down, then becomes standard usage, gets a bunch of rules baked around it, and is finally codified into something called "correct English".

It's this notion of a fully-fledged, correct and accepted English I wonder about. I'm always bewildered by outraged types who call the station whenever NPR has a "language expert" on: eager to expound on the non-difference between flammable and inflammable, and to tattle on slobs who overuse the passive voice.

Once I lost a contract because the guy reading my proposal said I made too many grammatical mistakes.
"And we can't have that," he told me, although he wouldn't tell me what the mistakes were, what constituted too many, or who we might be.
"Well, grammar is arguable," I said finally, which caused lots of snorting on his end of the line and then, bang, a hang-up .

But I was right too, by God. I'd spent too many years as an editor and English teacher not to know it. I still have in-my-head confrontations with this guy, in which I smash him like a bug. If he hadn't hung up, I'd have said that the various style books, like AP and Chicago, are fat with pages explaining just how arguable grammar can be. It's why most editors settle on something called common usage.

But I understand how deeply satisfying rules of any kind are. They allow us to be right, which is one of life's great joys and don't I know it. It's balm on the soul to believe that bright lines really exist in our arguable, shifting, and arbitrary universe.

And delighting in my own rightness is okay too, when I can remember my self-satisfaction is usually based on something as fictional as Mary Poppins.

Just sayin'.

Desire and longing...

Today is one of those days. It's pouring outside and the sky is the color of old underwear. My house is a wreck and the laundry is piled in a big stinky heap. Everywhere I look, there's something that needs my help and yet, I'm stuck, unable to move forward or backwards. It's a hateful sensation. That means it's a good time to write.

When I absolutely don't want to, it's always a good time to write. Frankly, my feelings of high inspiration are few and far between. What happens most often is that I shamble over to the computer, plop myself down with a groan, click on the file, stare at what I did the day before, and just start writing. Producing something good can happen when I'm sick, heartbroken, beat down, or broke. It doesn't matter what I feel like, except when it does.

In graduate school, I took a sculpture course one semester, thinking that this time I'd be terrific at it. Never mind that I had never shown the least aptitude for making anything three-dimensional. Pottery, jewelry, or sculpture, it didn't matter. My work was predictably rotten. It probably stemmed from a particular blindness when I viewed the world itself. I was blind towards reality's three dimensions. What I saw was one flat transparent plane over another, like images painted on glass. Still, there was a new sculpture teacher and I liked what I saw coming out of his classes. I could just imagined the wonderful stuff I'd make.

Cut to the chase, right to the part where he loathed my work and gave me a C at mid-term. I rightly viewed this as a catastrophe, since C's were always unacceptable in graduate school, plus I'd been awarded a merit scholarship and he was on the awards committee. Immediately, I pictured myself swirling helplessly towards a big sucking drain and realized I needed to do something. Somehow, talentless as I was, I had to make some good sculpture and do it fast.

I spent the next Friday, Saturday, and Sunday in my studio, working day and night, trying out my ideas, which were few and ugly. I remember thinking at the time that having to be creative was a slog: brutal, grueling and tedious. But somehow I came up with three pieces, one of which my teacher acclaimed as wonderful. I was so tired, I couldn't see what he saw and didn't care. I was toast. When he asked if he could have the piece, I nodded and handed my sculpture over wordlessly, glad to see it go.

My grade was saved and I became more cautious, especially about venturing where I didn't belong. But that isn't terribly important.

The big lesson here is that a lack of desire is different from not feeling like it. Paddy Chayefsky wrote, Desire and longing are the whips of God. If those two elements are missing, nothing can conjure them up. Proceeding without desire is perilous. It rots your soul and wastes entire weekends.

And so, at night, when I drag my unwilling carcass over to the manuscript box, and fish out my novel, I certainly don't feel like doing much. At the same time, like a dark subterranean river, within myself I sense the old, persistent excitement. My boredom will disappear quickly enough; the thrill is forever.

A faint twittering sound...

I worked as a copywriter for a software company during those heady delusional years during Clinton's reign and the Internet bubble debacle. Eventually, I wound up reporting to a 26 year old Londoner with a Maori ankle tattoo, a deep sense of entitlement, and a fancy Brit education. One afternoon, I got a call to meet with her and a couple of gear-heads over some scrap of text she wanted rewritten.

Once we were all cosily jammed into a tiny room, our eight knees touching, she read whatever chunk of prose it was, then stopped abruptly, shaded her eyes, and moaned, "Dear God, look what these Americans have done to the language." The gear-heads stayed silent but glanced over at me, the resident wordie, to see if I had anything to say about that. I didn't. The English language didn't needed my heated defense then, if ever. She was a twit, but I didn't need to say so since it was factually obvious. And she was a misinformed twit about the language because there are numberless versions of English--all respectable and recognized.

With the death of William Buckley, several warm-bath tributes have rolled out, indulgently praising his enormous and pedantic vocabulary. I was never a fan. Personally, I thought Buckley was a twit himself. For one thing, he was too hard to understand unless you wanted to sit in front of Crossfire with a dictionary on your lap. When his megawords combined with his very odd accent, what emerged was a kind of linguistic glue that never explained very much.

I'm an unabashed fan of American English. I love its clarity, precision and exactness. For those who sneer at it, seeing a lack of grace in plain speech, I'd point out that American English is far more sensual than British English and, certainly, in terms of poetics, it is realms away from Buckley-speak. The more the syllables, the less concrete a word tends to be, and the further away from all things earthbound. To convey the actual taste and feel of the living world, only simple words will do, words like dirt, tang, shine, wet, rough, silk, crisp, burn, and dark.

Good for what ails ya...

Actually, I started my writing career as a poet, and at quite a young age. Poetry suited me then. Like a lot of young people my conclusions about the world were hazy, most of my knowledge came straight out of contemporary fiction, and my emotions were large and unmanageable. Since I couldn't make much sense of direct experiences, I grabbed at metaphors quite naturally and my fast hot blasts of emotion were ideally suited to lyric poetry's tiny forms.

Back then, my fiction writing was entirely private and I entered into it like a warm bath: usually aching and half-aware. Large, undigested lumps of pain were what sent me scurrying to the typewriter: my father's very early death, my bleak then-marriage, or my long soggy clinical depression. Weirdly, or so it seems to me now, I could only hammer out my stories when I was completely alone in our student-rat apartment. They were done in single night-long bouts, as though I was afraid I wouldn't live to see the next day, and had to finish them instantly, right then. Once I was done writing, I'd read my story with real bewilderment. Why on earth did I say that? I'd wonder. And I'd wonder if what I'd written was even a real story at all, or just an outpouring of childish misery. Then I'd put my manuscript away in a black binder, and forget it utterly. But early on in my fiction writing, once I was done with a story, I realized that this thing, the black beast haunting me, had been magically erased, never to return growling and slavering at my door.

And so I formed the idea, never shared or articulated, that stories could heal me. At the time, and for many years after, I didn't think about that, was happy just to know it and keep on writing, squirreling my typescripts away, content to let them be My Own Private Idaho. Much, much later, when events tossed me into a 12 Step Group, I realized that the bulk of our meetings had to do with telling stories, very focused and pointed stories. And, simultaneously, I became aware that people got well in this place. Then suddenly, I was getting well too, and I began to write fiction for the outside world.

Why do stories have this power? Unless they're naturally good at it, I've discovered most people don't tell stories. They may talk about events, with one occurrence sliding into the next, with no beginning and no end. But that's not story-telling. Once upon a time and The End mark the boundaries of fiction's country. Selecting and arranging the landmarks for that particular land means we have to think about our experience deeply, look closely at what first seemed irrelevant, and pay attention to the travelers who crossed our path. It's this profound attention, I think, that cauterizes our bleeding selves, lets our bones knit, and opens us to life once more.

To my rightfully skeptical reader: the next time you lie awake hating yourself, or someone else, or are just tossing wretchedly, burdened with a foggy sense of discontent, tell a story. Tell yourself a story about whatever has happened, beginning with those most magical words: Once upon a time. When you come to, The End see if your problems and sorrows haven't shrunk or even vanished. Just try it.

Your tiny eyes...

Talked to a friend of mine today and asked accusingly, "Are you reading my blog?"
"Oh, yes," he said, without any hesitation.
"Really?" I asked, amazed and a little disappointed. I'd been looking forward to a good chewy argument about What Old Friends Are Owed After They Keyboard Their Fingers Skinny.
"Sure am," he went on placidly, "and ______ was in town. I gave him your blogspot address too."
"Wow," I said, unable to think of anything else. It's one thing to imagine people reading your stuff, and another thing altogether when you discover people actually are. Weirder still to meet strangers who have been reading your stuff for a good long while.

In Franny and Zooey, J.D. Salinger has a long dialog that's supposed to represent the spiritual awakening of Franny, an aspiring actress who's been sacked out at home with a nervous breakdown. Zooey describes her audience as being a dopey old fat lady, collapsed on the porch in the middle of a sticky summer, whose husband has cancer. Franny, as Zooey tells it, is supposed to do it for the fat lady and Zooey suddenly gets it: all art is aimed piggy humanity. She's a pig too. We are all One etc.

Even as a Salinger fan from way back, I found this audience depiction deeply offensive. At the time, I was in high school writing grim short stories about French casinos,step-fathers, fast little cars and the inevitable fatal wreck, all cribbed from Bonjour Tristesse, considered hot stuff back in the day. Weekly, I sent my grubby efforts off to The Paris Review, which zinged them right back. Nonetheless, even then, I knew I was writing for someone and it wasn't for any dim-bulb old lady.

My ideas about my readers haven't changed much since then. Unsurprisingly, I picture them as being a lot like me as a reader, as people with an itch, people who are looking for something and recognize it when they find it...the aha moment when you go, Yessss. That's how it is. Whatever it may be.

So, you out there. Yes, you. Even though this is a blog about the very internal process of being a writer, I'm still aiming this at you: your curiosity, your loneliness, your weirdness. Whatever itch you have, I hope I can scratch it from time to time. I hope I scratch it right.

While grocery shopping...

A blessing of the free-lance life is grocery shopping during a week-day afternoon. For me, it's Monday, preferably around two or three, when everyone has cleared out and left the stores bare-looking and roomy. Even the muzak seems better. I charge up and down the aisles with my lists and my menus, eagle-eyed for a deal but with enough brain-power to think about other stuff.

Today I thought about short stories.

This week's New Yorker has a story by Hari Kunzru called "Raj, Bohemian". Thing about New Yorker short stories is, you either like them or you don't. I do but as a cautionary note, my taste was formed during the 1950's and 60's when my parents subscribed to The New Yorker and the king of short story writers was John O' Hara. John O'Hara was considered the inventor of an archetypal New Yorker story: a snippet of real life, caught in the mid-point of its happening, and largely defined by the dialog, which was important because of what wasn't said, rather than what was. It's a tricky type of story to write, much harder than it looks. O'Hara never thought he got his due as a writer and died a bitter, nasty old man. Today he's pretty much gone out of time and mind. On the genre front, his type of story is now deader than Elvis and not a minute too soon, from my perspective.

O'Hara was a bridge figure though, between the Saki-type yarn and the much more internal writers of today like Lorrie Moore or Mary Gaitskill. As a writer, although I tried valiantly to imitate them, I never felt comfortable with writers like Shirley Jackson, or even J.D. Salinger. I breathed much more easily reading Virginia Woolfe and Katherine Mansfield even when I didn't understand what they were getting at.

Reading Kunzru's story today, for some reason I was reminded of Shirley Jackson and how much I hated her stuff, even when she was wildly popular. Story magazine, before it folded, was crammed full of Jackson-esque pieces every month, and when I read them I'd feel like weeping out of rage and frustration because, as a writer, I just didn't think like that. I couldn't dream up a scenario out of whole cloth, then drag it ::clackety-clack:: through an armature of plot development to an air-tight conclusion. Or rather, I could and did...well-enough to win an honorable mention in a Story competition. I was awarded a weighty three-volume dictionary and every time I looked at it I felt like a fraud.

Kunzru's story, by the way, is nothing like Shirley Jackson's tidy little tales, and I enjoyed it a lot. What Jackson always left out of her cardboard constructions and what Kunzru puts in, is the sense of a living, breathing internal life...the odd motivations that propel a character through a situation, half aware of what's going on, often not.

Like life.

Nothing to say...

"There's nothing on the Internet this morning. You write anything?" my husband asked.
"Nope," I said.
"How come?"
I shrugged. "Nuthin to say," I told him. This flies in the face of all that terrific advice I used to get in my creative writing classes: There is ALWAYS something you can write about. That's true in the literal sense...see my comments on graphomania in an earlier post...but does the world need to hear my thoughts on bird antics in my back yard, the funny ways of UPS delivery guys, the Albertson's checker who doesn't like cats etc.? Not when I have a sinus-migraine-TMJ headache, as was the case these past few days. I managed a few sentences on an article I need to get off to a magazine and then hobbled back to the couch and to a soothingly moronic movie, one where Everything Works Out In the End.

My father was a wonderful writer and he taught me how to write, for which I'm everlastingly grateful. He also told the most enchanting and funny stories, so I asked him once, "Why don't you write a book?"
"Well, dollface," he said, "I've tried, but I realized I didn't have anything to say."
Since I was nineteen at the time, I took this in silently and didn't probe further. Now I think he meant that he didn't have some grand overarching message...a big honking important something to tell the world. But who does?

It makes me glad I spent so many years as a painter. The great thing about the visual arts is that Big Ideas are few and far between. Once you get past the landscape, the still-life, and the portrait, it's thin pickings on the concept front, even if you count all that spectacular Renaissance religious painting. In fact, the whole Renaissance period is pretty instructive when it comes to big messages. Painters of that period were more consumed with how to paint than what to paint. They took for granted religion-as-subject-matter...it paid the bills. What the artists were hyped up about was mathematical and arial perspective, and a host of other technical ideas. The really good painters understood that it isn't what you do, it's how you do it. Later on that idea got misplaced. Certain 19th century artists, looking backwards to the glory of Leonardo and company, fastened onto The Important Message. Endless historical tableaus were cranked out, showing Napoleon winning a battle, or someone else defying the Turks, with all the human figures looking either stuffed or carved out of soap.

When I became a full-time, no-fooling, out-in-the-open writer, I spent a lot of time floundering in the Big Idea waters. I wrote bales of stuff that never saw light of day and didn't worry about it over much because my years of painting had taught me something. Sometimes, to find an authentic voice, it's necessary to splash around and look like a jerk. But then, it happens: you write something that only you could write. It doesn't happen every day...some days you have a really terrible headache.

Big hulking thing...

It's taken me a long time to learn how to accomplish a big, hulking thing. Had to do it on the fly, and for that I thank my years at Texas Instruments, a company that specialized in the monster project. I also owe it to my years as a ghost writer and the sparkly wisdom that spilled over me from that "Just Do It" Nike campaign. I'll refrain from mumbling a heart-warming list of lessons learned, except to say that the most important one I got was Just do the fucker, okay? Start keyboarding page one, and keep going until dawn or death, whichever comes first. Eat crap and don't wash your hair. Write it clear through, no rewriting, no matter how dopey it seems at the time. If you stop to jigger with a word, fiddle tinily with a sentence, you might as well hang it up. You're going to spend the rest of the night arranging doilies on the Titanic.

I've had a lot of help in doing gigantic things, mostly from completely unreasonable people, who looked at me with the untroubled gaze of the sociopath, and told me I'd do the impossible or...there was no or. Had a boss who only assigned the unfeasible to everyone, not just me. I can't count the number of times I stayed up all night working, trying to convert some fantasy of his into...whatever...my hands clammy and heart pounding because the guy just scared the living hell out of me. But he broke my natural drift into sloth.

Now I've got another biggie, staring down at me like a mastodon. It's a book, actually two of them, that I've worked at in a piecemeal fashion, hammering away when I had the time. But I've got too much done to go on that way. Now I've got to make sense of it, put it together. Just to see if I can.