Proscrastination? Fear?

All my clothing is laundered, the cat has been given his medicine, and the house is stocked with paper towels, flats of water, tissues and fresh vegetables. The house is quiet and it is a cool, slightly foggy day -- my favorite kind.

It is now six months into my grand experiment and I have done one of the big things I set out to do. I have a good draft of my memoir and a plan for what I need to do with it.

So now what? I have a ton of ideas for new projects and one that has stepped forward from the others during my vacation as the thing I want to work on next. I have a few chapters that I started last year so it's not like I'm starting from scratch. But it feels like that anyway. The second part of my grand experiment now begins -- to see what happens when it's just me and my imagination in the room day after day; to see what happens when you get to do something you've said you always wanted to do.

I can't leave my office until I write a thousand words. No trips to the kitchen for tea, no checking of email. I can fiddle with my iPod and use the bathroom but that's it.

I'm so glad I needed to do a blog post before I could start.

Brain Swirl

I arrived home from a two-week trip to France last night. My mind is spinning not just from jetlag but from everything I saw. For my writing project, a highlight was my tour of the Paris Opera (the old one where the Paris Opera Ballet performs) and a trip to the Repetto ballet shoe store around the corner. And even though I satisfied my desire for pastry for (I hope) the next year or so, I popped my head into every fancy patisserie just to give my eyes a treat.

I took about a thousand pictures, more than I have taken on any other trip. I found myself fascinated by how the corners of rooftops met. I now have dozens of photos of grey slate roofs. I also continued my practice of taking pictures of stone walls and pavement. Not much to look at after the fact but great fun in the moment of spotting a possible shot.

I know from past trips that I need to be patient and not expect much of myself with writing for a week or so. It's a good opportunity to reorganize my desk and decide what creative project is next.

Mourning My Playlists

I am officially an iPod slayer. I got my seventh one on Thursday. I've only paid for three -- the first a Mini about four years ago. The battery on that one failed in the first year and Apple replaced it. Then I upgraded to a "regular" iPod and that one in turn failed also. This is now my third 60G iPod -- its brethren both victims of some sort of hard disk failure that led to clicking and skipping during songs.

I thought I had prepared before I went to the Apple store -- I made lists of the songs in my On The Go playlists so I could recreate them, knowing that the rest of my playlists were on my computer and would synch into the new iPod. But when I got home and opened up iTunes (with a recent new version installed) my library was empty. Completely empty. I had to copy all of my music back into iTunes from elsewhere on the computer and in the process all of my playlists disappeared.

I'm still in shock.

I create a playlist for each significant piece of writing I undertake. I spent quite a bit of time on these and build them over the course of weeks. Once I have a decent playlist it is the soundtrack for my work on that piece of writing. I have hours of ballet music that got me through my big dance project; I had a playlist with songs I listened to during college for a potential novel; I had a playlist which was a combination of Sousa marches and mid-career Stevie Wonder for a short story about when I was forced to join a marching band when I was in high school. But now they are all gone.

Tomorrow I leave for a two week vacation to Germany and France. I've been running errands for days, making sure we have enough cat food on hand for the person who is taking care of the cats, printing out driving directions, scanning copies of passports. But what I really want to do is recreate some of my old playlists and make some new ones. I'm not sure I can face a ten hour flight without them.

Preparing for France

In a week I leave for a trip to Europe with my family. I have already started to think about the books I will bring on the plane (first in the pile is "Grant and Twain" by Mark Perry which is about Mark Twain encouraging Ulysses Grant to write his memoirs), but I have mostly daydreamed about the kinds of paper and stationery stores I will find.

I brought back a Moleskine notebook from Paris six years ago, well before they were available on every street corner. I also discovered a store called Marie Papier on Rue Vavin. It was amazing -- smooth creamy papers and leather covered books. All very expensive so I only bought one thing. But I've thought about it for the last six years.

A few years ago my son went on a school trip to France and brought me back a simple, spiral bound graph paper notebook that couldn't have cost more than $5. I was thrilled.

Also, someone has told me that French schoolchildren are required to learn to write using fountain pens and that there are cheap disposable fountain pens available many places. Can't wait to take a look at those.