Walked into Wal-Mart to buy water and beer. Had to reach around doe-eyed shoppers to grab the big $2.17 pint of Heineken. Cradled the water in the other. Bought it, drove home. Sitting at the desk drinking the pint. Mapped out the outline for my next novel and I'm not done with the first, yet. Got a title for the new one, too. Tentative. "Guijarra". This first book, "BTTWLHWBF" is a straightforward kind of thing, at least by my standards. "Guijarra" is a mindfuck. Lynchian shit, with maybe a little Jodorowsky in there. I'm excited to write it and it's actually jazzed me to finish the first one.

I really cannot explain how hard it is to write a novel. When I wrote short stories, that shit was easy. Had a rough draft in a couple weeks, finished product in a month. This has taken forever, but I really love the book and want to see it done.

Anyone who wants to start a Norman writer's workshop, let me know, and we'll talk about it. It's insanely hard to write in a vaccuum.

From Emerson's "Scanners" blog:

"...without a sufficiently lively critical culture to encourage discussion and appreciation (including evaluation), they [in this case, filmmakers] feel their work simply disappears into a vacuum. It can become popular or not, but it doesn't matter unless somebody cares enough to engage with it."*

So, yeah. Back to writing the first book.

*From "Yes, But is it Art?"