Chapter 1.

North America

Chapter 2. Amsterdam

Chapter 3. The Workshop

Chapter 4. Exercise

Chapter 5. Another Fictional Workshop

Chapter 6. Television

Chapter 7. The World

Chapter 8. Itzehoe

Chapter 9. Amsterdam Once More

Chapter 10. An Afternoon

Chapter 11. Untitled

CHAPTER 1. NORTH AMERICA

GALLIA

Gallia writes a book. No, she is not part of the Lost Generation. No, she is not part of the

Bloomsbury crowd. And her name is not Gallia. She drives an SUV. Well, more a sedan who

tries to be an SUV. She is a raging alcoholic, so, we can provide that. There are personas of

writers, of writers that are published. That go on book tours. That answer Q and A-s after

intelligent talks that they give at McNallyJackson on Mott. (Technically, on Prince.)

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Gallia is not like that. She is a failure. She has no luck. Her writing will be lauded posthumously.

Not in her life-time. Two hundred years from now. It is what it is.

She has written some 121 or so words. Every day 2000. That is what writers do, day-in and day-

out. They find the time. They sit at their lap-tops. Gallia has to do the same.

She usually writes in spurts, she manufactures two or three books a 100 000 words per year.

Every year. Since 2007. It is now 2017 and she has not published any of those tomes. They are

online, scribd, issuu. They rot in the cloud, just like yelp-reviews do. Curated Instagram

accounts. Nobody reads her twitter-insights, she is no Donaldi. Her blogs, all five of them, her

vimeo accounts, her you tube accounts. Everything 4 da birdz. Gallia is as good a name as any.

One day she will write the perfect book. The great American novel. You can do that even if you

dont hold a US-passport. Maybe she should be Dutch or Norwegian. They do great in

translation. Swedish crime novels in yellow with little orange-red dots. The best career move for

an artist is death. She has 288 words. It is a lazy Sunday in late August. Tomorrow, she has a

root canal. At two in the afternoon. That will cheer her up.

It is what it is.

A novel has S-E-X in it. Soft porn. If it lacks that, it is not a novel. It is something non-fiction-

shimaguggy. A novel has neologisms in it. A novel is written by ppl with MFAs in Creative

Writing. Upton Sinclair did not have that. He apparently wrote more than one hundred books. He

stood next to his books and the heap of books was taller than his six foot something frame, his

work towered over him.

Gallia likes stories like this. What do writers eat, what do they drink? Which cafes do they

frequent? Are they suicidal or non-suicidal?

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Suicide as career move, instant notoriety.

A tragedy that propels forth a career. You cannot write away in suburbia and try to make it.

There has to be something, fleeing from oppression, that kind of thing. You have to distinguish

yourself from the masses of scribes, of hapless scribes. You have to somehow hop to the other

side, where the rich and famous subside. Btw, you have to know the meaning of subside, its

proper usage. But that in itself is not enough. The right prepositions, the accurate ones, they will

not cement your place in world lit. maybe you should be male, white, have a beard. Maybe you

should be a woman who whines a lot. There are clearly defined trajectories. It does not help to

wear glasses and be a dork. And if you think that bespectacledness and dorkness are the same,

you are way off. Writing is a science. Art is a science. Art is science. Something like that here.

She has to wash her hair, she has an appointment at two. It is one oh nine, fifty-one minutes for

shower, mascara and the like here. Maybe lipstick will do. Mascara is for ppl. who do not write

books. You have to always dress for success. Painted faces do not go with intellectualness. An

intellectual being never ever wears make-up. These are ironclad rules. Gallia knows here. And

stop and spellcheck, save in the cloud.

DETLEF

Detlef likes New York. It is the city that will make him famous. He is an artist and artists

flourish in the city. His off-off Broadway piece will meander to midtown. At this point it

meandered to Hoboken, not even Newark, not even Jersey City.

It is what it is.

Sinatra left Hoboken and Detlef performs on the street. In which ever city gives him shelter. He

is young or he pretends to be young. He was born old, but who would know looking at him?

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Somebody gave him the name Detlef, the kiss of death for any field. You cannot make it

anywhere on this planet with a name like this. Too Teutonic for its own good, too archaic. Do

you write this with an F or a V? It is not the equivalent of a Mariah, there the H adds value. You

cannot add value to a name like Detlef. Some things are impossible. What is in a name?

Playwright, huh. He should pen novels or poems. Or write an op-ed piece for the Times.

Something, anything. A piece for the Brooklyn Rail. A happy yelp-review. This Mc Donalds is

the best, the best, I tell yer. The woman to the right is hot, the one in the drive-thru is everything

but.

Detlef. Ok, so his name is not Detlef, a pseudonym and the worst pseudonym on this planet.

Detlef, huh.

He goes down to the Whole Foods. Has kombucha, though it basically tastes disgusting. He

drinks it on the second floor. Looks down on Houston. It is getting late, dark. He hates New

York, the city that will eat you alive. This is what the woman said to George Costanza. He

watches Seinfeld, he watches Friends. He watched King of Queens and Big Bang Theory. This is

not how you become a playwright. You have to read Chapter Two. He has it all wrong, he does it

all wrong. The kombucha tastes disgusting. A beer would be better but he has to quit. Cold

turkey. Some things have to be done. He and alcohol, they cannot co-exist. He will end up in the

gutter, he is that kind of personality. You cannot choose your genes.

It is what it is.

MANDANA

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Mandana is slightly pretty. Her name is prettier than she is. She is way too fat. She is way too fat

since age five. the other girls in Gisela Grimms ballet class had skinnier wrists. And she was not

even in ballet, maybe pre-ballet. Or gymnastics, anyways, she left before the big performance.

She is an adult now. Well, so they say. She will never ever be an adult, but, shh, nobody need to

know here.

ANETTE

She watches Columbo on the telly. She types up stuff.

ANTHRUH

She is in Starbucks. That is where you find her on Monday mornings. Cars park outside,

Maseratis, Ferraris. Everybody wants a cuppa joe. You can come back after three in the

afternoon and have a Frappuccino. Not for free, mind you, nope, but it is the lump sum of three

bucks here in this very establishment. Not a bargain at all. Except if you have this over-sized

dollop of cream on top. The one that is spirally like a staircase in a bell tower. Antruh thinks

about that, funny lil metaphors that do not make much sense at all. She reads these days, one

book per day. If she can manage it, that is the goal. Writers and their flowery languages. She too

is a writer, not a poet, nope, it is the novel form for her. She packs the words, heaps them onto

the page. Her stories are wild. Unbelievable. Or too blah. She has a funny name that she just

made up.

GEORGIA

Writing is her calling. Or something. She could be part of a creative writing workshop. But that

is not her m.o. She is the go into the attic kind of writer. The one that toils in solitude. The

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construction worker who fixes the lighthouse on the desolate piece of land that burgeons out into

the fjord. She cannot handle criticism. She writes in utter isolation, then she saves it all and sends

it out to New York City. In the city someone will read this, on the subway, on the L-train, out of

Bedford Station. By First Avenue, by Third Avenue. The assistant to the newly minted lit agent

should miss her proverbial stop. Once she is on Sixth Ave, she will look up and mutter: This is

genius.

Georgia has dreams, of fame of fortune. It keeps her going, it makes her wake up every morn to

go and push down squares on the typewriter.

ARSTA

It is the wrong name, even for a name that is made-up. Arsta, what does that even mean? A

flower, yup, why not. There are flowers with the funniest of names. A nom de plume. For a

roman a clef. Why is the lingo apropos writing, penning, so gauche, so French here.

Arsta heaps on stories, scenes of different people who write. Persons who type up stuff. They are

not related, they do not know each other. They live all over the world, on five continents. Not in

Antarctica though. Just like the online community of the National Novel writers, the ones that

type feverishly every November since 1999.

Arsta lives a very small life, but she reads Moby Dick and The Jungle online. She just bought

three books that cost her sixty-six bucks. She still can give them back and got her money back.

But maybe she likes the smell of old books, maybe she too is a bibliophile. If you wait long

enough. These books will be old and then they have that kind of smell here. She can give them to

the used bookstore after. Or the take a book leave a book place on the third floor in the A

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building on the community college on forty-ninth. Arsta. A funny name for a poet. A flower,

maybe.

TAHI

She is Finnish. Finnish like Rava in Seinfeld. She has too dark hair for a person from

Scandinavia. Short and dark. She never laughs, just like Rava. Watching TV makes yer invent

people. The persons on the telly are made-up and the figures that the writer makes up are even

more made-up. Made -up once removed. They lack reality, because who needs reality anyways?

That is why we drink, to forget. She does not drink anymore and it is killing her inside. The lack

of drinks that drives yer crazy here. She will warm up the food in the fridge. Swedish meatballs

in beige sauce. It is good, it is frozen. Frozen food rocks. It is what writers in their peejays and

the t-shirts with holes eat. Writers that live in a vacuum, go to the gym and come back. They toil

in isolation until they are certifiable insane. It comes with the territory solitude does that to a

person. Snap out of it. There is a balance between mental incongruity and insanity, the fine line,

yup, that one. She misuses the words, English is a toughy. She could use German for that matter,

but those days are over. Nowadays it is merely English, which has its advantages. A bigger

market, though a shrinking market what with people and their blogs, their yelps, their Instagram-

accounts, their Vimeo vids. People tell their stories online, at the corner of film and words, film

and book. Image and word.

Well, she is not Finnish, but we can always pretend here.

Imagination can give you wings. The school opposite of ziggys apartment, the sentences

proclaiming, by reading you can travel to worlds far away, meet people you will never see. Just

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open a book and you are immersed in other worlds, you fly to places far away. You live in

nonreality and that makes your real life better, richer. Or something like that.

1975 words, it is all good here, all good here.

BOB

Bob likes Thai food. It is the name of a restaurant in vancity, at the corner of main and tenth.

Bob and Thai, aha. If Bob likes it, you will too. Bob cannot be wrong here. On the telly, Friends,

the one with naked chicks. Or Chandler saying something about naked chicks. Now the theme

song, who are these people that dance in a fountain? With hats on their heads.

2057 words here.

DIANE

CHAPTER 2. AMSTERDAM

Living in Holland. To write. To pen a masterpiece. She needs toothpaste. She is jet lagged.

Maybe this was not such a good idea. She is homesick. Three months in Amsterdam. She

calculates how much this will cost her. She will go thru her savings, well, thru half of them. A

trust fund baby. Well, she is not, but she likes to pretend that she is. If you want to be part of the

canon of world lit, you have to be good at pretending. All the extra time to walk thru the streets

of this city and avoiding bikes, trying not to be run over by them. Bikes rule the streets in this

city. It is marvelous, the greatest city on earth. She will walk by the bookstores, peer into the

windows. Scriveners. The bookstores here are different from anywhere else on this planet.

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She will have rose and beer, espresso verkeerd, espresso doppio. French fries with mayo in a red

and white paper bag. She will walk by the palace. Take trips to Rotterdam, to Leiden. To

Antwerp, Bruges. She will not check her email. Amsterdam is the bomb. People speak Dutch and

she does not understand their sing song. Men look like Rem Koolhaas. This is Amsterdam for

yer. She feels so alone and it is a good feel. Only in this city here.

Even if nobody will foot the bill for publishing this, she still will have had one hundred great

days. It is late August in Amsterdam, what more can you want. To see Amsterdam and die. It is

nice to glorify a city, a place. Nothing is wrong here, this is the perfect place on the planet. The

honeymoon will be over in three months, but that is when she will be in Schiphol and book the

KLM flight. She will have the pear pastry in terminal seven.

She will go back to New York City and then to Vancouver. Her adventure will be over, but she

will have written one hundred thousand words.

She read a lot, Moby Dick and Rabbit Run. She studied how novels are constructed. She has

what it takes to pen a novel. She has to stay positive. Her words have to be squeaky clean, no

murder, no deaths. Just rosy rosy happiness. A novel without disaster. Nothing that can be made

into a movie. There are strict rules about what she will do and what not. She has to adhere to her

principles, stick to them.

Amsterdam, the city where you write here.

THE HAGUE

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A coffee shop is a coffee shop. Even if you do not know anybody in this city. You can still sip in

the corner, watch people, inside here and walking by on the outside on the street. You can feel

lonely or happy that you are left alone. You can take out your pad and scribble notes. She will be

a famous writer. The new Melville. She can be anything she wants to. There are no frontiers in

Walter Mitty-land.

NEW YORK

Fashion week is near. She left Amsterdam, mainly because she was bored. She feels more at

home in this city here. She speaks the language. She has money to burn and it is more fun in this

city. In the end, she will have a novel. Writing in coffee shops in Chelsea. It is better for writers

than anywhere else. Outside. People on Eighth. It is that weird time between day and night.

Closing time is creeping near. She has no plot for her novel but that is fine. It is what it is. Eight

million in this city who want to make it. She is one of them. Or something like that, something of

that kind. Her language is not precise, it never is. It is hit or miss with words.

She could get a haircut. Dye her hair. Put night cream on her wrinkles. All these things are fun.

Ground her. The hygienical routines. Showers, gym. The daily things we do in this city.

She is a writer, she must be. She told David Sedaris that she is a writer. If you say it often

enough, you will make it. You will believe it and people will believe it. You do not need a

certificate. You need a publishing contract but that will come eventually. She capitalizes the first

letter of each sentence and ends each and every sentence with a full stop. What more do you

want? Meaning, ah, that will fall into place, like magic.

ICELAND

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Reykjavik, kofitar. Words penned in Iceland are more fascinating, exotic, interesting. They

smack of Bjoerk. She likes it here because what is not to like. Here you can write better, your

words will go farther. She will never eke out a plot, she might just as well run with it. The

plotless writer. The one that scoffs at plots. No Romeo, no Juliet. No love stories. Travelling is

where it is at, the different places on this planet. In 2017. You write up words, you type, you

scribble. You document your life.

She writes in Calibri body. 11.

SEATTLE

Back in the US of A. Having a cuppa joe. The aromatic whiff. Outside people in hats on the

street.

HAMBURG

Too much boozing.

PARIS

Everybody speaks French. She does not speak the language. She has 2955 words, she weighs 195

lbs. The numbers do not add up. They are never ever alright.

She will have some 3000 words, she needs so many more. Once she is at 100 000, she will wrap

it up and call it a novel. Come hell or high water.

She will be book touring. The publisher will pay for the hotels on the road.

She will eat in different places. All on company expense. One of the big five has to publish this,

gotta. Better.

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Paris has been good to writers. Though in a different century, arguably. Maybe Zurich would do

her words better. You know, Dada et. al. Once again, wrong century.

ITZEHOE

The small city. The small place. Rain outside. 3078 words.

CHAPTER 3. THE WORKSHOP

1.

Women sitting around a kitchen table and workshopping their creative writings. Rose in

wineglasses, laughter. It seems very unprofessional, a gossip fest. This is suburbia, definitely.

Long Island, East Bay. Pick any place outside of the city. These are not the texts that will make

it. A futile endeavor. No one will publish this stuff.

Gallia is a writer. But she is somewhere lost on the outskirts of serious writing. It is not even the

grammar or the words she chooses. It is something else that produces the glass ceiling. It is what

art school did to her painting. The process of over thinking. The trivializing of writing. The wine

is good, the writing sucks. She will vacuum the floor after everybody left.

2.

Gallia woke up at five and went to the coffee house. The policemen were all sitting in the back of

the store, she counted, there were more women than men. The woman behind the counter lets

Gallia wait, she does not have light brew as of yet, only dark. She actually forgot about Gallia,

she has to be reminded. Finally, it is coffee time, the right kind of brew. Outside of the coffee

house, the city is wakening up. She takes the car to the mall, parks there and takes the train to

downtown, to the gym. She tells herself that this is good for writing a book, the motioning thru

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the city. The staring at other peoples faces. She still goes to another coffee place, this one is in

downtown and it is busy. It usually has tons of tourists, it is the United Nations of coffee houses.

Gallia thinks about workshops, writing workshops. They might be better for a writer than the

moving thru the city, there has to be a story arc, so they say. Something with a beginning and an

end, something that makes sense. A narrative, drama, surprise, the like. A novel is not an episode

of THE PRICE IS RIGHT, a novel is different. It is a story that makes sense, that is not all over

the place.

Downtown is accommodating, it always is. You meander thru the streets, with stops in all the

nice hotels en route. Until you finally make it to the gym. Wow, our weight is the same as the

day before, no wait, we lost some 400 grams or so. Four tenths of a pound. Four times 45, 200

grams. The fifth of a kilogram. She is not good with calculating this, but she knows that she

weighs less than the day before. The downward spiral is good weightwise. You want to lose the

extra poundage.

She might write about bookstores, places where the final products are sold. She is fashioning

different characters and different locales. It all is fragmented; the only constant is the writer

herself. The one with the funny name. Gallia? What language could that be? It has an A at the

end, so it might be the name of a woman. A female writer. She ponders, what is the percentage

of female writers in the world? The greats are all guys, the lesser ones are gals. Something is

amiss. Do women not have as many stories to tell? Are they too verbose originally and gap so

much that they lose their energy to type it all up?

She has to think about that, research different items. Wikipedia, here we come.

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On the telly, it is THE PRICE IS RIGHT. It is nine ten in the morning in late August. She will

have a dentist appointment later in the day here. She is tired already, waking up at five in the

morn does that to yer. You are spent at nine in the ey em.

3.

Maybe, she should start a writing group. She is not that kind of person, not the one, that makes

things happen. She is definitely not an organizer. She knows what she is not, but she is not quite

sure what she actually is. She documents the journey, the literal one. Her trips thru the world.

Her sojourns between writing spurts. Every day, each and every one, there should be some two

thousand words. We can cut out words at a later time. Editing, curating. Making it better.

Polishing.

Writing group and wine. Reading group and wine. Book group and wine. Maybe we should cut

out the booze. Liquoring uo does not make for a coherent story. It is a myth that writers are fnd

of hard liquor. It has to be.

4.

She has 3853 words.

5.

3857.

CHAPTER 4. EXERCISE

She goes a lot to the gym. Not so much to use the stationary bike or the weights. It is more a

place where one can weigh oneself. Keep tabs on your weight. There was a time when she would

go down to the gym in downtown, the one next to the nice hotel, the one where everybody looks

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like a fashion model. The young gym. She would weigh herself and then come home and write it

down on a letter sized paper. Every day, there was a new letter sized paper. After three months,

she had a heap of 90 pages. She could follow her weightloss. It was quite a production but it

worked. She lost weight.

She has 3990 words. Everything is measured. The words we write, the kilograms we have.

Height weight age. Everything has to counted. What time it is, what date it is. How many more

days on this planet. A preoccupation with numbers. GPA. Money in the bank. How many dollar

signs. Numbers numbers numbers. The temperature of your coffee.

Her writing sucks. An exercise in futility. Stream of conscience is not a good thing.

Her writing has to be streamlined. Orderly writing.

Anyhoo, on the telly, it is this cooking show THE CHEW. It is nice, yup, whatev.

It is later in the day now. The dental appointment is over. One could write about that. But it is

basically irrelevant. On the telly, a sitcom. Laugh tracks. Amy says to Raj something about a

wine tasting on skid row. Penny has a sip of wine. After saying something about a room in a Best

Western and ending up there with a guy named Luther. Now Sheldon and the others in a high

school. Now the girls in the car.

She had ice cream from that place near the dentist. And two pieces of cake from the Chinese

bakery. Nothing to do with exercise which is the title of this very chapter. After the dentist you

have to eat. And we are standing at 4212 words here.

Somehow this became autobiographical. Which does not really fly. Gallia is merely the

protagonist of this novel. A woman who writes a book. Seems that is all we need to know here.

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Her life overlaps with the life of the author of these words but not really. Updike said that there

are similarities between him and Harry Rabbit Angstrom, but there are definitely differences.

A fictional character is just that, a made-up person that does not exist in reality.

There are courses that teach you how to construct a novel. The premise being that you can teach

that which is highly debatable. Writing is something you learn by doing. Or you do not learn it.

Practice makes perfect. There are no short cuts.

4338 words.

Moby Dick has a lot of chapters. Each has a one-word-title that might or might not correspond to

the text. The titles seem kind of random. Apparently that is ok, it is just a stylistic tool.

4376 words.

A thousand words per chapter. That sounds about ok.

4388 words.

CHAPTER 5. ANOTHER FICTIONAL WORKSHOP

The group and their workshop. Five women, five rising stars. It will not happen, none of them is

that good a wordsmith. There are obvious rivalries. There are subtle ones, hardly noticeable ones.

Everybody tries to outdo the other. They are helping each other up or suppressing the creative

spirit. Art is very fickle. There is no right, there is no wrong. Bullshit. There are very obvious

wrongs, very obvious rights.

The wine is good, citrussy. It costs just as much as the other wines, but it is way more aromatic.

The name of it is white wine, not chardonnay, not sauvignon blanc. A punch of white wines. It is

very good.

16
Wine does not go with workshopping texts. It makes the mind wander, lose focus.

Gallia is too old to make it in the world of words. You have to write when you are young, the

break-out-novel, the debut. Writing when you are old and decrepit, well, good luck with that.

She goes for a walk. Leaves the others to do the workshopping. She is not the hostess, so she can

do that.

The neighborhood is boring. Houses. Tree-lined streets. Culs de sac. John Cheever would love it.

A city is better to a writer. An urban environment. Shops, trains. More to see. Motion, dynamic.

Ever changing sights.

No repetition.

If you do not have a good text to start, not a strong enough one, all the workshopping in the

world cannot salvage the words. You either have it or you dont.

CHAPTER 6. TELEVISION

5:52 PM. A Tuesday in late August. On the telly, the flood in Houston. Hurricane Harvey and

devastation. Nothing good on the news. Like in the Beatles song. If it is happy stuff, it is not

news-worthy. Outside greenery. Sunshine. A nice day. Nice weather. This is not Texas.

One can change what is going on on the screen. Something with laugh tracks.

4729 words. This is her fourth day of writing. If she keeps this up, she will be finished come

November.

Painting the image of some woman named Gallia. Age, hair color. Eye color. Weight, height. \

17
On the telly, Chris Cuomo. CNN. It is a new program, Cuomo Primetime. He is giving Anderson

Cooper 360 a run for its money. The branding of journalists.

She is at the end of her writing. There is no story, no plot. Nothing ventured nothing conquered.

The abyss of wordlessness. Forget story, there is not even something to describe in here in the

room with the telly. A talking head, one like all the others. Sometimes there is a commercial to

liven this up.

It is Don Lemon, David Gergen and another guy. Usually these talk about politics, now they talk

about Hurricane Harvey.

The Gallia woman. What to say on her?

We officially stop this. Gallia writes a book. This is the tentative title. And this is all we have

here. There were other writers too, in the beginning. Other locales. Writing is so weird. An

exercise in futility.

What about the Detlef guy? We should flesh him out. There is something ah so boring about

making up people. Characters in a play. What about reality. Maybe author here is just not cut out

for creating fiction, for spinning a tall yarn. Maybe non-fiction is the way to go.

4965 words. So next to 5000. Twenty times this and we have a book.

A story about bistros and cheese. Something French. Romance. Provence. Love. Music. Wine. A

book like a walk thru the mall. Something light. Light fair. Just saying.

Coffee, coffee houses. Stuff that is called espresso.

We are losing it here, that happens when you are willing yourself to be a writer. You cannot will

art, poetry, poesie. It is impossible. You have to be in the mood. Apparently. Nah, what do we

18
care here, we just yap along. It is getting late and the wordcount stands at 5061. Tomorrow is

another day for writing.

CHAPTER 7. THE WORLD

And what to write about now? Apparently there is a novel named Gallia, and there is a goddess

named Gallia. So, there is a precedence for the name.

The title of the chapter is THE WORLD. Now we somehow have to fix this, there has to be a

correlation between title and contents. Hmm, writing is kind of tough here.

Why would anybody in her right mind choose to write a book? It is boring, it is tedious. It does

not pay the rent. It is a weird hobby, pushing words into some machine.

The Novocain is wearing off. Or whatever the anesthetic was that she got at the dentist.

This is the nicest weather for a kayaking trip. Which is something she would never do.

Wilderness, nah. We prefer the concrete jungle here.

We had seven chapters in nineteen pages. Somehow this sounds so wrong here.

Maybe we should get back to the workshop with wine. It somehow sounds fetching. Or we can

wait for tomorrow morning and watch the people on the bus. Let us call it a day and watch King

of Queens. We could need a laugh here.

5273 words.

On the telly, one of these court shows. One can type up stuff while listening in. which might be

detrimental to both writing and listening. Multitasking just means that you are doing several

tasks subpar.

19
Now an ad for an insurance company, the one that has the statue of liberty on its logo.

It is a dazy dizzy day. There is an air quality warning in place. August thirty. She had her coffee

and now it is all about typing up some two thousand words. That is the plot, the woman who

types. Enough of a plot. A person who writes a book. Why would anybody do that, scribble up

words that document her days. All the minutia. Futile endeavor. 5395 words here.

A writing workshop. She could describe that once more. Socializing while working.

Once more, we are out of words. The women on the telly. There is something to describe.

Greenery outside. The coffee house in the morn. That is about it. There is nothing more to

describe here. How to spin a yarn? Or not spin a yarn.

How will she ever go on a book tour for this? Who will foot the bill for this? How does

publishing even work?

She should do some research. The most fascinating thing she read recently was this dissertation

by a woman in Germany about author photos. The ones that are used on the backs of books.

What they convey or do not. Interesting. Publishing as one big marketing scheme. The marketing

of words. Without visuals. Sans images. A mere author image will do.

She has 5539 words. We need some 1500 words more to finish up the daily allotment.

CHAPTER 8. ITZEHOE

The small city outside of Hamburg. She writes in the coffee house on the Bahnhofstrasse,

number 20. It is rainy outside.

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It is such a weird place to write a book. Everything is so surreal. Dislocation makes for good

words, for the right kind of words. You are in the wrong place, you write the right kind of words.

Funny, how this works. Well, at least the rain is as rain should be. Water pouring down.

She will order the steak with gravy and mushrooms and potato mush. Peas. She will look out at

the rain. She will eventually take the train back to Hamburg, will stay the night in the hotel on

the Esplanade. She will feel weird and dislocated. The right kind of feel for the fashioning of the

great big novel. There is nothing else to do but write. All your energy goes into the task at hand

here.

Her chaptering is weird. Lots of chapters. Lots and lots of them.

There are ways to do this. Tons of ways. The main problem is that you are kind of competing

with film. Images on a screen. They are more concise than words. Words can be misinterpreted.

Or the reader can visualize stuff in certain ways. Each reader will see it differently.

She does not know much about literary criticism. Literary theory. It does not even matter in the

big picture of things. She just has to write, she is like a bricklayer, the words being the bricks.

One word after the next. Do not look to the right and do not look to the left. Just do your thing.

The steak arrives. The woman smiles. HIER. Bitte, Danke. And the rain is coming down on the

city.

CHAPTER 9. AMSTERDAM ONCE MORE

The woman looks out the window. There are bikes, bikes. A parking garage full of bikes. Three

stories.

This is Amsterdam for yer.

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She is jet-lagged, the flight outta JFK.

She has a tooth brush but no tooth paste. She will join the Thursday afternoon crowds in the city

until she will come upon a drugstore.

She will stay in this city for three months.

She feels dazed.

Her writing is no good.

She is no writer.

CHAPTER 10. AN AFTERNOON

The telly and Big Bang. Laugh tracks.

Outside, a mulmy day. August 30. She could go out for a walk, to the donut place. Pick up a

Canadian Maple. She could read the rest of Moby Dick. The 500 pages that are left. She is so

into reading these days. There are 13 books, one on the other on the table in the other room. She

has read more. Online. She has gotten rid of books. She put the one on the shelf outside of the

Used Books store in the side street near Union Square.

There are so many books to read. She read Updike and Emma Straub. Upton Sinclair and

Melville. She can read forever. Instead of writing this up. Her stuff will not be published

anyways. It is not good enough. There are better texts, better words.

She likes bookstores. Funny retail places that cater to an archaic profession. Why read when you

can see the movie? Writing is dead, reading is dead. Long live books.

Outside, the greenery is becoming pale here.

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She has ten chapters in ten pages. Her chapters have to be longer. You cannot have too many

chapters. One hundred chapters in a book, unheard of. Though you can Wikipedia it. Maybe

there is a multi-chapter version of a novel. Too many of em.

On the telly, Sheldon Cooper.

She feels like red wine. They have that in the store on West Boulevard. It is a mere short walk

but the shopkeeper gives her funny looks. If you are female and get wine too often, you fill a

certain stereo type. A woman with money to burn. Burn it on booze. It is not sexy. It is Betty

Ford. It is something you do with a strand of pearls.

She likes to make up stuff on drinking. It is way better than doing the real thing here. Boozing as

a state of mind. Not as a career.

She is not quite sure what she is saying. Her words are always a tad off. Open to interpretation.

She used to write very precise, very accurate. You cannot do that. There has to be some sort of

poetic mystique.

CHAPTER 11. UNTITLED

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