Seems I can't work on anything else. Every short story I started was pretty much either (a) drunk owl vomit or (b) secretly about one of the characters in the novel. Yes, I realize this is a direct departure from my "I'm totally going to write a bunch of stuff and submit it OMG" perspective of only last week, but you cannot control the timing of a revelation. When the time is right, the time is right. Plus, working on the novel today feels a lot less like pulling teeth than the work I was doing last week, and I'm pretty sure one's "dream job" should only feel like pulling teeth if one dreams of being in dentistry.
In other news, I got some books from Powells today! (Hooray! for online-purchasing!)
Just for the sake of accuracy (because Daniel thinks I'm going to claim to have read it before it won**): Yes, I had heard some reliable mumblings about Jennifer Egan's book A Visit From the Goon Squad many months before it received its recent Pulitzer, but I admit that its winning is what finally pushed me to buy it. We'll see how it turns out. If it falls victim to the same shortcomings as Let The Great World Spin, I will be pretty disappointed (though, in all honesty, not too surprised. This varied-POV narrative style is weirdly over-appreciated and often*** under-performing). I'm currently reading Cloud Atlas*** by David Mitchell--I loved Black Swan Green and have heard amazing things about CA--so it might be a while before I can get to it.
The other two books pictured are Jan Conn's Botero's Beautiful Horses, which is a book of poetry I've been eying for some time now, and Folio One of Hubris Press: Present Tense's new Writers' Journal (one of my best college friends, Jason--who is as close to an older brother as I could ever get--helped start it and has a great short story in there).
*for those of you who don't know what this means: Jamie is the main character in the novel that I've been working on for a few years. But that's all I am at liberty to say on the internet, because I am super paranoid about people stealing my intellectual property and plagiarism is to me like a bath is to your average cat: abhorrent, and physically painful.
**which IS what actually happened with Junot Diaz's win a few years ago. FOR REALS. Side note: if you haven't yet read The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, go do that. Also, I admit this perspective of Daniel's may be slightly prompted by my desire to purchase it before they re-release it with Pulitzer stickers. Heh.
***not always, of course. There are exceptions to every rule. Like Cloud Atlas. What a coincidence!