It’s a funny day. The fog gathered around my house this morning, turning everything gray and soft. Now the sun has broken through, but inside my head it still feels gray and soft. I’m in a different library, in the teen room, surrounded by the books that formed me. When I was a child, my father mostly read Scientific American and The New Yorker, and my mother read books about healthy diets and finances and thing. I didn’t know there were adult novels when I was little–though I was delighted to learn that there were.

What are the stories burning inside you? What are the books you desperately want to read that do not exist?

I put an ad on Craigslist for a babysitter and received, along with a passel of nice replies, the following:

“Who gave you the right to have kids? Under Gods law only a man and a women can have kids/raise kids, poor kids what example r u setting foe their future ? In school for instance, ohh yes I have 2 moms, right? They are going to ask, where is your father. Find God get them a real father, meaning! Get a man stop this sin, God made the woman for the man to rule this earth not the sick and depravation you are causing. Find God, you still have time to repent”

My own righteousness lies all in the practice of grammar, I suppose. Perhaps school is to grammar as church is to god. There are lots of people who go to school and learn nothing about grammar. There are lots of people who go to school everyday, but who do not care about grammar one little bit. On the other hand, there are people who forget that all human languages have grammar; school is not required for grammar to flourish. We humans develop systems for understanding each other whenever we gather together.

This is what I have to say to the man who is concerned about the depravation I am causing.

A long time ago, before I knew her, I took a class with Eileen Myles, and she had us watch an old movie with the sound turned off and to write as we watched. We were narrating the movie, essentially. Similarly, I could list off for you the titles of some of the books around me, and you could pick one and write your own book from it, or a short story at least. Angie listens to music when she writes–all kinds of music. I listen to interviews with writers while I clean the kitchen. My point, however, out of the soft gray fog of my brain (oh and I was leafing through Faulkner just now, which didn’t help), is that sometimes having two tracks running–the one you are imbibing and the one you are creating–can move you in different directions than just the silence of your own mind.

How does it feel to be hated?

Unfriendly, to be sure.

I was leafing through Light in August to see if I could map Aristotle’s incline across it. For example: There are 507 pages in the Vintage paperback edition I am holding, the one with the gold and burnt umber cover with a picture of a road on it. This one also has a sticker with a list of dates stamped and penned in (library book) and a Summer 2005 Selection sticker from Oprah’s Book Club (Faulkner being less able to object that the arrogant living writer who’d rejected her attentions). In any case, the midpoint of a 507 page novel should fall somewhere around page 254. Chapter 12 begins on 256 with the line, “In this way the second phase began.”

There is a mathematics to literature as there is to music.

I just finished reading A Spot of Bother, by Mark Haddon, who wrote The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time. I wrote in my newsletter tip about his excellent use of sensate detail. The whole books was visual; in fact, I would go so far as to say that it was nearly a film. Haddon has a background in writing film, so that may explain it. It was a funny and fast read–much like watching a romantic comedy with, say, Hugh Grant. (He could play the gay son, I think, or the sister’s fiance if he wanted to step out of type.) Omniscient narration with short chapters that spun among the main characters.

Haddon did a great job of pushing the story as far as it could go without becoming science-fiction or horror or something. Within its genre, I mean, he really let things happen and get bad and then worse and then . . . because it is a romantic comedy . . . better at long last.

Forgive this rambling little blog entry this morning. It is time to go retrieve the boys from the park and the babysitter and go have lunch. I leave you with five ideas for planning your novel, in case you, too, are going to start writing one in the next three or four days:

1) Write out everything you know about the book.

2) Write out everything you do not know about the book.

3) Make a list of twenty concrete images, scenes, people, moments that you want to include.

4) If you are stuck on a point, write out five different ways to solve it.

5) Ask yourself what you believe: what truths do you hold to be self-evident? Make a story up about that. Be sure you put that contrary character in there–the one who things that your best, most human self is a deprivation before god.

I am on vacation. It’s a working vacation, in that I brought the kids and their attendant need to eat and have their diapers changed and go places to play, and I brought my computer and the online course I am teaching and my blog and everything else that can now e-follow me wherever I go. But still, this afternoon Angie and I left the kids with Grandpa and Nana and went into town to have a milkshake and hang out in the bookstore, Copperfields, which happens to be wonderful. And I have spent the past two mornings in a park on Valentine’s Street in Sebastopol, meeting conversational, open-minded, intelligent mothers (and a few fathers)  and their charges and the occasional friendly dog.

Maybe it’s because Sebastopol is a small town, but being in the park here is like being at a brunch. You really talk to people. Everyone who comes into the park smiles at you. There is a strong sense that we are all here together. Not just co-existing as we pass each other in our busy lives, but sharing an experience together.

Being at a park in Berkeley–especially Totland–is more like being at a dance club. There’s a lot going on–movement, frenzy, action–and you may smile at someone and then you may not smile at someone else and you might dance by someone and talk to another person and even buy a drink for a third, but most of the people there are involved with their own groups and it’s too loud to talk for long or to everybody.

Maybe it’s the way this Valentine park is designed. Maybe it’s the slightly lower cost of living here. Maybe it’s just my being on vacation, being relaxed. I loved it, whatever it was.

Here’s the thing: I’ve been a little overwhelmed. Launching an online course, working with editing clients, getting ready to write a novel next month, taking care of my little fellows, figuring out childcare options, watching my insufficient retirement resources (which, honestly, I am using now instead of when I am old, when I fully expect to be working until I die) plummet in quantity, dealing with trying to get married before the out-of-state Mormons yank my right to do so away, trying to get to picture-lock on my short film so it can be finished and sent out into the world, shoring up my old and falling apart house, not to mention cleaning it . . . I don’t know . . . I’m feeling tired.

Chai lattes help. Showers help. Vacations help. Grandparents help a lot. But I have again been reminded of the root of all my misery. I haven’t been reading novels.

I read The New Yorker, and I read some blogs, and I read Egri and this and that from my piles, but for some reason, I read novels in spats. I’ll read four in a couple of weeks and then go back to The New Yorker. Today, I picked up a couple of volumes at Copperfield’s, and just now, I cracked one, and suddenly . . . I relaxed.

It’s as if I trained, as a child, to lead these other lives, in secret gardens and dumb waiters, in attics and at Paddington Station and in Milwaukee and on the prairie and inside the walls of houses, with spools for tables and buttons for platters*. I learned to expect complications and growth and some resolution. The tangled threads of my own life, with its confusion of themes and uneven character arcs, bewilder the reader I am, first and foremost.

Entering the world of a book, the voice of the narrator capturing my attention, the story drawing itself across my imagination, makes everything feel right again. In a book, I know what to do, the right kind of attention to pay. An ardor rises up in me, a feeling of connecting to life itself, a life full (but not reeking) of meaning. Attending to it is pleasurable and worthwhile and productive.

I suppose that I am at my best as a writer when I feel that way about the actual world itself, when I can peruse the vegetables at the market with the same passion for sensate detail and follow the chaos at the playground with the same curiosity about humanity, believing that in time, it will all be ordered into a thing of beauty and character, into a story. And that surely I will be the one to do it.

*The first three people to name the greatest number of the books alluded to in this list,  will win free, transferable tuition to my Gathering Your Materials course. To enter, email me the list and your name and contact information by Oct. 20th Thanks.

First, let me admit that I have blithely typed that title in, as if I had advice to dispense, but in fact, I have questions. Slightly desperate questions. But let me start somewhere else.

Yesterday afternoon, I was grumpy. We were trying to find sound equipment for some interviews I am doing, and as usual, we also wanted to equipment to multi-task for several other projects, actual and fantasy. And we wanted it to be very, very inexpensive. But of excellent quality.

The boys, of course, just wanted to play. No amount of singing “Old MacDonald Had a Farm” could convince them that driving around in their carseats had anything to do with the kind of fun they were after.

The guy at the audio place (which we chose because it shares the name of one of our sons) was absolutely humorless. It is a rare person who can be around Angie and not crack a smile. And here was Angie with Charlie on her back, dancing around and asking sincere, well-researched questions about audio equipment with humorous asides. No smile. No equipment, either. Just a glass counter, a long hallway, and this guy.

We left. Now it was too late to go to Radio Shack or anywhere else, because the park had risen forcefully to the top of the agenda. So off we went, to Totland, our home away from home. At Totland, we found Amanda and Vivian playing. We met Amanda and Matt in our birth class for Leo, when Amanda was pregnant with Vivian. Vivian can talk and give kisses–which the boys blushingly appreciated. Amanda offered us the loan of Matt’s microphone, which we were able to pick up that very evening, right after we picked up our near weekly Cheeseboard pizza. (Review of Pizza: YUM.)

Right then, while we were ending up with a very, very inexpensive, high quality microphone that we could aquire in the park (the boys approved of that), a big boy came along the cement path “road” at Totland in a large blue jeep decorated with a young punks dot com sticker. Charlie was in his own plastic orange car, but he was focused on honking and steering, and wasn’t actually moving anywhere. Leo was pushing a sort of lawn-mower toy with the little balls inside a plastic window that pop. It was a toy that made me wonder if we could get some sort of vacuum cleaner that he could push around the house like that . . . I got up to steer Charlie to the side of the road and direct Leo over next to Mama, and the dad of the big boy in the jeep said something about how it was hard to get anywhere.

“It’s the journey, not the destination,” I said. I live in Berkeley; these kinds of cliches passed off as insight are exected of me. Nonetheless, as I sat back down on the tiny cement wall, I found myself thinking about that cliche. And how infrequently I take in the journey; how frantic I am about the destinations–all four-hundred-fifty-six of them. Leo pushed his lawn-mower over to the water table and back. Charlie honked his horn and spun the wheel of his car. And I thought, I have no idea what’s going to happen.

I’m too superstitious to write down what I thought next, but it had to do with mortality and not knowing how long any of us would be around. What if this was it? Birds, butterflies and a special raccoon danced in the mural on my left. The guy who lives at Totland after the kids go home came back with his dinner and sat at one of the picnic tables under the oak trees. Angie was next to me, and Amanda came back with her pink iPhone and Matt’s yes to loaning us the microphone. The journey . . . What if this is it?

It doesn’t mean I don’t clean the kitchen (god knows) or write my blog or negotiate with Angie over which lucky one of us will get to take a shower today. It doesn’t even mean that I want to play in the sandbox more than I want to read a book. While I appreciate the opportunity to see the world all big and new again, I do slip back into my grown-up perspective awfully fast and want the kind of entertainment I am used to–with words and ideas at center.

It just swings the balance back to something a little closer to center: the journey and the destination. I’ll give equal value to the part I get to experience, and take a little energy back from the endpoint off where the horizon vanishes.

So, what does this tell us about time management? Maybe that the term forces an approach: management. For Angie’s birthclass, Ange and Leo (3 months old) and I met privately with Nancy Bardacke, who teaches mindful birthing. Nancy told me that I was trying to “micromanage the unknown.” Now that’s pretty much what I consider to be my job description, and probably have since I began, at age 7, to spend my time alternating–every few days–between my mother’s basement flat and my father’s house.

So what I want to suggest to myself and to other writers and parents and other insanely busy people, is that we launch a new field: time experiencing. Here’s one exercise: instead of making a list of what you have to do, make a list of what you’ve done this week that you loved. Or liked. Or just showed up for. Here’s mine:

1) Sat in the front yard playing with my sons.

2) Kissed the back of Angie’s neck.

3) Listened to an interview with Carol Muske-Dukes from the archives of Fresh Air.

4) Donated money to Obama (first time I made a donation to a political campaign in nearly 25 years, since I was a kid).

5) Had a great conversation with one of my clients.

6) Talked on the phone with my friend Katia.

7) Read the whole New Yorker in bed beside the sleeping boys.

8 ) Resolved a traffic jam at Totland in the warm twilight hours of the day.