Babies and Book Agents

Well, Letterlady's tenacity has paid off, and she now has an agent for her book! Yahoo!

Turns out that maternity leave pays off in multiple ways. A little boredom, a little time to surf around and make inquiries, and voila! A contract arrives in the mail!

I'll let her go into detail about everything, but said agent has asked for revisions, so Letterlady is back at the drawing board, nursing baby on one hip. (Did I mention that the source of all those summertime mood swings and reminders to eat made her premier appearance at the beginning of 2008? There is now another reader in the world...and named for a Greek heroine, at that!)

I, on the other hand, still have numerous note cards taped to the walls in my bathroom, but my book doesn't seem to be writing itself... Go figure. My latest literary adventures have consisted largely of professional emails and Match.com profiles, the latter of which have been more successful.

Perhaps I need another summer grant and two more weeks in the woods in order to get my characters across the finish line.

Letterlady certainly is an inspiration, though! I'm so proud of her and will be very happy to brag and say that I knew her when!

Going for the jugular

Well, for some unknown reason I started working on the novel again. Perhaps it is all the Halloween and Dia de los Muertos preparations at my house. My daughter and I made our annual altar to our ancestors, decorated with fall fruits and vegetables, and dried flowers. Perhaps all these notions of transformations, death, and disguises have brought me back to the brink of fiction?

This weekend I wrote two new chapters and connected the dots between several others that had been floating around out of order. I had to go down to the bathroom several times to check the wall for sequence and setting details. It's really strange: much of the story is hard for me to remember and when I reread earlier chapters I almost don't remember writing them. I find the early chapters pretty compelling, but I'm not sure if the voice is consistent throughout. I still find myself struggling and hung up on moving characters through the plot. Yet I find the details very satisfying, like when Eydie traces the hexagonal white tiles on the cool bathroom floor with her fingers.

I finished reading another novel this weekend, which may have been one of the reasons I was inspired to write. It's called Jamesland and it's written by a family friend, Michelle Huneven. Reading it, and knowing what I know about Michelle's life, I feel like I glimpsed some of the secrets of novel writing. Autobiography works its way in and out, creating the tension in the threads that hold the story together. When people who know me well read this book, they will see much that is taken directly from my life. Yet it is entirely fiction and completely imaginary. And I suspect some people will see themselves where they do not exist, and others won't recognize themselves at all. Letterlady says I should tape Carly Simon's song lyric "You're so vain, I bet you think this song is about you" on the screen of my computer so that I won't edit myself for fear of readers' reactions. Writing -- or at least, going for Natalie Goldberg's "jugular" -- requires a degree of fearlessness. Sometimes I feel like I should be wearing a helmet.

Given all that, I'm not at all sure that what I have written is worth much. It may quite possibly be garbage, actually. But that doesn't stop me from loving many of my characters and feeling great pleasure at spending time with them again. It is a strange head space that I find myself occupying these days...

Freewoman as Featured Poet

On Thursday night, October 4, I will be the featured poet at the Fall 2007 Open Reading Poetry Series at the Loveland Museum. There is a poetry open mic at 7, followed by me reading at around 8. I would love to see friendly faces, and even better, to hear you read your poetry in the open reading! Click here for more information.

Broken Ice

Blessings on teacher-friend Heather, whose invitation for a writing date finally motivated me to break the ice and spend some time with my book. I had to go down and stand in the guest bathroom for a while to reorient myself with the chronology and sequence. It seems like ages since last I joined my heroines in their fictional situations. But I took the leap and managed to crank out a new page and a half of Eurydice's story. She met Rhea and was directly asked about her family for the first time. Kind of awkward since the mythological original has none that I can find any reference to. Suffice it to say that in my story, her people weren't Catholic, which is all Rhea cared about anyway.

Rhea is a combination of women I grew up around: wealthy Pasadena and San Marino matrons. She's a lot more uptight than my own Pasadena Granny was, but they share a sense of style and, to a degree, a classist elitism. Granny did have a driver named Ed and a family who were often employed to serve holiday dinners, but Rhea has a full-time staff made up of multiple members of the same Hispanic family. As chilly as Rhea can be, she will ultimately be the key to Penny's liberation, so it's hard not to like her despite her many character flaws.

I am hoping that having written again at a lower altitude in a less-than-idyllic setting (only relatively speaking), I will now be able to continue to work on the book more regularly. I really want to finish the plot-draft (that's how I think of this incarnation of the story) so I can get to the revision and the enhancements. Now that we're back in the swing of things at school and the English department is staffed with at least five active writers, perhaps regular writing dates can be an ongoing event. Having a writing partner sit across from me certainly makes writing seem less lonely, even if I am the only one in my story. The challenge of the extrovert engaged in the introverted art form...

The Demonic Verses

Here's what George Orwell had to say about writing a book:

Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand. For all one knows that demon is simply the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention. And yet it is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane.

I hope I will be able to get back to my demons once the madness of starting school subsides a bit. It's hard to believe that the summer has ended (at least for teachers where we work...)

Harry Potter as Inspiration

Our family has just emerged from Harry Potter, like miners coming off shift surprised to see the sun in a new position. We spent Saturday morning through Monday in full immersion, barely taking time to eat or fluff our pillows.
And I know we are not alone. How cool is JK Rowling? She went from being no one, from a un-glamourous single-motherhood to being the second richest woman in Britain.
Number one is the queen.
This is the power of writing. This is what being a novelist could possibly accomplish -- making people around the world stop the rhythms of daily life and let themselves be drawn into the imaginative life. On Saturday, our friends Breeann and Rob showed up at 8 in the morning to begin reading with us -- the ten year olds at our house were haggard because they had stayed up WAY past bedtime to attend the midnight Harry Potter party (and win a golden snitch for costumes.) The grown ups were tired because we are old and were also up past midnight. But we made coffee and began to take turns, chapter by chapter. We put our family bets in writing (a combo of who will die and whether or not Snape is evil) before beginning since a cake was at stake.
And we have been reading ever since. Breeann and Rob had to return to their own lives but we kept reading (if you've tried to call and we didn't answer, don't take it personally.) At several points I had to hand the book to my husband as chapters made me cry (I'm a total sap.) Once, he had to hand the book to me, since I married a man who is not afraid to cry.
On the final night, the ten year olds stayed up past midnight again, because once we were that close to the end we just couldn't stop. I wonder how many hours we spend hearing every word that Rowling wrote out loud, or attempting (pathetically) to replicate British accents. Sure, our lives and our housekeeping came to a stop. I didn't write a word, or try to sell myself to any agents.
But talk about inspiring. I won't ruin anything, but I loved this book. My friend Kurt said that I only liked the books because I'm a mom -- I don't think so. Yes, I admit that reading out loud is more intense than reading silently. Someone putting sad things into the air for children makes me far more emotional than I would be reading silently to myself. But really I think I love them because they changed our vocabulary, and our rhythms.
How cool is that?

Plumbing the Depths

I put up all my notecards again (having carefully taken them down off the windows in our cabin.) I started to put them on my sliding glass doors, but they blocked out too much light, so I decided to make the most of the wasted wall space in the family room bathroom! Perhaps it will help me keep things in perspective when I start to feel like my writing is s#*t?

(No comments, please, about the horrible wallpaper. When I moved in almost thirteen years ago, I swore that the faux-Anasazi petroglyph wallpaper was the first thing that had to go. Now here we are in an entirely new century, and I still suffer with it every day. It is, however, at the top of my list of home improvement things to do. I even have the wallpaper steamer in my garage waiting for that slow weekend. Wallpaper removal tips, anyone?)

On another note, now that Letterlady and I are back in the same state, we had lunch and she told me that she has made the revisions that Careful Reader Susan and Lettermama suggested. Then she mailed off manuscripts to four agents who want to see it! She wants to target about ten more, and then she has to sit back and wait two to six months for their responses. Good thing school's starting soon and she has that lower-case Letterbaby to plan for...otherwise she might go a little crazy -- crazier? Strange to think that it takes longer for a book to be published than it does to gestate a human baby...or an elephant baby, for that matter.

Corrective Lens

I had dinner last night in Pasadena with my bosom college friend of twenty+ years, Tiné (on the left). She has had my chapters for the last several days, and is my only other reader besides Letterlady. Tiné was wonderfully helpful and very candid. She said that as she was reading it, she realized that it was like someone handing her their newborn infant, looking down and realizing that the baby is cross-eyed. I thought that was a perfect way to discuss a draft and plan to use the same analogy with my students. My draft is on its way to becoming a book, but it's cross-eyed and needs some vision therapy.

Tiné was able to articulate what I suspected was the biggest issue, which is that right now it is entirely plot driven, and that there are big gaps that need filling in. Everything written up to this point serves to advance the plot, and what's missing is a lot of the information that will help create a fully realized world around our two heroines. She described the heroines as existing right now in a vacuum, and wanting more information about everything and everyone around them so that the reader can inhabit their world, not just their points of view. She suggested that I continue to write the plot, and then when the whole draft is articulated from beginning to end, go back and add all the stuff that will answer the questions and fill out the world.

As a result of needing more of the characters' inner monologues and backgrounds, Tiné said it was hard to know who to sympathize with, especially since they all make morally questionable choices. I think the solution to that is having more access to their thought processes as they are making their choices, so that we are in on their own self-reflection and therefore understand why they are doing things. That way even if they make choices we wouldn't make ourselves, we can at least know why they made them, and sympathize with their dilemmas if not their decisions.

Other hugely helpful observations she made:

The names I've chosen for my characters are often hard to pronounce and trip the reader up. I need to revisit all of them and think about that aspect of it. I love names, and I love unusual names, so this could be painful.

I need to really figure out who my audience is, and how overt all the Greek stuff wants to be. Is it a titillating beach read for readers who may never have heard of Ovid and won't notice the allusions? Is it for more erudite, literary types who will get every allusion and criticize me when I stray from the original? How does the answer to the question affect the way it's written?

I think in a lot of ways, my background with dramatic literature (two degrees in theater) is in part responsible for the problems Tiné pointed out. So far, I have written a lot of dialogue and plot, both of which are central in a dramatic script that's intended to be performed. But in a script, dialogue and plot are only the sheet music for the actors to interpret. (In a play, names can be difficult because the actors will say them for the audience and the audience doesn't have to figure them out for themselves. Just think about Shakespeare and Shaw's names. There is a good reason that theater companies employ dramaturgs and speech coaches.) A novel needs to be fully formed and leave far less to the interpretation of the audience, as the novelist is both playwright and actor. A play needs to be relatively short. A novel is far less limited. I need to give myself permission to leave the momentum of the action and explore the more literary elements of fiction. I need to let in more poetry and figurative language, more flavor, more color. I need to allow more meandering into the lives of the other characters who interact with the heroines, so that when they do interact, it's from a three-dimensional place and not a vacuum.

SO, the challenge I feel right now is to create a paradigm in which I can continue to write this book while working full-time and being a single mom. Since this next fall will be my first ever in that capacity, a lot will be trial and error, I think. Surely there is a way to be productive without being isolated for days at a time in a tiny house in the mountains? In that regard, writing poetry is easier. An hour stolen here or there can result in a poem. An hour of novel writing is like ten minutes of physical exercise: barely enough to get warmed up enough to make it safe to proceed...

Collective Unconscious?

Interesting that in the past month, I've read two articles in the New York Times about new works of theater that use the Eurydice and Persephone myths.

The first is Sarah Ruhl's new play Eurydice, currently playing at the Second Stage Theater in New York City. It's apparently about Eurydice's experience in the underworld, and creates a central relationship between Eurydice and her father. I find that particularly interesting, as I have not been able to find any back story about Eurydice's family or lineage. In some versions of the myth she is called a nymph but in others they don't even say if she's mortal or not. Maybe I should email the playwright and ask her if she found any research into her family, or if she invented the entire relationship. I have chosen to leave my Eurydice's family life deliberately ambiguous.

The second work is Jake Heggie's opera To Hell and Back, in which Patti Lupone was recently performing. The New York Times describes it thus: "Reframing the Persephone myth as a contemporary tale of domestic abuse, [Heggie and Scheer] had conceived the 38-minute operatic piece with Ms. LuPone specifically in mind to sing the role of the battered wife’s mother-in-law."

My dad says the Collective Unconscious explains the rise of these themes all in seemingly unrelated places by unconnected people. I wonder if it isn't the same phenomenon that occurred when I named my daughter a very unusual name and then started noticing it everywhere. Was it always there, or was I unwittingly part of a trend about which I was previously unaware...?

Give me an L-E-T-T-E-R-L-A-D-Y!

Since she is too modest (or busy) to post it herself, I thought I'd let our loyal readers know that Letterlady has four agents interested in seeing her manuscript. These are folks she networked with two years ago when she was shopping her anthology of short stories. They each told her there wasn't much of a market for short stories by unknown authors, but to contact them when she had a novel. Well, now she has one, she has contacted them, and they all want to see it. Yay!!

When she gets her draft back from Susan, the Careful Reader, we are going to set up some times to get together to edit, revise and generally prepare the drafts for sending out. I predict that they will be in the mail before school starts and she'll have an agent by Thanksgiving (maybe a book contract by the new year??)

Rah Rah Rah! Sis Boom Bah! Go-o-o-o-o Letterlady!!

Susan

So here is the delightful Susan, who wears outfits that match her trailer, and is willing to read my whole entire book and make comments.

She is all that and a bag of chips. We went to her house and she made us sausage BBQ and 2 different kinds of milkshakes. The kids followed her around like the Pied Piper, and I was tempted to as well.

When printing off a copy of the manuscript for Susan, I had a mini breakdown trying to put 26 chapters in order. Then my sweet husband swooped in with a stapler and saved the day. Now he knows what I'm really like when I'm writing. We have a fun, full house now (4 children, 2 parents, 2 grandparents) which leads to some rollicking games of 20 questions, but not a ton of writing time. Luckily Susan is still making me feel like progress is happening!

Continuity

I realized this morning in my half-waked stupor that Darryl has to teach Persephone to drive the truck or the scene in the hotel at Christmas doesn't work. (Hades refused to teach her to drive in L.A., you see, so then how could she steal the truck to sneak out? Right now, there's no explanation, but since Darryl helps her get her GED, it seems reasonable that he'd teach her to drive. Especially since that would mean she could be more helpful around the orchard.)

I haven't written a single word since I got home, but that doesn't stop my brain from working on it. I am trying to trust that in the midst of painting the bathroom and Freedaughter's room, fixing the sprinkler, going to the grocery store, and doing laundry, that the literary stew is simmering and seasoning on the back burner and will be richer when I get back to give it a stir.

I need to put up all the index cards on my sliding glass doors downstairs so that I can keep everything straight. I hope I numbered them correctly when I took them down before.

I went to the bookstore and bought two different translations of Ovid's Metamorphoses to compare the myths and different interpretations. Letterlady's brilliant suggestion that I use pieces of the original text to begin chapters greatly appeals to me, but I also like the idea of using texts from a wider variety of interpretations (H.D.'s poem "Eurydice", various operas, etc.)

What about you, Dear Reader? Can you suggest other versions of these myths that might provide literary glue for my wee tale?

A Scrabble Win, Most Importantly

You will be happy to know that immediately upon returning home (after being showered with homemade confetti by my daughter) I beat my husband in Scrabble. Some of you I know were getting worried. But after a day driving rather than writing for 11 hours, I got my game back. Like Freewoman, I woke that first morning home anxious, with that "what do I have to do first" feeling, and the inability to believe that the answer was "nothing."
But tomorrow I have to deliver the manuscript in toto to my smart friend Susan. So tonight, my family is out riding bikes in the beautiful twilight, and I'm here writing once again, making all the changes suggested by my mother and Freewoman. By the way if you see my mother let me know. Last I saw her, she was driving off to see Emmylou Harris at the Telluride Bluegrass Festival and we haven't seen hide or hair since. Hopefully that's for very very good reasons.
I need to finish this novel and send it out before school starts because full time teaching doesn't leave much time. Yikes!
Always looking for readers, those of you who might be bored with summer!

There's No Place Like Home

I feel like Dorothy, waking up in black and white, back in Kansas. Was it all a dream?

I awoke at 5:38 this morning and debated getting out of bed and writing, but fell back to sleep and dreamed I was married to Tom Cruise. Holy Nightmare, Rainman!

I love being home and reunited with my daughter, and we had a very lively lunch talking through the Greek myths that have been obsessing me for the last two weeks. She's very interested in knowing the story and what Letterlady and I have been up to. She's mad that I didn't take any pictures of the cats that surrounded our little domicile, but she likes the columbine earrings I got her at the little gift shop before we left Ouray.

Our drive home was long, made richer by the music of The Dixie Chicks and the fiction of Richard Peck on the CD player. We decided to listen to a book in order to get out of our own heads for a while. The River Between Us is a wonderful tale of two friends at the outbreak of the Civil War, living along the Mississippi River. It deals with ghosts, family, racism, loyalty, and love. What more could a story want? We got it out of the Lafayette Library, and you can too, once I return it. We recommend it. (I also loved and recommend listening to his book A Year Down Yonder, also available at the library.)

I'm heading to L.A. in a week and a half and am trying to set up lunch with an author friend of my Dad's, to pick her brain about agents and manuscripts and the like. I'd like to make the revisions that Letterlady so wisely suggested before I go, so that I can have a few folks read it and give feedback while I'm out there. It's hard to know whether to keep composing and work towards the end of the story, or to revise what I already have.

I think I'll go take a nap and meditate on that question...

Happy Endings

So this is our last night in the Chipeta cottage, in beautiful Ouray, under the hospitality of the perfect Paul and Becky. Tonight we had a reading with wine (and O'Douls for me). Please see the photo to view the wonderful writers at said reading. This was a lovely, perfect ending to a very productive journey.
During our listening journey we heard about tarantulas eating into a man's brain, a compound fracture in a quarry, a ballsy woman in overalls with a cigar, and a girl being abandoned at a rock concert. I read 1/2 of my first chapter of my complete (yay!) manuscript, and freewoman read her first chapter of the 25 she has written while here. Only people doing meth could have been more productive. Then after everyone read a piece of writing, we talked about literature, tattoos, and people who go to the emergency room with animals embedded in their bodies. There was words, wine and actual guffaws. It was perfect. This journey made us cry, made us smell, made us mad, but it definitely made us better writers.
We've decided to keep this blog. We may not post twice a day, but we will definitely track our progress to finish, make it comprehensible (okay that's mostly my problem not Freewoman's) and get published. Yippee!
Now that we have lived through it, we highly recommend putting yourself through this. Just let us know and we'll put you in touch with Paul and Becky, muses extraordinaire.

Running Short on Supplies

In the mania of the day I'm having, I've been all over the map with my writing today. I wrote what might be the very last chapter (Eurydice and hot painter boy hitting the road) and the scene where Eurydice gets her dream job and house (in northeast L.A., for God's sake) and the scene where she gets the call and learns that the Maenads have torn Orpheus limb from limb. I'm going to need an actual medical-type person read that little section and tell me if it comes close to ringing true. To me, it sounds exactly like an episode of ER, which is the extent of my medical training. You see my problem.

Yesterday I wrote the awful scene where Hades blackmails Persephone into staying with him (think Sophie's Choice with a little porn thrown in). The disturbing thing is that last week, writing that scene would have given me stomach cramps, whereas this week it just rolls out of my head and onto the page (the fact that it comes out of my head in the first place is disturbing in and of itself.)

Tonight we are having a little reading with our hosts and two other writers who are in residence here from Minnesota. I was trying to figure out which sections to read, and I think I'll stick to Eurydice's two chapters in Boulder teaching at the Buddhist university. And possibly the first Persephone chapter where she meets Hades and Demeter forgets her at the concert. We'll see. It's one thing to write steamy scenes...it's another thing entirely to read them out loud.

Fascinating Trivia Fact: Letterlady and Freewoman have used an entire ream of paper and two ink cartridges in the two weeks we have been here writing. It's a good thing we're leaving tomorrow or we'd have to hitchhike down to civilization and get us some more.

Note to any students reading this post: Hitchhiking is dangerous and we are using hyperbole here to exaggerate our situation and the relative size of the town we are staying in. We do not hitchhike and neither should you.

24 Hours To Go...I Wanna Be Sedated

It's our last full day in paradise. Probably a good thing, based on the looks of Letterlady. I hope Letterhubby's got a hot bubble bath and a stack of trashy magazines at the ready. She's going to need them...

Of Cakes, Climaxes and Index Cards

It's now 10:50 a.m. and Letterlady has succumbed to the dark side of insomnia: the mid-morning nap. Those of you who know her know that this is highly unusual behavior.

Because I didn't come with her clearly articulated goals of being "finished" with a novel, I don't feel the same pressure that she does. On the other hand, she came with 27 chapters in various stages of drafts, and has been rewriting, revising, excising (80 brave pages into the Cut file on one day.) I am still in the first round of drafts, so my story is still half woven in the loom, while hers is stretched out and pinned, damp, to the finishing board. She's busy knotting and hiding all the loose and dangling ends.

I'm at the point now where the two women's stories have largely intersected. It's getting harder to designate a chapter as belonging to one or the other. I woke up this morning and lay in bed for an hour trying to figure out the timing and sequence for their stories' separate climaxes with regards to their relationships with the men. Both culminate in awful betrayals and permanent damage, and yet they are each involved in the circumstances of the other, so the timing is intricate and hard to plot out.

I am a visual learner. I have index cards taped to the left kitchen window, outlining each woman's story-line, in chronological order with dates (month and year) in the corners. Their stories don't start at the same time, but they merge, so keeping the timing straight is important. On the right window, I have taped individual cards for each chapter, for each woman, numbered in sequence, summarizing the events of the chapters. On the kitchen table, I have a grid of cards detailing the climaxes that I have yet to draft, and that were only broadly sketched in the original outline. I have approximate dates and locations for the events, but things have a way of taking on a life of their own once I begin to write, so a lot of this could still rearrange itself.

Having said all that stuff earlier about not having a self-imposed deadline or goal, I do worry that once out of this miraculous state of isolated, uninterrupted, 'constant composition', I will lose momentum, lose the thread of the stories, the voices of the characters. I worry that after these two intimate weeks with the muse (may She be blessed and honored always) I will turn back into a pumpkin, and the business of life will creep in and taint the business of writing. That the lure of the laundry and the television and the mundane tasks of being in the world will ultimately condemn my efforts to a forgotten drawer, much like the half-knit sweater I started three years ago and have yet to finish.

It is hard to have faith in oneself, in one's ideas, in one's world. It is hard to believe that we will be capable of creating our own creative miracles even when surrounded by ordinary, every-day life.

I choose to believe that the beauty of this place and the gift of this time allowed us to find in ourselves the discipline and creative energy that we needed to accomplish these tasks, but that neither is required for their completion. I choose to believe that these stories are asking to be told, and that they will not sit willingly, quietly, forgotten in drawers under bills and day-camp registration forms. I believe they will harass us until they are done, much like the buzzer on the stove does not turn itself off and take the cake out of the oven, but hollers persistently until the baker completes her task and sets the sweet reward on the cooling rack to share.

Insomnia, Garden Hoses

It's 8:30 am, and Freewoman is sleeping peacefully. Me, on the otherhand? I've been up for approximately 4 and 1/2 hours. I woke at 4 in the morning and despite my best efforts to think calm, boring thoughts, my head was racing and at 5:30 I just gave in and got up. I think the ticking clock is getting to me. Other writers, those who have advances or large trust funds perhaps, might luxuriate in this last stages of writings. "Golly, I just don't want it to end! I want to savor every word!" But I am so worried about meeting my self imposed deadlines that I may be getting a little sloppy. I want so badly to be done, to say those words (casually, with a flick of the hair): "yes, I've finished my novel."
So I'm trying not to rush, and not to let my dazed sleepiness affect the quality of my prose. This may prove impossible.
Jumping Jehosophat novels are long slippery things. I feel like I'm trying to do macrame with garden hoses.

Sustenance and Head Counts

We've just returned from a lovely late dinner of carrot-ginger soup and artichoke dip with home-baked crostinis. I don't know why it seems so vital to report on all our adventures in eating, except that it's the only thing we do, other than writing. It's the highlight of our days. We challenge any teachers anywhere to write for ten (plus) hours a day for ten straight days and then not get excited at the arrival of carrot-ginger soup.

I realized, after printing today's compositions, that I now have twenty completed chapters of my book: nine for Persephone and eleven for Eurydice. I have a total of thirty-six characters, some of whom intersect both women's stories, and others who only appear in momentary cameos. I love certain characters passionately. I love the way they talk and the choices they make. I can see them so clearly in my mind. I hate it when crummy things happen to them.

Today Orpheus convinced Eurydice to sell her '68 VW bug. It just didn't make sense to have it towed back to L.A. from Vegas, you know? But it killed me when they sold off that car. That car was a part of her, man. I do not have a lot of hope for those two, but they're giving it their best shot.

Alley cats are prowling and yowling and Venus is quite shameful up there next to the moon...

Say goodnight, Gracie...