Why I schedule writing time on Saturday, I’ve no idea. Reading the paper at the coffee house after a leisurely 11:30 breakfast is about the best I can do.

However, I did get inspired to organize my office today! Next week, B. will get his own desk, so mine will return to my corner of the study, and I won’t have to clutter up the dining table with my laptop and papers anymore. Wheee!! Mmmm… my cozy little writing corner, surrounded by neat stacks of magazines and books on the floor, Sting on the radio, and a warm halo of light around it all. I will have absolutely no excuse not to write anymore.

Got more feedback from a fellow playwright on my play (currently posted on a writing forum). B. read it this afternoon while we were at the coffee house as well. Definitely needs more work (not just tweaking…I’m talkin’ real work), but I think I have a better grasp of it. The dialogue does sound stilted, and there’s so little action. B. says that there’s so much more to the story, which I’m fully aware of, but I really want to stick to the One Act/Two Scene format for now. It can most definitely be expanded to become a full-length play, with several characters, but the way it is now is challenging enough.

I need to inject more tension in this first scene. The story itself has built-in tension, but I’m not sure the dialogue conveys that. I guess that’s my work for next week.

As for the novel, I now have a contact in Singapore — an academic, natch — who’s done considerable research on the Japanese community there. He was sooo kind — he sent me PDF’s of the two relevant chapters in his last book that dealt specifically with the issue I’m grappling with! Did I mention how much I love academics???

Bedside reading this week is Marilyn French’s In the Name of Friendship. Good feminist read, albeit sometimes confusing. Characters with similar names, multi-generational female friendships, that sort of thing. (Funny. I just realized that the characters with very similar names — e.g., Steven and son Stevie — are all men. Is French trying to make the point that men are so simple and similar to each other that to give them unique names would be pointless?) Anyway, at one point, one of the characters — an artist — is pondering the question of whether or not a woman can be an artist and a wife/mother. I haven’t finished the book, but my suspicion is that the answer may actually be no, despite some rare examples to the contrary. (Ayun Halliday is the first to come to mind.)

MRA