Dear Bruckner,

I have suspended the husband search- as it's true being at the end of week one- only 1 of 3-5. I could be enveloped in this meloddrama for a month more. I mean, you know you're life has taken a turn when you think, i can't wait till blisters stop erupting from my skin and dreading the unholy after effects and pleading for everything to scab over quickly as that will be at least be cool and interesting opposed to sensing some alien presence breeding on your back, waiting for the ooze and trying to explain to friends exactly what fiberglass in the skin feels like as pulses of haywire nerves make you whince like you've just been hit by a stray dart. But nevermind.

You mentioned in your letter you had thought due to the number of ailments someone else had taken over my blog moniker. Being self-analytical and neurotic are not good combos for when one becomes sick is all i'm saying. I do not handle it well. I do not have what you would call fortitude, especially if I feel whatever brought upon me is undeserved or over the top. But this year- only 4 months in was quite a doosey? doozy? i don't know. But 1. the cold that over took my camping trip in january 2. the wretching nightmare that almost made me miss chicago 3. my dog died in march 4. the death cold of april has lead straight into the 5. plague of may. not to be outdone by anal fissures sometime between 4 and 5. All of it heralded by a malaise lasting clear in from Novemberish and reaching a bad pitch in through early spring? Well what to do. One should make a story of peppercini seeds landing in your eye- as novelists it would be symbolic for life and some ironic twist that makes you see yes, the absurd, the random pain of life, take that. But the novel is becoming literal. They'd say, that's too much. Or I'd say, I'm going to make a comedy out of it. I may get there. I may make it to the frown upside down-- if i were writing.

One will just have to wait and see. But I take your point Bruckner. It's writing in the minuitia opposed to pulling out and developing an arc. A true arc of suffering or of comedic prat falls which say something, which tell you something. It's not just throwing stones in a pit or watching someone bail water from a sinking skooner 50ft from shore. My god my character has got to learn something. There has to be some-Thing behind all of this. Something funny and a bit pathetic in the character hunched over on a wooden box with a bag of frozen corn to her back.

Don't pay attention to her self-pitying demonstrance and her pleas for attention. It won't work. It simply won't work. This girl has a pie in the face coming or she's going over the waterfall in a barrel. She just wants to make sure someone's watching. Just give her a glance out of the corner of your eye and look the other way. That'll be enough.

m-