Q: What kind of a book is FLORIDA WRITER: A PI NOVEL?

A: There are four kinds of books. Poetry, fiction, non-fiction, and other.

Q: What is other?

A: All of the above.

Q: What is FLORIDA WRITER: A PI NOVEL?

A: It's a novel.

In fact, it's a subtype of novel. A picaresque.

Moby-Dick was a picaresque.

On the Road was a picaresque.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was a picaresque.

Don Quixote, the first novel, was a picaresque.

Q: Why is it a novel?

A: It has a plot and characters, a setting and a theme.

Q: What's the plot?

A: A man goes on a journey.

Waiting for Godot was a picaresque.

Q: Waiting for Godot was a play.

Besides, the characters didn't go anywhere. They stayed in one place and waited for someone to come to them.

A: It's the same thing, isn't it?

The character never came. Did he?

A poor man's like a gopher in a tub. You get up on your hind legs and scratch around, scratch around, and end up right back where you started,

The structure is trochal, as they say in the quarterlies.

Not to give away the ending, but I'll bet nothing happens in this book.

It's the journey, not the end.

The place for logic is not between the map and the real world but within the map.

Q: I see.

A: How well did you describe the journey.

Q: What's the setting?

A: Florida. The whole state.

As the chimneysweep says, "Ramirez le chemin, du haut en bas."

Q: Who are the characters?

A: Me and Brenda, our children, Owen and Balder, and their wives, Jean and Jennifer.

The grandchildren. Cale, Ella, Rowan, Eb.

We're going to keep Ella and Eb at Thanksgiving.

So it's multigenerational. My parents and Brenda's parents.

We're living in Granny Brown's house. Brenda's old home place.

Balder wrote a song called "Granny Brown," in which he asked her about the Depression, and she said, "Weren't no such thing, we always lived that way."

The conchs in the keys in the Depression lived on grits and grunts.

That's what we are living on.

Grits and grunts.

A saltwater panfish.

That's the plot. Will times get better?

Or is it the theme?

Q: The theme is vocation and career in conflict.

A: Thank you.