MUSICMAKERS: POEMS ABOUT FLORIDA. October 23 - November 8. 35,000 words. I start writing GULF COAST STORIES, about driving along the Gulf Coast, from Key West to Corpus Christi, Texas. Then I change the title to FLORIDA WRITER: A PI NOVEL, investigating what form a book like FLORIDA WRITER will, at my stage of development as a writer, take. I hang a right in Pensacola, drive across the top of the state, and head down the East Coast, to Delray Beach. Around DeFuniak Springs, I see that I am writing HILLBILLY HEAVEN: I DREAM OF DYING. I'm dying here, Ma. Nobody wants to hear about death. Around Jacksonville, I see that I am writing MUSICMAKERS: POEMS ABOUT FLORIDA. A celebration of family, children, fresh seafood, and live acoustic string band music. No hard times blues I got chickens in my back yard. A barrel of flour and a bucket of lard. 40 years of marriage. The hippies were right. Nixon was wrong. Bush was Nixon.
MYTHMAKER: OUTSIDER POEMS. November 9 - November 19. 22,000 words.
School, the military, work. I see a program on BookTV about a Restored
Edition of A Moveable Feast. I buy the book and reread it. I compare
myself to Hemingway, starting out. And at the end. I compare our respective careers.
Measure dicks. I see that I'm no more an outsider than any other writer. I just
have a chip on my shoulder. The Cow Chip of Doom. As he told Scott Fitzgerald,
"We're not tragic figures, Bo. What we are is writers, and what we should do
is write." I see what I am going to write next. WRITING STORIES. I have a
job interview for a temporary technical writer job at the last place I worked, where
I wrote training programs for the unemployed. We will make it through December this
year.