Ciao

It seems to have taken me six months to finish my Honeymoon Photo Project. (What will I do now?) All of the 1500-odd photos are arranged into tidy sets here:

www.flickr.com/photos/jere7my/collections/72157621208654448/

I didn't expect to be so moved by Italy, to leave bits of my soul scattered over the countryside. Certainly it was overwhelming and beautiful and sacred, knowing everything that had sprouted from what we were seeing. But I wasn't just seeing the foundations of Western civilization — I was seeing the foundations of my sweetie, my wife, the love of my life. This is what she chose to devote her life to; this is what she came to Swarthmore to study (and thus why we met); this is why we moved together to Ann Arbor, and why we're here in Boston now. It was a privilege touring Italy with her, and while I recommend Rome and Florence and Ravenna to all of you, I selfishly feel your experience could never live up to mine: walking through the Forum Romanum with my giddy wife, her Blue Guide tucked under her arm and her brain bubbling over with True Facts of Antiquity.

Each night, when we got back to the hotel, I jotted down notes for the day. I've been using them to write the last six months of posts, but not everything got in. Below the cut are the out-of-context trimmings, because I thought it might be amusing to see just how much gelato we ate. ( Enjoy! )

Halftime

As of my final writing session of 2009, I'm halfway through the second draft of The Slow Palace. I finished the first draft on my last day of writing in 2008¹ — I see I was hoping the next draft would be shorter, but so far it's grown by exactly an eighth — and had a vague resolve to finish this one in 2009.

I only made it halfway in twelve months (technically ten months, since I took a break from writing in January and spent February working on short fiction). I could beat myself up about that, but it was ever only a notional goal. More importantly, my pace of revisions has increased markedly — I spent the first half of the year revising about an eighth of the text, and the second half revising the next three eighths. I've figured out a method for revisions, and there was a time when I wasn't sure I would. Given this accelerando, it would be nice to finish by my birthday (late April), but that would call for a steady pace of over two pages a day in 2010. I'm not sure that's plausible. Pitfalls and tsetse flies and angry water buffalo may be lurking in the second half.

But the summer? I can make the summer. You betcha. Solstice or bust.

¹ And broke a tooth the next day. Hrm.