Well, Southwest Airlines has sent me three very nice emails telling me they are thurching and thurching for my writing notebook, but alas, I fear it's gone. Gone, gone, gone, along with all those lovely ideas for chapter beginnings for my new novel. I remember what the device was, just not the embodiments of the device. Going to have to go eavesdrop again.

Twenty years ago, this would've been my worst nightmare.

Twenty years ago. Before I'd lost entire computers and phones full of information. Before I'd lost jobs. Before I'd lost people.

Man, twenty years ago I didn't know shit.

Now I'm a little sad but mostly annoyed because there were some good chapter heading ideas in there that took a good three hours to conjure in the car on the way home from Thanksgiving in Iowa.

When I got home, I went to my stash of hard-covered, spiral-bound, lined notebooks and picked another one. Then I printed out the brain dump I'd vomited into a Word document in the hotel the night I realized the notebook was gone. Then I pulled out the last notebook from THE BIRTHRIGHT OF PARKER CLEAVES, because there were some notes on the new idea in there, too. I'm still new enough to this novel-writing gig that I don't have a real set process yet. It does seem to be one notebook per book, though. Even if it's not, I may make it so, because it seems clean, and everything else about writing is messy.

But I still couldn't start again. I decided I needed a different music line-up, so I made one, and in doing so I realized we've only downloaded about 1/6 of our music collection onto the Mac. It's so tedious, the downloading. Beloved used to be a DJ and has like 600 CDs, and I brought a significant amount of chic-rocker singer/songwriters into the marriage, and also the two-disc set of Piano By Candlelight (purchased off late-night television, natch). There wasn't nearly enough to make the perfect new-novel playlist, but there was enough of the soul-searchy and NIN teeth-grindy to get me in the proper mood to remember the first twenty years of my life. 

I'd like to make a playlist to go with this new project when it's done. I didn't do that for PARKER CLEAVES. I missed it. Maybe that is part of my process. Who knows?

So the working title for this new book is THE NIGHTMARE DRESS. It's going to be young adult. I'm going back to high school, yearning and reconsidered relationships. This is the sentence I wrote down to set the stage for myself:

"Don't you know," she said, her pupils dilated in the falling light, "hell is other people not caring."

ONWARD.