no, really, i'm okay

I found an hour's worth of work to do this morning. Not much coming in these days. It's the annual slow period for satellite workers while the New York City home office prints out graphs, binds them, and sends them to clients. Not many phone calls being made, not many interviews, not much call for transcribing.

The fact that I got a 25% pay cut a month or so ago makes it worse; the fact that, along with that, my cushy minimum 20 hours a week also disappeared makes it horrible.

Fortunately, I'm not paying rent right now.

I canceled therapy. I stopped going to yoga. I canceled my monthly massage club membership (which admittedly was a weird thing to have anyway). I'm down to the bare bones. Watching my lap top for incoming transcription work while working on my novel on the desktop Apple behind it. It could be a lot worse.

Things are going well with august chagrin. I finished chapter 31, "Christian Wall" and am now working on chapter 4, "Hell's Kitchen" (which chronologically comes after chapter 31). Christian Wall was a brand new write; Hell's Kitchen is just a rewrite, but it's really being rewritten; the structure of the story remains, but the characters are being changed.

S checked out a book from the library for me that he read 25 years ago, Edmund White's States of Desire. He thought the section on Houston would be useful, and it may well be when I get to the section in my novel that deals with Houston. Right now my main character has just moved from Florida to New York City. The chapter in Mr. White's book on New York is amazing, perfect, basically a blueprint for the character I had already started writing, the Manhattanite Charles Hatch, a wealthy homosexual who (sort of) befriends Randy almost from the moment he arrives, gives him a job, an apartment, fucks him, all the things Randy really needs after what precipitated his hasty departure from Florida (chapter 31).

Right now, my longhand notebook is a mess of beginnings, endings and middles, and even reminder notes for the next two chapters in this section, chapter 11, "Anita Cox," and chapter 18, "August Collins." This is the most exciting part of the work to me.