…are making a racket next door. Can’t the gardeners just use a broom? Are leaf blowers prevalent in other areas of the country, or just here in the O.C. where autumn leaves aren’t seen as beautiful but seen as a mess on the sidewalk and yard? You won’t find O.C. kids jumping off swings into piles of leaves because there are none!

I’m really not in a bad mood.

It’s just that Jordan (I’m gonna out you, J., and tell everyone you’re “Sweetness” in the comments section) just wrote to me accusing me of laziness for not blogging lately. But I’ve been working on an essay this last week, J.! That doesn’t matter to J.; he’s just sick of checking back here and seeing the post on the Helen Schulman podcast (he doesn’t listen to podcasts but wants me to transcribe. Uh-huh, right….). I understand, though. When I check blogs and it’s the same old stuff, I become frustrated and if I knew the blogger, I’d do just what Jordan did, and I’d write to him or her and say, Whassup?

Just so this blog post isn’t complete nonsense, I have one discovery for you. As I said, I’ve been working on an essay the last week and when I started the essay, I didn’t know what it was about. I just knew I’d been wanting to write about this thing that happened about 15 years ago. And I had a first line. But I didn’t know where it was going.

The piece started out as a five page sketch, swelled to a 12 piece essay, and shrunk to eight pages, and in the meantime, I discovered what it was about and found my ending. So my tip for you is, regarding essays, don’t wait until you know exactly what it’s about to begin writing your piece. The discovery is in the writing. I love essays and I love discovering along the way what I mean to say.

Okay, Jordan, happy?

My podcast expert Rob Roy just posted last week’s interview with Helen Schulman, author of A Day at the Beach. Click here for the link.

Also, just so my friend, J., won’t think I completely lost my mind and am lost to baseball, as well as teaching and editing and working on articles, I’ve been working on a piece (an essay? a story? depends on how much I embellish….). And yesterday I punched holes in every page of my novel and put the pages in a big white binder with the cover that says Starletta’s Kitchen, so now I can easily go through the pages and continue my revision. (Okay, J.???)

One more thing: If you’ve been visiting this blog for a while, you know I categorize some books according to color. Check this out (thanks to Lacy, who sent it to me).

Always a fun literary way to spend a Sunday: The West Hollywood Book Fair. I’ll be on a panel at 3:00, moderated by the wonderful book publicist (and person) Kim Dower, called something like, “Making a Book a Success.”

Say hi if you’re there…

This has nothing to do with writing, or does it? It does and it doesn’t. What I mean is, lots of male writers are sports fans but what about female writers? Joyce Carol Oates is into boxing–or used to be, a sport I Just Do Not Get At All. Male writers wear baseball caps, write about sports in their fiction (The Sportswriter, etc.) but what about women? Where are the stories and novels in which sports play a part?

That’s not what I meant to write when I started this post. What I meant to say is, I encourage my students to read the sports page. Even before I was so deeply into baseball, I read the page now and then, to refresh my approach to verbs. Sports writing has to move, can’t get bogged down in passive verbs. But when I became an Angels fan(atic) this past spring, my sports page reading progressed from once in a while to every day, first thing, the first part of the paper I look at. I love Bill Plaschke’s commentary and Helene Elliot’s, too.

When baseball season is over, I imagine I’ll enter a state of withdrawal, like I did with Diet Coke and coffee (both of which I drink again; all those headaches for for nothing). I will look at the sports section for any mention of my Angels. And my TV watching will decline by a ton of hours a week. The upside: More time for writing (although I rarely write at night anyway). Actually, there will just be more time with a hole in it where a baseball flew through. Until April 2008 when baseball season begins again. (I looked on the Angels web site; it doesn’t say….)

So I keep thinking I need to incorporate baseball into my writing. Justify all the time I spend on the game. As if it needs justification.

These are incredible….

An article about walking where Raymond Carver walked.