Birthday Eve

The boys love to celebrate “Birthday Eve,” especially since it carries with it the same privilege as Christmas Eve: one present early. Just as Daniel did the day before his birthday, Alex is setting up a table with imaginary cake and ice cream surrounded by all his friends. These are mostly stuffed animals with makeshift party hats, including a rare appearance by Alex’s friend “the invisible man.” He adhered a party hat to the upright part of his chair to simulate invisible-man wearing a party hat, too. These boys crack me up. We’re still awaiting our pay so we can celebrate a little with them today. Which means this blog will run silent run deep (mostly silent) tomorrow on Alex’s actual birthday. No work on the book will be possible.

Mom just shut off “The Biography of Sergei Eisenstein,” a famous Russian filmmaker, to put some more appropriate birthday fare for the boys: Looney Tunes (the Road Runner disc). Yesterday I “did some research” (a.k.a. putzing around on the Internet googling everything even indirectly related to something in my book in lieu of actual writing and revision) and read up on the San Jose Gurdwara (Sikh Temple) where the funeral for Robbie’s mother is going to take place when I edit that rather long and complex two-scene set today. It’s a beautiful-looking building; I just wish there were some online interior photos so I could accurately write about a few details on the place. Instead I have to google other temples and fake it. It’s also awfully hard to pull two different and distinctive eulogy-style soliloquies out of my butt – one for a mentally disabled 23-year-old Sikh man and the other for his enraged, drunken, widowed father. I want something significant said, but I have to make them realistic and neither one uncharacteristically eloquent.

I rearranged a lot of the scenes of my book yesterday after I printed out a scene list. I think the narrative rhythm will be enhanced. I’ve read before that if you are able to rearrange the scenes in your book without too much trouble, it might not be a good thing (although I can’t recall precisely what they said the problem was). It concerns me a bit, but it’s not as if I don’t have to significantly alter each scene in its new position in the tale’s timeline. It further seems to me that Robbie’s story is rather episodic by nature; he sort of drifts to and from work and isn’t very assertive and things happen TO him rather than him doing a whole lot. By the end of the book his personality has become much more independent and self-reliant so those scenes likely wouldn’t be relocated so easily. Plus, I’ve been through this book so many times that no matter which scene I pick up to work on, my mind has a pretty good handle of where Robbie is on his in-story developmental arc (from very dependent in the beginning to damn close to an typical adult at the very end).

DING! Ten minutes. See you in the literary trenches, soldier.