Last debate:the birth of cool?

summertime

I'm in Florida now, to see Charles, revise my novel and swim. It's hot and blue and the clouds are bigger and closer and more rococco than at home, hanging over the beach like MoMa installations. All the shapes and shades of white and gray make it easy to think of writing, of structure and pathways. Whenever I write now, I keep the thought of my next book (which changes from day to day) in my mind like a reward, the sweeter, riper story I can work on if I only finish this. Work then pleasure. Beginnings are pleasure.

I want to write about ghosts, chimpanzees, country houses, unhappy love, pomegranates in myth and martinis. Of course I've already thought of a ghost chimpanzee bartender, a longtime resident of the Lower East Side, who's always bothering Persephone in her summer house, persuading her to use her special powers to solve murders instead of lounging lazily with her codependent, imperious mother. The chimpanzee loves Persephone—loves her dark, smoky beauty, her irony, her immortal cool. Persephone can't love anyone, having been abused in her youth, and is therefore, to her dismay, the quintessential private detective. Demeter, in the meantime, has discovered that Hades has recently bought a cellphone with a family plan, and...but I'm getting ahead of myself.

Really I just miss my country house with the snakes in the basement and the vines creeping in the windows, and I miss childhood when I read Greek myths all day while lying in the yard imagining love. I haven't had the perfect pomegranate martini yet but they sure are pretty.