Signed, Sealed, Delivered

Emma Adler just headed to the publisher. Now comes holding my breath for a couple of weeks while they look it over.

She came to me in a snippet of a dream. I saw a girl, sometimes standing before me and other times I looked through her eyes, peering through the window of a tar paper shack at an entire family dog piled atop a single, full sized bed. The parents had their heads at one end, along with a couple of the kids, and the others had theirs at the other, with feet and arms all tangled up in the middle.

Suddenly I was in the room, standing quietly next to them as they slept. Reaching out I gently woke up a boy, putting my fingers on his lips to keep him quiet and then taking his hand. We were young, sixteen maybe, and clad in threadbare clothes with dirty, unkempt hair. The home was a hovel, dirt floors and barren walls and a tin roof that let in more moonlight than it kept out.

Then we were outside. She/I touched his chest, and stroked his arm, and then he pulled her/me to him and we began to grope and kiss.

That's when the 44 ounce iced tea I drank before going to bed woke me up and sent me scurrying to the can.

The Evolution of Emma Adler is set in the 1930s, during the Great Depression and in the middle of the seven year drought known as the Dust Bowl years. I did a surprising amount of research on it; slang, prices, automobiles, typical meals, and thanks to Emma's obsession with the sirens of the silver screen, endless reading about and studying the photos of 1930s starlets. I have developed a new appreciation for Mae West back in her heyday, and a rabid dislike of the plucked and painted on half circle eyebrows that somehow managed to set the style back then. Anyhoo...

Sending Emma off to be weighed and measured is like sending a child off to college. You've done all you can, now all you can do is sit back and watch and hope it all turns out ok.

Would you like fries with that?

An old college professor once told me to strap on the blinkers and run my own race, not worry about how others run their own. While I have found a stiff margarita to be an outstanding substitution for racing blinkers, as well as much easier on my hair, I still suffer regular bouts of "who the fuck am I kidding?".

Every so often, and really it's more every than often, I read someone else's work and am left feeling as if I should bone up on the latest techniques for properly preparing french fries and cheeseburgers and leave the writing to those with real talent. I don't know why this happens, it's not as if my scribblings are so wretched that the reader is driven to drink, hoping to erase the chapters from his memory. Or hey, maybe they are! In that case I will be proud to have contributed a valuable resource for anyone who needs a reason to get completely blotto.

I write because I love to, even have to, because I can sit down in front of the Dell at the crack of noon and get up for my first 48 ounce iced chai tea latte two pink stuffs easy on the ice of the day and discover it's already 5 in the afternoon. The time flies almost as fast as my fingers. Sometimes it seems I have an unruly hoard in my head demanding to have their stories told, and I can't write fast enough.

Today was not one of those days though. Today was "research day", thanks to Miss Emma Adler whose tale of lust, betrayal, and revenge demands I understand the fashion trends, hairstyles, slang, and daily life of a teenager living in the dustbowl during the Great Depression.

For the record, I think Marian Marsh is one of the most beautiful women I've ever seen. I would gladly sacrifice a hundred Kardashians, Honey Boo Boos, and Snookies if I thought the gods would see fit to return old school glamour to Hollywood.