It's 92 degrees in the evening today, a day spent in sweltering reminder of how housework can get away from you.  I wanted to go to Maxi Kim's talk at LACE, I really did.  I do regret missing it.

I awoke at ten, spent the morning dying my hair black and in ninja action at the laundromat.  Eluding attendants at launderland, yes, that's how I get my thrills these days, apparently, as I snuck in and stuck a twenty in the quarter machine. Slammed handfuls in my purse like Vegas and tip-toed out again.  At home, the laundry piled above the dresser by two feet, a teetering tower of panties and stank dresses.

It had to be done.  It just did.  And dear Katie, in an Ambien haze, was sleeping through the heat of the day.  I don't blame her, I wish I had as well.  But thanks to Wellbutrin and a slight hypomanic edge, I was running loads of laundry for the next six hours.

Yet now it's five-thirty, and there's still a load of towels and tablecloths on the floor, waiting to be taken down.

I skipped office hours today, and that is the other thing I feel guilty about.  Perhaps I can place them in the evening.

But our plan, the big plan for productivity, at the four day mark has had its successes and failures. Trying to throw down structure in floating stream of carefree summer willfulness, it's tough.   I've been pretty faithful to the office hours concept, and found that forcing myself to focus for two hours a day really increased my writing output.  I finished the essay for the Headcase Anthology (queer writers on mental illness), and have dived back into the novel, which may have two parts, may have four, I'm not even sure anymore.

But the heat, the dead heat, it kills everything.  I would love to go play tennis this evening, but it is still 92 degrees, and I have already broken a sweat just typing this.

We are embarking on a plan today, a plan to be more productive.  I felt that I wasn't getting any writing done, except for bloggy bits, so K and I are going to try setting "office hours" (don't laugh) between 1-3 pm.  During this time we will shut off the internet, turn off phones, and focus solely on writing.  Every day.  There are other elements to this plan, scrawled on notebook paper the day before in a fit of midsummer mania.  At six pm we must do some sort of physical activity (tennis, walking, biking, etc). Upon waking (after coffee) she will search for jobs and I will read that manuscript. 

After a week we will assess its successes or failures and modify if needed.  It is an effort to impose structure in that we are both just floating along in this July heat, no jobs in sight, no accountability in sight either.

I feel a bit ridiculously life coach-y in that I was the one who drew up the plan, as if - I sure haven't successfully applied these rules to my own life, how can I apply them to someone else?  But as with free time management, once one passes the party funtime phase of it, the depression hits, and that can be insurmountable unless...or untill...one begins to work independently.

The book I've begun has five parts, each set in a different city I've lived in: Portland, San Francisco, Valencia, San Diego, and Los Angeles. Each part begins with a poem, to give context and mood, then moves to narrative text.

Part 1: Cigarette Butts in a Chipped Teacup, is set in 1997-8, Portland.  It relates how Nicole/Nikki, a 19 year-old living in a messy punk house called the Dustbin, navigates her subculture as it crosses with her own rising attraction to women, namely her roommate Lana, and the beginnings of her own psychological problems.

As of this morning I have 17 pages of this, retyped and revised from an earlier, 120 page document.

Part 2 is set in 2003, San Francisco, and will take substantial revision of a three-story set in terms of point of view and tenses.  I wrote the stories originally in a very post-modern way, and I'm changing them back to a more traditional first person straighforward narrative.  Revision is key.

Part 3 is set in 2005, San Diego.  It discusses Nikki's isolation after the manic excitement of San Francisco, and her friendship with Micah, an HIV+ neighbor who becomes her only ally while she waits to go to graduate school.  I have a rough draft of this, but it needs some work.

Part 4 is set in 2006-8, Valencia.  This part will be the most difficult for me to write, as I vowed while at CalArts, not to write about my experiences there.  Therefore I have no base texts to bounce off of, and must write cold.  that's fine, I hope that by this point in the process i will be more able to tell where the story needs to go, and thus what this section needs to do for it.

Part 5 is set in 2009-10 Los Angeles.  I have a few fragmentary stories to work with here, but at this point a lot of the focus is going to be on tying the previous threads together into plot threads that cohere and coincide with the present state.  That is to say, I'll write this part when I get to it, hopefully.

So, that's my plan, I've decided that to keep myself going I must write not only for pleasure or for the self-indulgence of the thinly veiled memoir (pa-ha, I know it's obvious).  But this time I must write from fear, write from the nipping at my heels of the dogs of supported employment, the drool and leaden hands at the factory floor.  I must discipline myself this time.  I will try.