From Rózsadomb Presszó

(For those of you reading on your mobile devices, I offer an extract of this message at the bottom.)

Hi.

After the last missive, I realized that I enjoy writing to you by hand, sharing glimpses of the world around me. It's Friday here and it's snowing outside. I wrote the message the night before last, but this is what I'm seeing now:

From the tidiness and apparent order, you might guess that I have a smooth, Zen-like approach to my work, but that's all an intentional lie. I maintain the environment to offset the cantankerous, drunken brawl that is my creative innards working out the ideas, struggling with ugly prose, strangling the ego that demands instant gratification or at least validation.

But right now, boy, I love the snow. We haven't had a good snow in a few weeks, since just before Christmas. It doesn't stick around for a long time. It's noon and the church bells are ringing, a steady report for two minutes or so.

Work continues on Budapastiche, but I'm in a different stage of drafting so my releases will continue to be more sporadic. I had to come to terms with that, which is part of what I was working out and sharing in the message below. So, travel back with me two days ago. It was early evening and I had the impulse to get out of the flat and do some work out in the real world, and that's how this message came to be.

The café looks more like a bar and keeps bar hours, but the signage insists that it's something else. I was fine with either distinction. They serve beer and a bit of food, which was more my speed at this time of day.

I have been several times to the café across the street–in fact, it's the very café where my previous dispatch about walking through the Christmas market and whatnot wound up--and many times I've thought to myself, I have to check out the place across the street. Here's a view of the place from that excursion. You can see it on the left:

But on the more recent evening, I was inside that room with the narrow windows above the awning, looking out. In fact, in the photo below, you can see a woman in the third pane from the right sitting in the very same place where the picture above was snapped.

And while I'm at it, why not give you a cartographical reference to the mirrored images above? I can't think of a single reason.

Anyway, I went inside and ordered a beer, and took it to the second floor to find a table, which was an easy prospect as there were only three patrons in the place, myself included. I had the impulse to bring my small, rechargeable desk lamp, and that proved to be a useful instinct. Here's my table.

And here's what I recorded of the moment:

Moving forward, I will intersperse images from the second floor of Rózsadomb Presszó with my message. It will look something like this:

One of the perils of writing your dispatches on notecards while out and about in Hungarian cafés is that sometimes you lose a notecard. And that's what happened here. Maybe it will turn up, but in the meantime, I was saying this:

"is that you speak with very little accent."

Then I went on to reveal something so poignant and insightful that you, dear reader, would lament that you almost didn't read this far. But I forgot that part, probably dropped it under my table. It was really good, though.

So here are a couple more shots:

That last one is a bicycle seat (non-functioning). I like it.

So that's about it for now. Sorry about losing the punchline. More soon. And as the header of this dispatch proves, chapter work is happening. Bear with me.

Love you,

Chip

PS. Oh yeah, here's some text to scan for you nutters reading this on your Blackberry (unedited from its original form):

Another dispatch, a mid-January update. The cadence of my releases has gotten blown up and that was causing me some distress, but then a number of things began occurring to me. By the way, I am sitting in this bar/coffee house down the way from my flat.

A cover of "Psycho Killer" by The Cube Guys is playing. That's the vibe. I like this place. I like the lighting. Outside the streetcars, the trams, cruise up and down Margit körút.

So as I say, I realized that it's perfectly reasonable that my work, or rather my delivery of the work, would slow as the stories begin to weave together toward a conclusion of the novel. Foremost is that I had already written a first draft of many of the

chapters that got us to where we are. Everything now is new. And finding my way through these passages and crafting the prose, it takes more time. It's more work, and I enjoy the work, even when the passages that took me several hours to write wind up in the discard pile.

I love the craft, but some things you cannot rush without compromising the work and the love both.
There are only two other people in this part of the cafe, two Hungarian men. Thirties, handsome. Having a conversation with a conspiratorial town [SIC, tone] that makes me think

they are creatives. That kind of conspiracy. The good kind. I love where I am right now, this table, this cafe on this street, in this city. The men count out coins. They speak about numbers and beer sizes. Pohar and Korso. One of them grabs their empty glasses and goes downstairs

for another round.
So, a couple of weeks of mild despair ended when I realized that the whole point is to love the process, and everything else is secondary.
I did another thing. I loaded the story onto my kindle [SIC] and read it the way one might read any old novel. I found typos and over-writing with

some of the passages, but I felt good about what is behind that veil of imperfection. Thank god. I still love the characters, even when I see them through my faulty prose. I will refrain from another edit on those chapters, but it appeals to me because I see work that needs a final polish to get it

where I want it to be.
I love the Hungarian language. It doesn't sound like any other language and learning it is a slower prospect than writing fiction, but I'm getting there. My aptitude is just past infant. But I often get the best compliment that you can get from a native speaker: which...

One of the perils of writing your dispatches on notecards while out and about in Hungarian cafés is that sometimes you lose a notecard. And that's what happened here. Maybe it will turn up, but in the meantime, I was saying this:

...is that you speak with very little accent.