The Way Things Go...

Hello, my Dears,

The view from where I sit writing this:

As you know, I sent no chapter last week, and although I have a few ready, I will wait to send the next because I want to share a few thoughts and situational tidbits.

The past week, ten days really, have been punctuated by a long squeal of screeching tires. Imagine cartoon tires, please; something less triggering than actual screeching tires. Or better yet, imagine a cartoon locomotive conductor hitting the brakes because the coyote, in his unyielding effort to make lunch of the road runner, took out the bridge with a barrel of ACME dynamite. Let's think of this as a fun but abrupt end to steady forward motion that started in late June and went something like this:

LA to DC to NC to LA to Budapest to NYC to LA to Shasta, CA to LA to Arkansas to LA to Cleveland to Budapest.

It was a lot of running about, but now I am back in Budapest with a plan to hunker down and get some work done—the stationary kind. When I started working on Budapastiche in late 2022, I planned to stockpile eight chapters and maintain that stockpile so I could weather any busy spells without regularly missing a Friday dispatch. But boy, I didn't foresee the most peripatetic year of the last decade coming my way. And happily, I look back on the work, and that schedule held up. Then, over the past few days, I've become happy about this brief pause because I've learned some things, and I caught myself doing something that wasn't good.

Which is this: as I closed in on the last third of the novel, I started wondering what the world will think about the finished work. That's how the artist's fear starts: what will the whole wide world think about this? It's a ridiculous concern, but it doesn't just show up one day and knock on your door. No, it seeps through the cracks like carbon monoxide. You don't recognize the effects at first, and that's why I am grateful for this little pause. I saw that external concern creeping into my process, and now I can eject it and get back to the one-on-one communion with the process.

You can't judge a body and love a body at the same time, whether that body is made of flesh and bone, alabaster, or words… It simply cannot be done.

In the second part of the story, the characters and their narratives begin blending. We find them reflecting off one another. External perceptions challenge internal ones, mainly for the better, because I believe people are mostly good despite their shortcomings. The chaos of my autumn months notwithstanding, the work has continued. Still, my drafting became scattered across notebooks as I did the work writing and editing on airplanes, in a condo on a lake deep in the Ozarks, or during fits of insomnia in my sister's basement. So this past week has seen the consolidation of those chapter snippets and rewrites into my drafting system, and thank goodness I felt the love for the body as I went. For now, I am immersed in that process and am appreciating it as a part of the journey.

"So, "the cynic interjects, "what you're saying is that the dog ate your homework."

To which I reply, "Perhaps, but more like a civet cat and your coffee is coming right up, Sir."

Something else has come up over these past few weeks: an impulse to share a bit of my beat-by-beat experience over here. The last time I lived in Europe, I did a bit of such chronicling. "Blogging" was relatively new, and I rejected the idea because what a stupid word, "blog." So, I published regular entries of hard-coded HTML pages on chipwarren.com that, in their aggregation, could only be considered a blog. I'm such an asshole.

Still, when I look back on the record of my first habit spell in Eastern Europe, I wish I had a deeper log of the experience. I have those entries, a handful of notebooks, and a bunch of photographs, but there is more I could've captured. So this time, I've been experimenting with a third capture mode: audio recordings. I have the gear, so when an impulse hits, I pin on a mic and capture the thought or the moment, whatever is happening. So, depending on how things go, I may begin compiling and sharing that capture, all three forms of it, in something I'm tentatively calling "my blog." I'm joking. Fuck that word.

So, for now, I will continue day by day, and I will share all of what I am compelled to share. I may have a journey to Ukraine in the near future, so that should yield some observations, images, and reflections… So stay tuned. And more of Budapest in the weeks to come…

Love you all,

Chip

PS. A few more images of these first few days: