Here's another big laff for anyone out there who's ever thought longingly of the Glamorous Writing Life: today, my finances completely destroyed by having to stay over an extra day in DC, then purchase a new computer immediately upon arriving home, I enjoyed the glamorous experience of grubbing change out of the car in order to buy a small bag of dog food. I'm not flat-out broke, but for some reason my bank placed a hold on the deposit I made Saturday, and I'll have no access to any money at all until Monday. I'd planned to make groceries today, but looks like it'll be grits again (and again, and again).

This is not such a terrible way to live when you're 23 -- I know, because I did it then too -- but at 37 it's pathetic and demeaning.

Meanwhile, just as it looks like Crown is finally ready to make an offer on the next book(s), my agent is jetting off to Europe for two weeks. I seriously think I picked the wrong end of the business.

In the talk we saw at the Press Club, Paul Theroux spoke of someone becoming "unhinged." That's a good word for my general state of mind lately. I'm driven to distraction by the queer-baiting C*nst*t*t**n*l *m*ndm*nt. I need to get to work on something, even just a short story, but the one I started before the trip doesn't seem to want to go anywhere and I have no other ideas. I really want to be working on a novel, but I find myself paralyzed by the uncertainty of whether it will sell, even though my agent has assured me it will. (I like my agent, but if you could put agents' promises in the bank, I'd have a canal house in Amsterdam by now.) I mentioned this to Peter Straub when he kindly called to see how we got through the hurricane, and he advised me to remember what it was like when I was a hungry kid who did it just because I had to do it, with no idea whether I'd ever sell even one book. Well, yeah. Sensible advice. If Crown decided they didn't want to make an offer on this novel, I'd still want to write it; the question is whether I'd be able to afford to. I'm no kid any more, but I'm still hungry, and now I have 25 other hungry mouths depending on me. With no novel advance and no other source of income aside from the odd royalty check, I'm not sure I would have the freedom to write a novel; I'd probably have to turn at once to short stories and other things that produce smaller but more immediate amounts of money.

These thoughts, and others like them, have kept me from getting a full night's sleep since I got back from DC. I take Excedrin PM, sleep for a few hours, find myself wide awake at the hideous hour of 4 or 5 AM, take more Excedrin PM, read for an hour, wake up with a headache. When I do sleep, I have tiring dreams of swimming the Mississippi River, or being prepped for surgery with a long curved needle that scrapes across my skull, or watching a brick wall collapse onto someone trying to scale it, crushing him. You needn't be Freud to see the symbolism in those little loveys.

Yes, I am definitely unhinged. That's one of the things I like best about Theroux: his love for precise language ensures that he can almost always supply the perfect word.

I'll be OK, though. I mean, look at the alternative.