Before I got up this morning, I lay in bed thinking about Paul Harvey, which led to thinking about Ray Stevens (there is a connection, though only my old chef at Cookies & Company in Athens is likely to get it), which led to thinking about Drawing Blood, because there was a piece of business in the novel about an employee of the Whirling Disk record store in Missing Mile who'd accidentally ordered something like fifty copies of Ray Stevens' Greatest Hits, and at the time this seemed hilarious to me. I still think it's pretty funny, but -- like many of the little in-jokes and cute references in Drawing Blood -- it is totally irrelevant to the story, and as I lay there, the idea came to me that every novelist starts out trying to create something that looks like the front of a beautiful tapestry and ends up creating something that looks -- at least to himself -- like the back of one. You, the reader, may see the carefully stitched horses and kings and Virgins and floral motifs. Or, if you don't like the book, you may not. Either way, you will never share my view, which is of all the messy, incoherent stitching on the back of the tapestry that is needed to create the design on the front. And the farther away I get, the messier it looks.

Anyway, I've worked that simile quite enough, and I am here to offer you news of a book, not to maunder about books in general. I'm happy to announce that Small Beer Press will be publishing a paperback "omnibus" edition of The Value of X and D*U*C*K, titled Second Line: Two Tales of Love and Cooking in New Orleans. (OK, much of D*U*C*K takes place outside New Orleans, but Two Tales of Love and Cooking in New Orleans and Opelousas would make for an unwieldy subtitle indeed.) "Second line," for anyone who doesn't know, is the New Orleans term for the crowd of revelers that follows a large parade, or for a smaller parade that usually takes place in a poor neighborhood, features brass bands, and often happens after a funeral, in order to celebrate the life of the deceased. There has been no actual death connected with the Liquor novels except the blessed passing of my relationship with Random House, but I think the title fits the book well, since TVoX and D*U*C*K are smaller works attached to the three "big" Liquor novels.

I am very excited about this project because it will make two books I like a lot more affordable and widely available, and also because I admire what Small Beer is doing and am pleased to be working with them. I believe their target publication date is October '09, so I'll have more on this as we get closer to that date. Sorry, I won't be touring or anything like that -- a book tour would be an utter impossibility for me right now -- but I do hope there will be some interesting interviews and other press for Second Line.

I want to repeat the comment I posted on louismaistros's blog regarding New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin's "Just kidding!" hotel special for Texas evacuees:

Nagin has done more damage to our city than any other single human being in history. "Spoons" Butler, Mark Essex, all the thieves in public office who have stolen money from our citizens (including our schoolchildren), even George W. Fucking Bush -- all pale in comparison to our current mayor's divisiveness, inability to think before speaking, and unshakable certainty that he is always right and his critics are just meanies who are "hurting the recovery." I think many Saints fans will agree with me that Nagin is the Aaron Brooks of politicians, grinning and eating crackers on the sideline after throwing his third interception of the game -- except that Nagin hasn't even led us to one playoff win.

In other, somewhat happier local news, Zachary Bosch's old apartment is for sale. I'm not sure this is the exact address where Zach lived at the beginning of Drawing Blood -- I'd have to go look and try to remember which one I had in mind -- but any of the upstairs spaces along tiny Rue Madison could have served as his. For just $15,000 more than I paid for my spacious house in the ghetto, you can live in a minuscule (71 square feet? Can they be serious?) but cute French Quarter pied-à-terre with a (fictitious) criminal history!

I never did sleep last night. Did another radio interview at SIX DAMN THIRTY A.M., then finally went to bed and managed to sleep until 1:00. After yesterday's excess of activity and emotion, today was for despair. Surely those awful old men will not change their minds. We can fight, we have to fight, but what are the chances of winning? I was visited by my old recurring belief that no matter what I found to try to save myself, it would be snatched away from me. The books. Nathan and William. Maybe Augie. The church. It seemed to be no more than I deserve, because I know exactly what unforgivable sin I committed. If I were on trial and Ivan and our other ferals who died after the failure of the federal levees were the judge and jury, I wouldn't expect them to absolve me. Rather, they should sentence me to a bad death alone on a filthy kitchen floor, just as Ivan had to endure.

Of course this kind of thinking is useless even if it's true, so I took some Klonopin and read some good books and got some more sleep, and now I'm hanging in there again, though the threads are somewhat thin. Everyone in the New Orleans area seems to have seen me on TV or heard me on the radio in the past two days (twelve million times, according to one source). I'm not entirely comfortable that my fellow parishioners have cast me as such a prominent spokesman -- not because I'm reluctant to help OLGC, but because I've only been a Catholic for about three weeks and I think we have other people who would do a far better job. But they think I'm famous or something, and maybe that will help a little (unless local viewers and listeners get so sick of me that they hope the archdiocese will close OLGC just to shut me the hell up). OLGC has given me so much that I can hardly refuse them this even if I feel a little weird about it.

And speaking of despair, what the hell ever happened to my R. Crumb comic by that name? It was essential to me when I was writing Drawing Blood, and then it seems as if I never saw it again. I have the various contents in my Complete Crumb collection, but it just ain't the same. Anybody out there got an extra copy of R. Crumb's Despair they can, um, spare?

William's situation is iffy. Our vet feels it's time for him to go, and this is a doctor I trust. However, William woke up seeming a little livelier this morning, ate some more ham, and isn't in pain, so Chris -- who's been working for the past five days and hasn't gotten to spend much time with William -- asked if we could try one more steroid shot/infusion of subcutaneous fluids and, if things aren't looking better by Thursday, do it then. I can't deny him those last two days with William, and of course I'm happy to have them myself. William has perked up before when the vet thought he was at death's door, so there's a chance it won't happen Thursday, but we've already had more time with him than we expected to when this began -- for which we are grateful.

Thanks for all the well-wishes. We appreciate them.

I was amused to read the following in officialgaiman:

A couple of odd FAQ mails came in accusing me of either lying or "jumping on the bandwagon"when I mentioned the other gay Neverwhere character. So I thought I'd point them to http://www.neilgaiman.com/journal/2003/06/questions-answered-neverwhere.asp. (Odd, because they didn't actually seem to be from readers of my stuff, but seemed to be from people who'd been led here from some sites where people were arguing about other things.) (Shrugs.)

I want to "jump on the bandwagon" too, so I'm announcing that Trevor and Zach in Drawing Blood, Andrew, Jay, Tran, Luke, Soren, and several more characters whose names I can't remember right now in Exquisite Corpse, Jared, Benny, and Frank in The Lazarus Heart, and Rickey and G-man in The Value of X and the Liquor books are gay. (I didn't include any characters from Lost Souls since most of the characters in that one seem to be of the Frank Booth orientation: "I'll fuck anything that MOOOOOOOOOOOOOVES!!!") I'll be happy to organize a press conference if anyone wishes to discuss these shocking revelations.

Bad high school English classes have given too many readers the idea that "theme" in literature is a ponderous concept, the sole province of Great Literature, something writers decide on before they write the first word of a novel. In truth, I think most stories, highbrow or otherwise, have a theme of some sort, and it's seldom a preconceived thing. It grows out of the story and the characters, and I believe few writers know what the themes of their novels are until the novels are finished, or at least well underway. Sometimes it doesn't become evident until years after you've written the damn thing.

In On Writing, Stephen King writes:

I don't believe any novelist, even one who's written forty-plus books, has too many thematic concerns; I have many interests, but only a few that are deep enough to power novels.

Of course I got to thinking about what my own "thematic concerns" might be, and I came up with a few I believe have run through my work over the years, regardless of how radically some readers may feel it has changed:

- The search for and creation of alternate families by characters whose biological families have rejected them (Lost Souls, Drawing Blood, The Value of X)

- The way the gay community sometimes victimizes itself almost as effectively as it is victimized by the religious right and its other obvious enemies (Exquisite Corpse, The Lazarus Heart, [to a lesser degree] Prime)

- How doing the work you truly want to do can power your life and fulfill your dreams (Liquor, D*U*C*K)

- How the everyday people of New Orleans, even more than the celebrities, the architecture, the food, the music, the spooky glamour, or any of the other things we're best known for, make it the unique place it is (Liquor, Prime, Soul Kitchen)

I don't know if this is of great interest to anybody, but I don't have much to say about my work these days (what work, ha-ha?), so I thought I'd share.