Well, it seems to have cooled off a bit today, at least.

I'm doing laundry again. Three loads today. Where do all these dirty clothes come from?

It's strangely quiet in this apartment, with Daniel not around. At night, I hear strange things going bump and creak in odd corners. I go to see which pile of books has fallen over (the most likely source of a bump in our apartment) and I find the piles of books intact. Odd.

Maybe it's just been the building's way of complaining about the heat.

I've been doing a lot of reading. I finished Love's Executioner. A very compelling book - Yalom presents each case study almost as if it's a little mystery story: What is the key to this patient's problem? And can he find it before it's too late? ("Too late" most often meaning, "Patient gets fed up and quits therapy.")

Then I started reading Snake's Hands: The Fiction of John Crowley. After a couple of chapters it inspired me to go over to the Berkeley Public Library and pick up a biography of T.H. White that was mentioned in one of the essays. (Crowley's novel Beasts has quite a few nods to White's The Once and Future King, including a character who is both a Merlin figure and possibly a portrait of White himself.)

And while I was grabbing the White bio, I came across a Madeleine L'Engle memoir, A Circle of Quiet. I read it while loitering over an iced latte at Starbucks (it's not a very long book). I enjoyed it, but I wanted to know more about L'Engle's actual writing process. For a writer's memoir, it's curiously silent about what actually happens during all those hours spent in front of the typewriter.

L'Engle's definitely inspiring for anyone who's having trouble persisting in the face of rejection. During the first ten years of her writing career, she sold almost none of the books she wrote. A Wrinkle in Time was bounced by countless publishers. L'Engle recounts receiving yet another rejection letter on the morning of her fortieth birthday:

This seemed an obvious sign from heaven. I should stop trying to write. All during the decade of my thirties (the world's fifties) I went through spasms of guilt because I spent so much time writing, because I wasn't like a good New England housewife and mother. When I scrubbed the kitchen floor, the family cheered. I couldn't make decent pie crust. I always managed to get something red in with the white laundry in the washing machine, so that everybody wore streaky pink underwear. And with all the hours I spent writing, I was still not pulling my own weight financially.

So the rejection on the fortieth birthday seemed an unmistakable command: Stop this foolishness and learn to make cherry pie.

I covered the typewriter in a great gesture of renunciation. Then I walked around the room, bawling my head off. I was totally, unutterably miserable.

Suddenly I stopped, because I realized what my subconscious mind was doing while I was sobbing: my subconscious mind was busy working out a novel about failure.

And she uncovered the typewriter and went on.

I think anything following that would be an anticlimax. And it's time to move the laundry to the dryer. See you later.