I keep listening to the Shiny Toy Guns' song "Le Disko" over and over.
Everything I've written today has failed, utterly, to amount to anything at all. Which isn't to say I didn't enjoy doing it. I'm trying things out, it's the early part of working on a given story, it's all false starts and trying to nail down exactly what I'm writing about. Or trying to write about. All I really produced tonight was two pages of over-worked comic book artists in the Fifties arguing over an apartment intercom when one shows up to deliver supplies to the other, who just left his wife and is a terrible, terrible drunk.
On top of that, I ended up reading an old almost-story I wrote one night about a year ago, churning out seventeen pages in a few hours. It's a dinner party, that old chestnut (let's face it, Joy did a better one), there are a lot of problems with it -- for one, there's six "in-camera" characters and one unseen one in those seventeen pages -- but I was rather impressed with the characters, the voice, the smoothness of some of the prose. It's quite self-indulgent in a lot of places, everyone operates in this state of hyper-drollness, they're so terribly good-looking, it feels as though someone's spliced yuppies together with bohemian artists and created some kind of super-boppies -- but it still reads in an oddly captivating way. But that's because it's mine, I suppose, and it's that narcissistic impulse to stare into photographs of you or looking in the mirror for hours on end.
Still, the story includes (what I think is) a passably amusing scene in a barber shop that I might expand into something on its own.
Or not.
I can't really get over that conceit of crooks trying to kill a crime writer using a box of wasps, and the horror of it being undercut by the writer happening to develop a weird ability to control the insects as they swarm over him, threatening to pucker his skin with their stings.