…I'm going to see Vampire Weekend with my kids tonight. If you've never heard of them, check the band out on YouTube. Their sound and lyrics are entirely original. They incorporate so many unusual instruments.

…Did some hard work on the novel. Chugging along.

…Reading "Bloodroot" by Amy Greene. I keep looking at her picture on the back--this blonde elfin girl that looks to be nineteen--and wondering how the heck she can write like that, with so many different and distinct voices.

…Here's some more random stuff from Annie Dillard:
"It takes years to write a book--between two and ten years. Less is so rare as to be statistically insignificant…Falkner wrote 'As I Lay Dying' in six weeks; he claimed he knocked it off in his spare time from a twelve-hour-a-day job performing manual labor. There are other examples from other continents and centuries, just as albinos, assassins, saints, big people, and little people show up from time to time in large populations. Out of a human population on earth of six billion, perhaps twenty people can write a serious book in a year. Some people can lift cars, too. Some people enter week-long sled-dog races, go over Niagra Falls in barrels, fly planes through the Arc de Triomphe. Some people feel no pain in childbirth. Some people eat cars. There is no call to take human extremes as norms."