Enjoying August in Connecticut. A little too hot at the start of the trip but now just lovely. Working on a couple of writing projects both of which have New Narrative qualities and San Francisco connections. And both a pushing themselves to be longer than the short story form I am trying to contain them in.

 I realize I am the kind of writer who writes less and then fattens out the writing with more detail turning a sentence into a paragraph and a paragraph into a chapter. I'm sure as I continue to work on it, that that will be the case for what I am now calling The Boy Brothel.  Set in San Francisco in the late 1860's, the story is set on the just becoming fashionable Nob Hill.  The story takes place in and around a fancy and discrete house of male prostitution.

I am still hopeful that I can constrain French Steam to a longish short story while still giving enough meat to the ending which right now feels too slight.

I may if I persist in this return to this blog post some of this work here along with some of the shorter work I am doing as part of Dodie Bellamy's workshop.  Each week in addition to presenting part or all of our current projects to the group we do exercises assigned by Dodie or sometimes Kevin Killian.  These are typically a page or so in length.

My favorite recent one was writing like Anne McGuire in her long running project about flying hospital planes and farm life.  A sort of 1950s SciFi thing,