hi. my name is elizabeth. have you forgotten me? maybe.
A lot has changed since I last tried to pawn my apartment off on all of you (that didn’t go so well, but you can ask me about it in person). I live at home with my parents and dog. I have a full time job at a children’s book company in Cambridge (after having spent the summer dabbling in textbooks). I don’t go on very many adventures anymore, though I did go on one today. Anything else you want to know, just ask, but those are the basics.
I’ve been at my new job a month now and am settling into a routine. I find that living at home has put me back into the rhythm of things I did in high school. I eat dinner with my parents. Watch tv in the basement with Mike. Drive around in the honda listening to music as high as it can go. The music is all what I listened to when I was 16. I also started reading John Irving’s new book Last Night in Twisted River. Irving, was my favorite author in high school after I read A Prayer for Owen Meany. The way he writes has influenced both my writing style and my ideas of what a good story should entail. Lots of semi-colons, an intricate plot, characters you can empathize with, feel anxious towards, even despise and heaps of coincidences that are never actually a coincidence.
Here’s a passage from his latest books that maybe you will like as much as I do.
“One day, the writer would recognize the near simultaneity of connected but dissimilar momentous events —these are what move a story forward —but at the moment Danny lost consciousness in Carmella’s sweet-smelling arms, the exhausted boy had merely been thinking: How coincidental is this? (He was too young to know that, in any novel with a reasonable amount of forethought, there were no coincidences.)” pg 135
This scene takes place on Charter St in the North End, my home for 2 years.
I visited a granite quarry today and it took me right back to Owen Meany. On days like today, where it’s not too cold and not to hot, I can love New England. I understand Irving’s obsession with it as his home and as a setting.
I think it’s time I go finish my book.
(Also, after attempting to log into this blog for the first time in months I had to spend 10 minutes trying to remember my password. I then was instructed to update wordpress and after doing so was handed a fatal error on both the front end and back end. karma? Well we’re back now.)
