Scattered

This is going to be a scattered blog because my mind is scattered, although maybe it’d be more accurate to say my mind is distracted. I’m waiting for too many things. I’m waiting to hear my editor’s reaction to THE ARCHANGEL PROJECT (yes, I finished it a month ago, but it was actually due March 1 and she’s only now getting around to reading it). I’m waiting to hear something from Hollywood, although that will be a longer wait. And I'm waiting for the post-Katrina reconstruction of my house to be finished. That will be the longest wait of all.

Did you know there’s a protocol to submissions in Hollywood? Most production companies are associated with a studio, and one is supposed to submit a property to only one production company per studio. There’s also a pecking order among production companies at a given studio, which typically depends on how well—or how badly—a company’s last film performed. So if several production companies affiliated with the same studio are interested in a book, a smart agent sounds out which company is highest on the food chain and sends it there. My agent has assembled what she calls "anyone's dream list" of production companies that are interested. It certainly looks like a dream list to me. But it all moves so slowly.

This past weekend, everyone in the family pitched in to wage war on our house and cleaned madly from top to bottom. Just because we have no windowsills and there are holes in the floor is no reason to live like we're camping in a construction site. I decided I was fed up with not having a coat closet and that the time had come to clear out all the paint, drywall compound, and other assorted building materials that have been hiding in the entry closet since we moved back into the house post Katrina (I was waiting for the garage to get cleaned out, but I'm beginning to think that will never happen). As I pulled out rolls of painters' paper and boxes of wiping rags and stacks of caulk, the tile floor gradually began to emerge...and no baseboards. It turns out the closet has been stuffed with so much cr*p for so long that we totally forgot we'd never put the baseboards down in there. I know that's somehow symbolic of my life, but my mind's too scattered at the moment to pin it down.