On Saturday I completed 20 new pages of a first draft I began in 1994; I'm in unexplored territory now, splashing in the void sans waterwings. It's an interesting experience, this attempt to jump-start vibes and emotions now 10 years gone, and make the transition like a smooth piece of film--the happy, content 31-year-old masquerading as the gloomy, pessimistic 21-year-old who thought he was doomed to an existence on the periphery. In order to pull this off, I usually have to psych myself out from within, kinda pile the world's weight on my brain, close my eyes, and let my fingers go crazy, snatching every remembered scrap of bullshit and desperation from every corner and breathing into it a sorta sad-sack glory.

The hardest part has proven to be the dialogue. I hate writing dialogue in fiction, because inevitably every character winds up sounding like the writer, speaking in a stupendously literate voice they couldn't have possibly mustered had they been real people. To me, it's always a copout when you pick up a book, and there's, like, an eight-year-old character, and he's way too wry and lucid for his age, leaning on a fanciful polysyllabicism like a wrought-iron crutch. But then, on the other hand, if you opt for realism, how do you make the conversations between characters in their early 20s interesting, when on paper they seem so banal? Stay tuned...

In other news, I was at the bookstore on Saturday and impulsively bought a copy of Vincent Bugliosi's Helter Skelter, which I hadn't read since the eighth grade. Amazing how the story has more resonance when you actually live in Southern California and are familiar with the grounds the Family once trod. "Wow, the LaBiancas lived near Griffith Park? I go through that park every day!" "Hey, I've been to a party on Cielo Drive!" "The Manson Girls squatted at the corner of Temple and Broadway, right outside the Hall of Justice? Dude, I walk over that spot every night!" It's an extra jolt of terror, to know that you blithely brush past the almost phantasmic presence of one of California's darkest chapters.

Listening to the new Modest Mouse. Great shit.