I generally have a dozen ideas as to what to write about in my dispatches. But when it comes time to come up with a title, none of the ideas surface. This is most likely because I am now writing my dispatches later in the day and am pretty tired. Tonight, I have a slight headache.

This morning, I did work on Shelf Life – I’m now on Part III, the setting of which is the former banquet room of the historic Eagle Hotel. I do as my former mentor, Donald Murray, suggested, and I write for surprise. Today what surfaced was my early interactions with Cherokee Brown, who lives in the hotel, upstairs. I talk about abundance in relation to our both watching Car Quest close, and the parking lot and building being gutted. I’m also able to write about Bishop’s Attic, and use this as an example of overabundance.

Cherokee spends a lot of time there, so I talked about our mutual love of salvaging, by using the Car Quest and Bishop’s Attic examples to make my point. Throughout the book, I talk about other’s having to deal with over abundance.

I feel like the book is holding together okay. I have gotten this far when writing other documents and given up because I lack and don’t know how to find narrative continuity. This manuscript has, in this respect, what the others have lacked.

I had this idea today – I thought I’d like to go to a writer’s colony for two weeks and do nothing but work on Shelf Life. I can’t work for two weeks in an uninterrupted fashion here because even on the home front there are too many distractions. Tonight, for example, I spent time cutting down cow parsnip with my scythe.

I still have a lot of ground to cover in writing this book. But my allowing myself to run with what materializes in my subconscious is working. Writing is like running – it’s easy after the fact, but at the onset it is difficult. And so, I know that if I don’t give myself that hour (which right now is all the time I have), I will again abandon this project.

Today was pretty hectic. I assisted Sharon, who is very crafty, as she decorated the baskets that are going to be up as auction items on Saturday. I also cleaned books and went to Physical Therapy.

Pretty funny – I shared pool space with a large fellow who as it turns out, knows a former BLBP volunteer. We traded stories and made our respective physical therapists laugh.

Pete was at the hotel when I got back – he went to town and picked up twenty-three boxes of books from Title Wave. He reboxed the fiction and nonfiction, and I reboxed the children’s books.

I keep telling people that in order to get good books out there, we have to have a large inventory. And so, the better books are getting out on the shelves.

Next: 160.6/12/25: The Best Weather Day