Old Notes

I took to transcribing our phone calls some time ago. You want me to call you no more than twice a month, and these calls last a maximum of ten minutes, so it's really not that much work to get a pad of Post-Its and jot down your half of the conversation. It's caused me to say less and less because I'm busy writing,  but you don't really seem to care. You only want soundbites of "what's new."

The other day you wrote me an email to tell me not to call this Sunday (today) because it is Oscar Sunday and you don't want me to interrupt. I went looking for last year's reaction to the ceremony. I mean, I would swear that for the past eight years you've done nothing but complain about how boring the show is. But I couldn't find notes about the Oscars. I found complaints about the Golden Globes and freelance clients and your "stupid" writers' group. But nothing about the Oscars. I would imagine that your renewed interest in the ceremony has something to do with a renewed interest in screenwriting.

As it turns out, I found a set of notes from a night about a year ago when there was no episode of Brothers and Sisters, when ABC "made" you "suffer" through an extra hour of Extreme Makeover Home Edition. ("What do they care? They don't care.") It had to be at least a year ago, before you'd discovered the wonders of Lulu.com. You told me you were "working" on the novel, but you were "not finding much to change."

You were "not finding much to change."

Perhaps this was a different novel? Oh no. This was The Worst Novel Ever that you were "working" on. Because there was not much to change, you were mostly looking for excerpts to send to agents. You had decided that the scene where "they make LOVE" was the way to go. You said this as though it were the most scandalous way of describing raunchy sex. Make LUHV.

In case I didn't know exactly which scene you were talking about—the scene you had been so impressed with when you wrote it in what? 1992? Long before you were aware of Candace Bushnell and the way a certain Samantha would influence how a generation of women viewed sex and sexuality—a scene you described briefly as "the bride and groom have a fight and then make love in the wedding coordinator's office. That's a good one." Oh my god. As I was typing this, I put "on the wedding coordinator's desk." But even that is too graphic for you. No, no. They make luuhv in a room. They don't fuck on someone's desk. Oh my god. Dear readers, you can only imagine how brilliant of a scene this must be. But [author] was still completely impressed with her handiwork more than ten years later.