In case you don’t recognize the phraseology in the headline, it’s from a song in the musical Sunday in the Park With George by Stephen Sondheim.  The George in question is a French artist named George Seurat, a pointillist, who, instead of painting with brush strokes, did so with thousands of tiny dots of color.  It’s been close to forty years since I saw the play, but as I recall, someone looks at one of Seurat’s paintings and asks him how he goes about doing it.  He replies that first he starts with a bit of sky, and then, bit by bit, the rest of the painting comes into focus.

That’s a lot how writing books works, too.  I start with a tiny piece and gradually—one scene at a time and one page at a time—the story comes into focus. When I shut down the computer last night the manuscript stood at 42,360 words or 44.55% of the book.  How do I know that?  The book is supposed to be around 100,000 words, give or take, because twenty books with that number of words fit in standard-sized shipping  boxes.  That means I count the words every day.  That’s how I can tell that I’m making forward progress.

The encouraging thing about being at 44% is that I’m that much closer to 60%.  In my experience, that’s usually the beginning of the banana peel when, the road to the end of the story is all downhill and fairly smooth sailing.

The book remains Unnamed Joanna #22.  I come from an era when no one knew what baby would be until he/she arrived, so I don’t have a name for sure yet, but one is niggling away at the edge of my mind.  I’m thinking about End Game, but I’m not sure that’s going to make it to the finish line.

But the fact is that when I sat down to write this, the first thing that came to mind was that song.  My head isn’t full of what Professor Henry Higgins would call “cotton, hay, and rags.”  It’s full of songs and lyrics, so many in fact it’s a wonder there’s any bandwidth left over for writing.  (Wait, did I just use the word bandwidth in a piece of casual correspondence?  Maybe after forty years of being married to a now-retired electronics engineer, some of the double E lingo has rubbed off on me.)

Some of the songs rattling around in my head are the ones our mother sang to us, ones my kids, grandkids, and greats will never know, including this tear jerker:

Oh, they cut down the old pine tree

And they hauled it away to the mill

To make a coffin of pine for that sweetheart of mine

They cut down the old pine tree.  

But she’s not alone in her grave tonight

’Tis there my heart will ever be

Though we drifted apart 

Still they cut down my heart.

When they cut down the old pine tree.

When I’m lying awake in the middle of the night, some random, long-ago song will turn up out of nowhere and I’ll spend the next hour or so trying to recreate the words.  Night before last the one that kept me awake for a while was Patti Page’s 1953 hit, How Much is that Doggie in the Window.  Most of the lyrics turned up in good order, but the one that stumped me was the two syllable word for the pet alternative she didn’t want in place of a dog.  It took a while, but I finally landed on the right answer—BUNNY.

Sometimes it’s an old Girl Scout song:

Oh, Mr. Johnny Quebec how could you be so mean?

I told you you’d be sorry for inventing that machine

Now all the neighbor’s cats and dogs will never no more be seen

They’ll all be ground to sausages in Johnny Quebec’s machine.

If you think that one’s politically incorrect there’s always:

Please Mr. Custer, 

Please don’t make me go.

Please Mr. Custer, 

I don’t wanna go.

There a injun waiting out there

Just waitin’ to take my hair.

A coward I’ve been called,

But I don’t wanna end up dead or bald.

And if you think that one’s bad, how about The Battle of New Orleans?

We fired our cannon till the barrel melted down

So we grabbed an alligator and we fought another round

We filled his head with cannonballs and powdered his behind

And when we touched the powder off the gator lost his mind.

PETA would definitely be up at arms about that one!

But now that I’ve exposed you to just a tiny bit of the junk that’s rattling around in my head, you’re probably as astonished as I am that there’s still room enough for me to write books, but there is, and it’s time for me to go back to my real work and continue putting it together, bit by bit.

In the meantime, I’m wishing you all a happy Friday and hoping I started your day with a smile.