My apartment

is astonishingly emptier than it was a week ago, though I've still got massive stacks of papers to sort through and organize; still rather chaotic, in other words, but I've soothed myself with a really excellent novel, Bloodlines by Jan Burke. I really like these books, and I think this one was the best yet--a complex narrative with a number of different time periods and interweaving stories, all completely mesmerizing. A most enjoyable read. And this afternoon on the train back from Philadelphia (I was getting my cat settled in at my mom's house, she is kindly taking him for the year as I can't have pets in my Cambridge sublet), the ritual Dick Francis reread, this time it was Hot Money. In Philadelphia we also dumped a ton of my stuff at the amazingly named Whosoever Gospel Mission, poured roughly 10 years' worth of coins (mostly nickels and pennies, some dimes, the quarters get picked out for laundry) into one of those supermarket machines ($126 and change even after the nine percent service deduction), I helped her sort through all the books in her house & packed up ten boxes to take to a place whose name I can't remember. All very useful. Now I must get back to the real work I have to finish between now and the end of the month. I'm having increasingly violent pangs regarding fiction-writing, I've been heavy on the academic stuff this summer and I am DYING to get to my novel revisions, but it will have to wait till September; on the train this afternoon I was also musing about a frivolous other novel I'd like to write (vampires and lots of sex, first-person narrator, slightly futuristic New York), but I'm psychologically locked in on a sequel to Dynamite No. 1 that I think I must write first. We will see. It is possible that if I work like a maniac I can write both of those this year plus the remaining two chapters and revisions for my academic book, but that has the sound of overreaching.