Hiatus Landed: Bay Area

I don't know why I'm writing a blog post right now.

I'm sitting on a couch in a house in a rather suburban part of Oakland, and it's raining. It's raining on both sides of the bay, where I spent the better part of the day and where I am now.

I was struck by the idea today that writing literature is a handy way of purging demons from your past—all those little emotional hangups that we could pay a therapist to talk through or simply invent characters and make them go through the same thing.

And the characters are the easy part. The hard part is the situation. I may not have an overwhelming character, but I find myself in the most interesting situations. And as I accrue new ones, I notice the patterns, the inversions, retrogrades and transpositions of the same themes.

This is also a good time to redefine the blog title, embody the struggle.

The original quote is referring to a novel, not a character. In my head, I had it wrong, whether or not I ever explained it.

For a *novel* to have merit, *it* must embody the struggle of some characters against that keeps them from existing in their own way. The characters struggle, the novel embodies the struggle.

And I am merely a character. Which makes the novel the blog. So the *blog* embodies the struggle. I write the blog to embody my struggle.

So it does make sense. Sorry to think out loud.

Stay tuned, though, for some fiction. It may be loosely based on reality. But the names will be changed to protect the innocent—and the guilty.