relax, jake, it's television

The season is coming to end and we don't know if we're going to be renewed; ratings are great, but the exchange rate with the distant country where we shoot is bad and the economics may not work out of the studio. The really brave me would tell my wife "honey, rein in everything, fire the housekeeper, cancel the gardener, do your yoga at home, forget that wedding we were going to go to in Bordeaux, tell the kids they'll have to apply for loans for school, I'm going to follow my crazy heart right now."

But I'm not going to do that.

I'm going to start a round of meetings on television shows that I don't watch, meetings in which I will be smart and charming and breezy and funny and insightful and cool and, like Scarlett O'Hara visiting Rhett all dressed up in mama's curtains, acting like a job is the last thing I need in the whole wide world.

Why?

I don't know. I am.

Maybe because I'm not brave.

Or maybe because I'm honest, and know that the truest thing Hemingway ever wrote was a tossed-away line (as if anything in Hemingway is ever tossed-away) in The Snows Of Kilimanjaro (and I'm paraphrasing, because I don't have the book at hand): "What you do for a living is what you do for a living."

Maybe because I like it.

Progress

Done with the first chapter of Part Two (of three parts.) I actually worked in Paris. Worked in a shadowy high-ceilinged room in an apartment that was a gift from Louis-Napoleon, Emperor of the French, to one of his mistresses (who must have had a taste for gilded everything). Worked while there were museums to see and neighborhoods to explore and boudin noir to eat all around me. Which is not, of course, to say that I didn't get in a good bit of Titian, Montmartre and boudin on the side.

The problem, however, is pace. A novel can not be written a chapter a month. Can't. So something more is going to have to give. But what? When I wake up at 3 a.m. and work until 6 I am a wreck at work by 2 p.m. Drowsing at the table in the writer's room, dozing during casting sessions. It's wrong. It's embarrassing. It sets a bad example for the baby writers on the staff and it looks bad to the powers above me. I can fight it by getting up and pacing around and forcing my eyes open. But losing sleep is not the answer. So what, then? What? Weekends are good, but I need more.

How am I going to do this?