The difference between writing essays and books and writing a blog is that you can get chatty in a blog. Go off in various directions, ramble along, add details that really don't have a whole lot to do with the main theme of what you're writing about. (Though blogs more likely have topics rather than themes.) When I write an essay or pages in a non-fiction book I get chatty and then have to go back and rewrite (and rewrite and rewrite.)

Why am I telling you this? Because I feel chatty today. I want you to know some of the wonderful books I've been reading (Keith Richards' LIFE, Mark Salzman's THE MAN IN THE EMPTY BOAT, Meghan Daum's MY MISSPENT YOUTH, and now Anne Lamott's delicious new memoir, SOME ASSEMBLY REQUIRED) and also tell you why I haven't been blogging, chatty or otherwise, lately.

Three days before A YEAR OF WRITING DANGEROUSLY went off to the printer, I heard Mark Salzman at the L.A. Public Library – he did a performance piece that had turned into his above memoir – and I was so blown away, and loved him so much that I had to write an entry about him in the book. My editor allowed me to cajole him into one more change (a whole page of change actually), and we got it in the book at the very last minute. So that took up some time. And I was getting ready for my new class at UCLA, and working on the next book due in September, and then went off to become comatose on a warm beach (see entry below) – and then had twenty-five people for Easter brunch. (See Nelson at the brunch above.)

But the big news, the real chatty cathy stuff is that in the middle of all this I bought a house. A cabin in Lake Arrowhead that's down the street from one of my daughters. And now I have to sell my other cabin that's on the opposite side of the lake. And not only that, but I bought a real fixer-upper. A 1936 fixer upper. A house that my friend/contractor Bucky begged me not to buy because it has so many issues. The only thing this has to do with writing is that I intend to take notes.