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2001-05-07 | 9:54 p.m.

I apologize for posting so many boring entries lately.

The problem is I'm avoiding working on my screenplays and other writing. Before we left for Florida, I sent a few pages of the political screenplay to Frank--we're supposed to be working on it together--and I haven't heard back from him, so I suspect he didn't like what I did. I did tell him not to expect it to be any good, because I'm just trying to plot it out, but he has high standards. And I hate to fall short of his expectations. He likes everything to be of the highest quality from start to finish. To put it another way, he starts out with better material than I do, so maybe it's hard for him to imagine that I can ever sculpt mine into a meaningful shape. My first draft is dirt, second draft I add water, third draft I mix it up, fourth draft I add minerals, and so on. It takes so much effort just to get me to clay that it must seem unlikely that I will ever get around to a likeness.

But look, my dear, there's nothing else to do but to do it. You've heard this before but it bears repeating: The writers who succeed aren't necessarily the most talented, they're just the ones who kept plugging away. Frank is an extraordinarily talented writer but he has almost as much trouble getting his projects off the ground as I do. We're both of us just wandering around, enjoying the weather, praising the strong wind, and tripping over our beautiful kites.

Duff just called from the BART station to tell me about his LSAT class. He was all excited about it because he learned a trick for diagramming logic problems that he estimates will buy him 7 or 8 points on the test. (That is a big difference between him and me, because I'm way too superstitious to ever say stuff like that. But because he was a competitive athlete, he is very comfortable with predicting outcomes.) He made me laugh when he said, "I was talking circles around these people. Not that they're so dumb--I just talk in circles anyway."

Cripes. I just ate 10 of those Ling Ling potstickers and now I feel like I'm going to keel over. Like a panda.

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