Waiting for Appliances and other things

I’m waiting for some appliances we ordered to be delivered today. They were supposed to call between twelve and four. It’s almost one. I’m hoping sometime in the next hour.

And yes, I’m also waiting for a call about my last interview. They contacted me earlier this week asking for an unofficial copy of my transcripts. That seemed like a good sign, but I haven’t heard anything since then. If it doesn’t work out, I’ll be really disappointed and depressed for a while, but we’ll just move on to something else. We are probably going to make some major decisions based on what happens with this last interview…if I get it, we’ll stick around here a couple of years. If not, we’ll probably start working toward leaving sometime in 2011. It will be a ton of work, but that may be what it takes to get me back in the workforce and to have us return to some kind of stability. I’m okay either way.

I’m reading MATTERHORN by Karl Marlantes. I’m about three quarters through it. The author served in Vietnam and wrote a novel based on his experiences. The interesting thing is, the novel was only published this year, and it’s winning all sorts of accolades and awards. I would like to find out if he’d been working on the book for all those years, or if it was something that just percolated for a long time until he felt it was time to write it.

I’m always interested in cases where books take years to write. I just started COMPASS ROSE, a sequel to SPARTINA. SPARTINA came out in 1989, when it won the National Book Award. COMPASS ROSE came out this year. Yet the story continues more or less as if the events of SPARTINA had just occurred [only a few months pass between the end of one book and the beginning of the next.] Did the author take a break on the characters for nearly twenty years, then start up again? Or was it a case where the book was in the process of being written for several years and only now has been published? Supposedly it is to be a cycle of novels about fishing life in Rhode Island. I wonder how many remain and if they are finished.

Maybe it’s a situation where the characters lie dormant for years and then start speaking to the author again, like friends who make up after a fight. Another author I like, Poppy Z. Brite, had a series of mysteries that was ended after three installments [I believe one remains unpublished.] It was a case where the publisher decided they didn’t think there was a market for the books [which was ridiculous.] In her blog, she mentioned that she sometimes dreams of those characters, and is glad that they continue to have some kind of existence even if she is no longer writing about them.

Still waiting. I’m hoping they probably are finishing up lunch and then will come by in the next hour. I will be glad when today is over.