As we know, I am working on a novel. In self-aggrandizing jest, I call it The Great American Novel. But in reality, I don’t actually aspire to such grandeur. My novel is not so wide in scope. It isprimarily an examination of loneliness and the transience of city life on a personal scale. It doesn’t really deal with things like the bond beyond a parent and a child and the effects of their past on their present relationship (that stuff is golden as it’s timeless and universal). Now that I think about it, my novel is rather sparse when it comes to themes. I delve into the curious condition of being alone in a large city. I touch on how familiarity breeds a certain sort of stasis, and how modern technologies have led us to be more alone. It is largely, as I’ve taken to calling it, a portrait of loneliness. As such, it’s not a piece of fiction that is all-encompassing in the various conditions of human nature. No, it’s more focused.

In my Moleskine, I’ve got all these little boxes of scribblings with the heading IDEA and THEME. I have lots of them dotting the pages, but when I take a step back, I see that at the core they’re really mostly about the broad sentiment of loneliness. Failed connections, the cyclical nature of loneliness, the desire to be free of it, all that good stuff; but it’s still narrow.Do I need to expand? I don’t think I should. I feel that I’d be overreaching. This is, after all, my first novel. Hmm…now I can’t fall asleep…