Onward, onward.

Now the dog and I hunker down to survive the heat: thank goodness for air conditioning, which makes all the difference between sweating through the hours (while wearing next to nothing and cursing myself for not having used our cooler days more productively) and cruising through my writing quota for yet another day. It's not big or obsessive. It's not dramatic. But it brings me a few pages closer to a completion, and that is no small thing.

I forgot to tell you, the other day, about what might be my favorite bookstore moment ever. While I ate a bagel for lunch on Monday, two high school girls sat at my table, paging through magazines. "Ugh," one of them said, "this magazine is too long." I looked her way, from under my eyelids, trying to be subtle. She was reading InStyle--and a short issue of it, at that.

We all have our burdens.