less crowded morning cafe

It’s been hard coming back into a working frame of mind.  Without a university setting, a syllabus to ache over and reprint a million times, students names to learn, reading responses to grade, I feel a little bit lost.  Because of some consulting work and other good fortunes, I’m able to spend much more time writing this year.  Full time writing at a desk with a big window overlooking Margit Island and the Danube.  With a new printer, unlimited coke lights, and a corkboard Györgyi installed for me last night, and into which is already pushpinned my writing schedule for the two completed fiction manuscripts that I’m currently circulating to agents and important details about my new characters for my new manuscript–Erzsébet Bogár, Mrs. Csontváry, and the rest of the crew inhabiting a 1920s-1990s Budapest world.  There is very little to disturb me except for a few side-trip jobs and the elephantine snoring of a cocker spaniel.

And still I’ve been finding it a little hard to get back to the millstone.  It still feels like summer.  Two Saturdays ago, we were driving back to Budapest from Szeged on the old 5 road, the one people used to lumber along before there were super highways.  Where you can still see farms, lavender fields, old churches, mostly vacant panzios and town plazas.  And though it would be usual for my cynical side to notice only the vacancy, rather I felt peaceful, settled, and still fully summer-aware.

We stopped into a little village Tesco and bought some bread with baked cheese.  And that’s all that happened.  I can’t even finish a full paragraph because the moment was just that simple.

So in writing this I guess I’m trying to explain my blog-absence for about a week, but also to publicly contemplate the fact that it is already September 1 and I am a little caught between setting and rising.  Here at my desk with my cork board and printer and coke light.  I need to get to work.