My city wakes in a rush of purple mist, rising up over the valley rim, hazing the green canopy of live oaks in a deep, quiet gray. The atmosphere in the mornings is always humid, particularly in the spring, when the mornings are cool and sleepy, the days burning bright, white-hot, reducing soil to sand, eroding at everything it touches.

This morning was quiet. Leaving Fortuna asleep, I climbed from our shared bed, clumsily tugged my ragged blue jeans (my favorite pair) over my hips, then crept outside to sit on the front porch, to loiter with the stray cats and observe the violet dawn. No horns...no sirens...a few stars still pinpoints overhead in the lavender sky...the sharp staccato of a grackle beginning to forage for the day...but none of the people-sounds I've grown accustomed to. Many people say this city is ugly, but if you know when to look, it can be very, very beautiful.

I cannot see a single ray of sunlight...not yet. In a few hours, the sun will slip free the veil of mist and settle its hands on the city until we are all long-tired of the blinding gold, however beautiful or necessary. The days are becoming hotter, and my skin is becoming paler now as I spend more and more time indoors, huddled at my keyboard in the moist dark.

Work has begun on the novel outline again, and as I return to it after hiatus, so many more facets emerge. My concern now is not 'whether or not there will be enough material' it is instead, 'how will I fit all of this into one book?' I suppose the break was what I needed, but as the layers and layers of associations and mythic patterns fall into place, I wonder if the beginning of the project will leave me stuck unable to see the trees for the forest...unable to isolate that one beginning point from the body of the tale at large.

Currently reviewing The Hero With a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell, and listening to the String Tribute to A Perfect Circle. There is nothing quite as sexy or as exhilarating as a bunch of musicians playing like they mean it...as though they love what they're doing.