After spending 6 hours in the car yesterday, driving back and forth to Grand Lake Stream to fetch my boys from camp, I'll be spending 5 in the car today, driving back and forth to Boothbay for the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance book signing. It's a traveling-salesman kind of week, apparently. But if I ever get back to my desk I am going to do the following:

1. Post some initial thoughts about my next "essay about books I can't stop reading." This one seems likely to deal with the modernists: Henry Green's Loving and Elizabeth Bowen's The Heat of the Day, and possibly Iris Murdoch's A Severed Head.

2. Start writing said essay.

3. Continue with my Shakespeare's-sonnet exercise. For those of you not at the Frost Place conference watching me fall off my chair with excitement, I am undertaking to write a series of fourteen-line poems that begin with the first word of each line of Shakespeare's sonnets--his transition words, not his rhymes. There are lots of sonnets, so I don't promise to get very far. Still, these kinds of projects can snowball. Look what happened with Paradise Lost. Attempt Number 1 resulted in a draft that, of course, sucks but is nonetheless convincing me that I could learn even more from this project than I had originally guessed.

Dinner last night: extremely hungry boys, ravenously exclaiming over grilled lemon-pepper chicken and ice cream with black cherry sauce. Shouts of "fresh meat!" which gave the pleasant family scene an overtone of Jaws.