Steinbeck

Yesterday I went to Half Price Books (one thing I do love about Texas) because they are having an “everything 20% off” Labor Day weekend sale.  As I was browsing their mythology / folktale section in search of The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell – no luck – I overheard a mother and daughter arguing.  They were shopping for school books and the daughter wrote down the titles, but not the authors, from her required reading list.  Neither could remember who wrote The Grapes of Wrath.

I told them.  Someday I should read The Grapes of Wrath.

Today at work I will be working at the register and world-building for my upcoming NaNoWriMo novel.  I wonder if other people live most of their lives wandering around inside their brains, too.  I think I might call my new protagonist Ellen.  Ellen…Helen…Hélène…Athene…Athena…  The gray-eyed goddess and the rosy-fingered dawn.  Perhaps I will invent epithets for my book; then I can be like Homer, and people will read my work for the next twenty-plus centuries.  The lank-haired Ellen.  The crooked-nosed mentor.  The dust-smelling Library.  The lank-haired Ellen followed her crooked-nosed mentor into the recesses of the dust-smelling Library. Or perhaps that literary technique is a little antiquated.

I am already looking forward to some Earl Gray during my break tonight.  The tea-drinking writer.  The inky-fingered woman.  The double-lived imaginer.