Well, it was amusing for a couple of days. The food was sometimes not bad at all but by about Friday of last week, though, I’d had a pretty horrifying epiphany about Seattle Sutton. Consider these two trays:

Mystery Meal #1   Mystery Meal #2

One of those was my very last Seattle Sutton meal. The other is an image I swiped from mealsonwheels.com. I’m not even going to tell you which is which.

The saddest thing about all this is that my meals weren’t even ON WHEELS. They were inert meals and they came in on wheels that I had to provide myself. I actually paid money and took time and effort to procure virtually the same kind of food that will surely be brought to me for free when I am 82 and living alone in a tiny bungalow filled with yarn and stacks of magazines and dead houseplants. Great.

The book in your head is not quite the same as the book you actually write. If they had colors, one would be in RGB mode and the other in CMYK, and if you tried to make one match the other exactly you’d go fucking insane. They are like Norway and Sweden or Minnie Driver and Toni Collette. You can compare them all you want but you will foam at the mouth if you keep it up for too long.

Also, every one of your friends who gets to take a peek at the rough cover concept will pick on a very specific thing and it will never be the same thing that anyone else picks on.

Also, for weeks you will have this manuscript sitting around on your kitchen table with dozens of little Post-Its sticking out designating things your editor wants you to change, things you want to change, things you hate but don’t know how to fix, things you don’t want to mess with but need work anyway, things that just plan look up at you from the page cross-eyed, and typos. All you have to do is go page by page and get rid of all the Post-Its. Seriously, that’s it. But what you don’t realize is that the longer you leave Post-Its in a manuscript, the heavier they get. It’s true. The molecular structure changes in the glue and everything.

And then once you take the Post-Its out of the manuscript, you will not be able to crumple them up and throw them away. Even though they’re completely blank, they’ve been activated. They might be needed. All this time your sweet beloved manuscript has been addicted to you and is about to experience withdrawal from your intoxicating talent, and therefore those Post-Its are like its nicotine patches. So hang on to them for a few days in case you just need a little fix. Or, I mean, your book needs a fix. Whatever. It’s okay.

Someone came up with a pretty funny online “Which One Are You?” quiz for my nasty recipe card collection at Candyboots.

Yes, it’s Which Weight Watchers recipe card from 1974 are you?.

If you must know, I am Fluffy Mackerel Pudding. And that feels about right…

Last night’s dinner: turkey, in meatloaf form, and potato, mashed. I WISH I WAS MAKING THIS UP.

Also, I wrote a real review of a fake boutique for Gapers Block today.

Behold: the meals that I am eating today were prepared in this very room.

Upon further discussion of Seattle Sutton‘s name, a friend agrees that while “Seattle Sutton” would be a very suitable porn star name, he feels that it would be an even better name for a Penthouse columnist.

As in: “Dear Seattle Sutton, I never thought I’d be writing you but the most incredible thing happened to me last week. I was at home relaxing in my hot tub when the doorbell rang…”

You mean you can’t imagine an alternate reality where Seattle Sutton does this for a living? No?