Squeezing writing into Chol Hamoed Sukkot takes a kind of discipline that I apparently have not mastered.

I’m squirreling away at trying to come up for a title for my book. And no, it’s not finished. But the publisher wants a title. Between my catchy ones and his “textbook” ones, we have yet to find a middle ground.

Meanwhile, I happened upon a New York Times review, Hallelujah Chorus, for the new memoir of a former favorite author, Anne Rice. It chronicles her return to Catholicism. This is a woman who wrote about horny vampires and S&M.

From the review:

“So the stages here are set for many — many — deployments of the word “miracle.” One of the more challenging or, if you will, trying aspects of accounts by people who have been “saved” is that everything is viewed as a personal intervention by Jesus himself.

Which is to say that confessional (and profess-ional) literature is like faith itself: to believers, a tone poem of perfect lucidity and logic; to the unconvinced (in whose camp I squat, nervously clutching Christopher Hitchens’s pant leg) it can sound a little, well, fruity. “

My goal is to make my book not fruity.