Clifford Coffin took this photograph in an age when sitting on a California sand dune was a beneficial, or at least benign, experience. Stay cool.

The heatwave broke yesterday and I finished the first draft of the manuscript. I was expecting some kind of elation, but instead I took a nap. Recharging for the revisions to come? Perhaps. I’ve sent it off to he who gives notes for a first impression, to be followed by much discussion and a lot of work.

The novel is about a college-aged kid from the East Coast who goes to Hollywood to be a nanny, and ends up a studio head. Here’s a snippet:

My son refers to my not-so-carefree younger days as “ye olden times,” I prefer to think in geologic terms, and since we’re talking about California we can parse that as foreshock, earthquake, and aftershock. It breaks things down to their essentials, as you’ll see…