from the return to the Florence novel, this small moment

There were olive trees now on both sides of the road.  The air was the color of pearls and sea moss and the sometimes sudden wild purple of flowers that erupted from vines tangled in among the branches or caught in the thatched places of the wall.  Some of the stray cats that had made their way here were curled about the tree trunks, waiting for the fog to burn off, and we walked alone together, Jack and me, until a girl with a bike appeared at the top of the road and sped toward us, whooshing at accelerating speed, a skateboard tied to her back. Jack turned and watched her fly.  He stood there facing east and down, while I climbed west and high.

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In the midst of the Florence novel, stuck, I chose

to move my story (for the moment) into a new tense.  It was the only way for me to see the story new, to get the characters moving more quickly, to take a landscape and give it shape and meaning, to accelerate the plot.

Here, then, is where I have been since 5 AM, along the great wall of Fort Belvedere.  Four new paragraphs for the Florence novel, a book that I had left untouched for weeks.

We move ahead, in stolen time.

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