"Yeah," I told him. I guess in Meehan's eyes I was rapidly taking on
the character of a woman-hungry satyr. Bonnie, Lorraine, Harriet,
Joanie, now Sandra--all in two days. I didn't see the sense of
explaining that most of these women were chasing _me_. All except
Joanie, who was the one I really wanted.
But somehow I didn't feel like discussing my private life with Meehan.
We wandered back to the cabin together, and he told me all about
what he had discovered about organized nudism--the conventions, the
squabbles between different national bodies, and all the rest. I
listened politely, because I knew Jack was only talking this stuff out
in order to get it better organized in his mind for the article he
would do later.
I sprawled out in the grass in front of the cabin and got some sun
while I was digesting my lunch. I guess I dozed off for a few minutes.
I had an odd sort of dream. Women were dancing in a circle around me.
Not naked women, though. These babes were covered right up to their
chins. It's funny what a couple of days in a nudist camp can do to your
subconscious.
_CHAPTER EIGHT_
When I got tired of lolling around soaking up sunshine, I got the
typewriter out again and worked on the book. I put in two more hours
and finished up the outline. It was nineteen pages long. I leaned
back in my chair with my feet up on the porch railing, reading what I
had written and liking it. Maybe you're not supposed to like your own
stuff. I don't know; I had never written a book before. But everyone
in the outline seemed to be a real solid person to me, someone I could
summon up practically in the flesh. And every incident seemed to grow
out of the one before it. I felt satisfied. I had been terribly afraid
that I would poop out, that I'd go back to Wacker Drive in a few months
with no novel written, like plenty of other hot-air boys who make a big
stink about how they could be making better use of their talents than
writing ad copy.
But that wasn't going to happen to me. My book was going to get written.
I took a pencil and went over the outline, blocking it off into
chapters. It broke up pretty well into twenty-one chapters. I figured
I could do an average of three chapters a week. That way it would
take me seven weeks to get the first draft written, if I stuck to my
schedule. Then I could stash it away for a week to let it cool, come
back to it, and spend four more weeks editing it into shape, cutting
and rewriting, and finally sweating it into what I thought would be
the finished draft. When I got back to Chicago I could give the book to
a typist, and by the middle of September it would be ready to go off to
a publisher.
For a second I had a nice vision of the finished book, typed with a
nice dark ribbon on crinkly white paper, lying in a box just before I
packed it up and shipped it off to New York. It was a nice vision.
But I told myself you didn't write books in your dreams. You had to
sweat them out, word by word, before that magic final day when it was
all neat and packed up to go to the publisher.