My Life in LA

Europeans and people from other parts of the U.S. sometimes ask me, with a sparkle in their eyes, what it’s like to live in Los Angeles. Here’s a view from my balcony, the last several mornings.

Here’s the same, in early evenings.

Living in southern California is nice, but, like the view from my balcony, my routine is not what some imagine as typical. At work, some years back, a visitor from Georgia saw me with a Snickers candy bar and snarled, “I thought y’all out here only ate granola.” Weekdays, I leave for work at 6:55 a.m. and then see only the walls of my office building for most of the day. Since 1979, I’ve visited Disneyland just twice (about as often as I’ve eaten granola). I don’t “live” at my gym, shop on Rodeo Drive, or go to nightclubs (my lights are out by 9:30 p.m.). I’m not vegetarian or vegan (how I wish I could find good fresh rabbit, reasonably priced!). I’ve not had a facelift, and my hair is natural salt & pepper (more salt, these days). I’m a native and I fit in, because, as they say, here anything goes. I do wish there were more people here from the world of publishing, though.

The French family who visited last summer told me I’m lucky to live here. I accept.

- PJ

Thinking

Time constraints of full-time employment force me to be tortoise and hare, cramming as much as I can into precious mornings and evenings that straddle my job. I’m productive, but often feel I’m “held back,” no matter how much I get done. Simultaneously, I anticipate when I’ll be done with current editing, proofreading, queries, submissions, and can once again “move forward,” meaning find new routes to pursue. Completion of current routes is one life force of moving forward, but anxiety pushes its way in, awareness that those routes are the last, until new ones are found. Then finally the moment arrives: current work is complete and I’m free to search for more routes to publication.

That time is now, yet, all I’m coming up with is -- I’m out of ideas.

I love looking out the window at my little Tuscany, but, do I need to be living in New York City, amongst “printed page people,” agents and publishers, as opposed to Los Angeles? What do we have in LA that NYC doesn’t have? Probably more script writers than book writers, and the Hollywood Sign. Not a help for my particular situation.

So was I wrong to think I could get published? Isit cuz m’last name ain’t “Palin”? In Half Italian I wrote about my wish to build a piazza near the new biblioteca, the library, in my grandmother’s village in northern Italy…using proceeds from the book…was I foolish to dream that? I wonder, sometimes, but I’m simply not ready to give up yet. Call me constructively stubborn, a feature I have that’s paid off in the past, and once made a dream of mine be realized.

- PJ