9:44 a.m. Yes, I do get up in the morning. I'm trying a little experiment in healthy functioning. What if my evening entries are the equivalent of that second bridge in this photo: watery with yawns, reflective but fragile, darker, ephemeral? What if a morning entry has muscle and clear struts and anchors?

The printer is humping along beside me, making my ceramic showering duck in a stone well rock back and forth, as it was clearly intended to do. The duck is on a spring, in a spring, and in this instance a picture would save me.

I have to go out in a few minutes ...

12:05 a.m. And that was the rest of that. Several changes of clothing later, I am back here at the machine and there is some nice leftover steak in the fridge in a little doggie bag. The remains of a celebratory dinner! We sold another movie!

Since these movie sales are so hard to come by, the way so fraught with tripping stones instead of stepping stones, we've adopted the practice of celebrating with dinner at a fancy-ish restaurant the second we get the good word. Today, in the middle of running around doing other things, we got the good word.

This movie sale is to Starz, the cable network, and it represents over ten years of work. The book from whence the movie is being made is The Riverman, written by my own lovely Igor and Robert Keppel, an important law-enforcement personage who was responsible for the capture of Ted Bundy. This is the real Silence of the Lambs story, without the fava beans.

The Hollywood moral here is: Never give up. Every ten years or so you, too, might get to go to a fancy-ish restaurant and have some leftover mignon in the fridge. It could happen.

And tomorrow, I really really will start a diet. Really. Stockpiling the fruit and nuts as we speak. Trying to finish up the Kisses so they won't go bad. Sometimes when everything else around me seems to be spinning out of control, I am able to delude myself with a diet. It calms me.

Also -- and this is very exciting -- we found some 5-drawer filing cabinets at the used office place. These are very old, pretty beaten up and probably despised by the women who slammed them shut each workday and then hobbled back to the desk to dab clear nail polish on their newly shredded pantyhose.

But they'll be delivered in a day or so and I will be able to finally remove the packed copy paper boxes from my office wall, once and for all. In fact, I'm going to try to get all the back filing done in one big putsch. I'm going to photograph it this time so that I'll have a record of how hard I work. The photograph will show the paper all spread out, room by room, alphabetical as you please ... nothing lost ever again.

It's been awhile since I've filed. It takes a certain frame of mind to file.

Poor Igor. A filing project and a diet at the same time. Things may become a little tense around here. Oh -- and the filing cabinets are going to need to be painted. I foresee a really fun June shaping up here.

See what happens when I write in the morning?