The things I write are only like extemporania.

I have a rule, a writing rule, that the killing of dogs in narrative is cheap and lazy, and also I can't really handle, emotionally speaking, the death of fictional dogs, so there's the double-edgedness of the rule: the emotional whallop to the solar plexus and the (perhaps reactionary) idea that "so you couldn't get away with killing a human, so you thought you'd invent a dog to slaughter" ("you no-good sleazeball of a hack writer") (I feel very strongly about this). But today I picked up The Twenty-Seventh City by my writer (if I had idols, he would be my idol) Jonathan Franzen and lo! Dead dog, page 33!

And, to explain how this was: imagine that a wife has just started cooking breakfast and her husband walks in and declares that he's been having an affair (with his secretary, of all fucking people) and she cooks breakfast and puts on the uniform for her part time job and is in the car driving down the highway before she realizes that - shit - her husband is having an affair with his fucking secretary.

I am on page 135, and don't know whether to continue. I put Vurt, or Vert, or whatever that book was down immediately, but this I do not know.