Every week I’ll ask a writer, musician, director, actor or other person one question: “What are you up to?” and post their answer here.
This week’s entry comes from Lev Grossman. Lev is the author of The Magicians, a coming-of-age tale of magic and loss, as well as Codex, a literary mystery. He is the book critic at Time magazine and a contributor to the popular blog Techland.
So, what are you up to, Lev?
Right now, I am repeatedly rebooting my Xbox 360 and wiping my Modern Warfare 2 disk with the proverbial soft cloth because it won’t play. It’s just mad because I kicked it.
Speaking more generally, I’m counting the minutes before I can go on leave from my job and get back to work on my new book. It’s a sequel, of sorts — that word scares me for some reason so I always try to qualify it — to my novel The Magicians, which came out last year. I’m about a third of the way through the first draft, the point where I start to question everything I thought or hoped or told my editor or signed a contract specifying that this book was going to be. I’ve been very pointedly not thinking about it for the past few weeks, in the hopes that its many structural and stylistic failings will magically correct themselves in my absence. Kind of like the way my Xbox 360 will magically start playing MW2 in three, two, one … dammit.
