What the Hell Kind of Nest am I Building Here?

“All I know is that at a very early stage of the novel’s development I get this urge to garner bits of straw and fluff, and eat pebbles. Nobody will ever discover how clearly a bird visualizes, or if it visualizes at all, the future nest and the eggs in it.” — V. Nabokov, Playboy interview, 1964

For weeks—no, make that months—I’ve been collecting some weird-ass twigs, mud and other junk to build a new nest, or novel, of my own, but I have no idea what the disparate items mean in terms of what the “future nest and the eggs in it” will look like.

I’d like to share this list with you in the hopes that somebody will email me a cogent theory on the story my subconscious is working on.

So, following are the “bits of straw and fluff” I’ve been gathering, in the form of books read, subjects investigated, old memories remembered, questions asked, and topics debated. I look forward to your theories. Good luck.

• Stories by Russian & French authors about duels (yes, duels): Chekov’s “The Duel”; Nabokov’s “An Affair of Honour”; Pushkin’s “The Shot”; Lermontov’s “A Hero of Our Time”; and Maupassant’s “A Duel”.
• A New Yorker article on the history of duelling.
• A memory from when I was a newspaper reporter and, rogue that I was, dated my editor’s girlfriend; I only asked her out because she did the announcements at a now-defunct department store that I happened to be in, and she had a profoundly sexy Marilyn Monroe-like voice, and I decided then and there that I wanted to hear that voice whispering sweet nothings in my ear—not to mention I wondered what kind of kisser a girl with such a voice would be like; to this day, I have to call her “Caldor Girl” because I can’t remember her name.
• McCann’s steel-cut oatmeal.

• How good can a pencil be if it isn’t made anymore (the Eberhard Faber Blackwing 602) yet people are willing to shell out $250 and up for a box of twelve of them?
• Model train “layouts” and the idea of what goes on there when you’re not around.
• Why the F–K did they cancel my favorite TV show, Boston Legal?

• Should I give the checkers at our local grocery store a Christmas tip? And if so, what about the UPS guy? The waitresses at the diner? Where does it end? What’s the etiquette here?
• Is fiction, as James Joyce once said, “imagined autobiography”? Or was he just drunk when he said this?
• Should I go out to Boston soon to visit my old professor/mentor, and when I do, should I take the train, and if I take the train, how will the experience tie into my musings on model trains?
• Charles Ingalls as a role model for young men.
• Is it possible to anthropomorphize the quintessential inanimate object, a pencil, to the extent that when its little story is done (or the pencil “dies”), readers or “followers” feel a sense of loss?
• Why do I keep experiencing phantom smells? Over the past few years, they’ve been smells of gas, garbage, sewage and now smoke. Are they caused by nose polyps as the ENT guy recently suggested, my history of migraines, or are we talking something more disturbing here like temporal lobe seizures or a tumor? And, is there some way I could give this trait to a character?
• Old-fashioned glass milk bottles—they were great; why’d they get rid of them?
• The lack of integrity of most people, like my landlord, and knowing how the Russian writers lampooned guys like him.
• Kashi Heart-to-Heart Apples and Cinnamon Instant Oatmeal—yummy.
• Why Alexas despises oatmeal; what traumatic event happened to her at camp as a kid?
• The unbelievable assortment of CRAP you find in dollar stores; yet, at the same time, how you serendipitously stumble upon good books there, including this literary gem.