The third time was not the charm for me, at least as it it pertains to National Novel Writing Month. I started out pretty good, keeping my word count around the daily average, for the first five days. Then I became ill. Nothing serious, just a massive head cold, with a sinus infection chaser. Persistent cough from the drainage. That led to the onset of bronchitis. All of this kept me up most of the night on Wednesday/early Thursday of the 7th and 8th. It really sucked away a lot of my motivation, because I was just so tired all the freaking time. Then I began making excuses to not write during times when I wasn't tired. Like deciding the afternoon of Friday the 9th that now was a good time to begin a massive purge of all magazines in my study. (Anything more than a year old, with some notable exceptions, went to the recycle bin.) I do have more legroom under my desk now, so one could rationalize that this actually assists in the writing process. Yeah, that sounds good. In the end, though, I excused myself right out of getting anywhere past 6,000 words. It's December 1st, and I'm still not 100%, but I'm well enough that I should be writing, writing, writing. And I will. Because writers write. I have some great ideas regarding this novel I started, and the overall plot is pretty well laid out in my head. (This is a rarirty for me, as nearly all of the novels I've begun, NaNoWriMo-related or not, have hardly ever been fully-formed, at least in terms of a basic plot.) I'm going to keep at this one. It may turn in to the sort of project Jason Snell undertook, where instead of starting a new novel for this year's NaNoWriMo, he added 50,000 words to one he already had underway. We'll see.

In between the yummy dinner of homemade chicken fajitas, and the Jello-provided chocolate pudding for dessert, I perused the front page of today's Wall Street Journal. Above the fold was a puff piece on Al Franken's senatorial run* in Minnesota, and it included this tidbit, "... the bane of conservative talk-radio" in describing Franken. Webster's defines "bane" as "a source of harm or ruin; curse". Such is what I always held "bane" to mean as well. So I sat and thought, after having read those words, that while one might be able to argue that Franken has harmed conservative talk radio, I cannot imagine it has been to the extent of earning the the moniker of "bane". He certainly hasn't brought conservative talk radio to ruin, not now when it is stronger than ever. Therefore one might surmise that writer June Kronholz and her editors at the WSJ either, (a) don't have a twelth-grade education, or (b) don't know how to type "www.m-w.com" in to their web browser address bar. A better description of Mr. Franken's relationship to conservative talk radio might be "source of material", or, if one were feeling generous toward Mr. Franken, "adversary". (Mr. Franken can thank my friend, Mr. Lawson, for that one.) One might also note Ms. Kronholz's mention of Mr. Franken's short-lived career at Air America: "He left that gig in February." She fails to include words to the effect of "...due to lack of ratings and lack of revenue." Mr. Franken may be a lot of things to conservative talk radio, Ms. Kronholz, but "bane" is not one of them. Please choose your words more carefully next time, noting that Webster's also has a thesaurus.**

*Subscription may be required to read. ** (A "thesaurus", Ms. Kronholz, is a volume used to find words of similar or antithetical nature.)

Those of you who read my musings via this site's RSS feed (you are using the Feedburner one, aren't you?) will not see the new graphic at the top of the right-side column on the main page. Yes, I will again be taking part in the annual self-flagellation event known as "NaNoWriMo", or National Novel Writing Month. The insanity will commence shortly, at 12:00 AM, Wednesday, November 1st. Writers will have thirty days to write 50,000 words. The goal is to suppress your inner editor and just write, going for quantity over quality. An average of 1,667 words a day is what you're shooting for. Doesn't sound like much, does it? You try it. Last year, I flamed out some where around 18,000 words, not even making the halfway point. I've been doing some brainstorming the past week or so, and I think I've got a story I can take the distance this year. (No, Rich, it's not the one we've been talking about; that's on the back burner for now, but still something I'd like to pursue.) I've been fleshing out the main character, even made a few notes. I've set up the PowerBook as the primary writing machine. For those of you in and around Lewisville, Texas, there's a write-in scheduled at the Lewisville Public Library this Saturday, November 4th, from 2:00-4:00 PM. Bring your laptop, they have wifi. Our church has the Roads Coffee House, open on Sundays from 10:15 AM-12:45 PM, and Thursdays from 5:30-9:00 PM, and I'm going to try to organize a write-in for a Thursday night. (Hey, Brent, you want in on this? This could be a kick start to getting some writing done.) NaNoWriMo participant "ShatteredByRain" has posted some encouraging--or maybe sado-masochistic?--calendar wallpapers for the NaNoWriMo crowd. I'm using the one titled "Shore". Hopefully it will inspire more than depress. "Thirty Days and Nights of Literary Abandon." Let's hope so!

About this time, sixteen years ago today, I was at an after-party with a girl. It was our first date, and she had accompanied me to the annual Military Ball held by the combined ROTC detachment at LSU. The after-party was a small affair, at the apartment of one of the older cadets, who just happened to be my former flight leader and was a big sister-type to me. The girl who was my date? She's upstairs right now, getting ready for bed.

Lee and I share a pet peeve relating to grammar, and he has chosen to begin documenting finds in meatspace. One reason I don't slog through comments on most blogs is because the respondents apparently didn't learn anything in third grade, or since. "It's" means "it is," and "Its" denotes the possessive case. "There" denotes a place, while "Their" denotes a plural possessive. Those are the two major mistakes I see, which irk me to no end.

Yeah, it's been up a few days, but I'm just getting to it, okay? John Gruber has come around, much as I have recently, to the notion of PowerBook-as-main/only-system, a concept Lee has been a proponent of for some time. John also has an in-depth review of the latest 15-inch PowerBook, outfitted just as I would like, with his usual attention to detail. It's Monday evening, and I'm still sore from the neighborhood tree planting from Saturday morning. Eleven ten-gallon trees to go in the neighborhood's greenbelt area. Seventy homes, with an average of two adults per home. Seven people showed up, including myself. Yeah. An interesting tip I picked up from No Plot? No Problem! shows an innovative use for all that spam that gets collected for me. This one writer keeps a list of names that show up in the From field of spam e-mails, so she always has a pool of character names to pull from. I really like this, since usually when I'm working on fiction, I can come up with two or three good character names, then I start really pulling stuff out of bodily orifices. A simple text document in BBEdit now has 305 names, one per line, and the built-in Kill Duplicates filter ensures I don't have the same name twice.

So I've decided to give it a whirl this year, and join Danno and fifty thousand others at taking a crack at churning out 50,000 words in 30 days. Should be fun. Blogging may drop off considerably. Think you have a novel in you that's just dying to get out in the thirty days of November? Join us.

Because I know it is something Tiffany can relate to, here's Brian Hampton:

This just in: bring and take are not synonyms. I shamefully confess I have erred in this area.

The 9th Circuit actually gets it right this time, with an extension of libel protection to online self-publishers, like moi, and those who participate in online discussion lists.

Zeldman calls it. Disney is not your friend.

Gibson continues to blow me away.

One of my favorite authors, and the coiner of “cyberspace,” is blogging. He also has a new book coming out, and damn, can this guy write or what? This is how the book freaking opens:

Five hours' New York jet lag and Cayce Pollard wakes in Camden Town to the dire and ever-circling wolves of disrupted circadian rhythm.

It is that flat and spectral non-hour, awash in limbic tides, brainstem stirring fitfully, flashing inappropriate reptilian demands for sex, food, sedation, all of the above, and none really an option now.

A departure from the body of work most readers are familiar with, Pattern Recognition takes place in the present, instead of the cyberpunk future Gibson helped build.

Now February cannot get here fast enough. . .

Extend your vocabulary by subscribing to this free A.Word.A.Day email list. (Thanks, Michael.)

Hmmmmm…..motivation?

November is designated National Novel Writing Month; the object for participants: to write a 50,000-word novel, beginning midnight, November 1, ending midnight, November 30 (actually, midnight would be December 1, but trying to convince people of this is like trying to convince them that the new millennium really began at midnight, January 1, 2001 — which it did, by the way).

As the site states, it’s a kamikaze approach to writing, where quantity reigns over quality. Output is the only thing that matters. Gee, maybe I could write a novel this way. . .