November 2003 Archives

Well, it's here at last--the end of the fall trimester. I get this week off, except for the little matter of grading my exams, calculating my students' grades, writing comments, and prepping for the winter trimester. Oh, and I've got 18,000 words left to write on my novel by midnight Sunday. Piece o'cake.

I'm working at about a thousand words an hour, so I'll need to spend around three hours a day on the novel over this next stretch--feasible? Possibly. We'll see.

Today I was going to knock off quite a bit of novel this morning, but you know how it goes on your first day of vacation. I slept late, lingered over breakfast, re-read a bit of Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle's Inferno, picked out some CDs to load into my laptop, checked in on my fantasy football team, agreed to meet Kelly for lunch... the usual. But with luck, I'll have a shot at writing tonight and/or tomorrow, though with the kids home from school tomorrow, that may be easier said than done.

In the meantime, I'm aghast at my fantasy football status. In the Number Crushers league, I'm still gamely fighting for the regular-season championship, but I lost this weekend and dropped to second place by a game. At least it wasn't one of those "If only I'd played Player X..." contests. I played all the right guys, but they simply didn't score as many points as my opponent's guys did. The good news is that I get to meet the current league leaders, Super Donkey Kram, this week. If I can beat them, we'll have the same record, but I'll be 2-0 against them, which would give me the tiebreaker. I'm feeling fairly good about things in the NC league.

No, it's FLOGG, the Fantasy League of Gentlemen/Gentlewomen, that boggles my mind. I'm currently 7-5, with one more regular season game to play. I'm guaranteed a playoff spot, which is good, but my team is behaving in a baffling manner. At the moment, my record is 6-0 in my own division and 1-5 outside it. In our ten-team league, I'm 8th in scoring--but I'm 2nd in points scored against me. In overall league rankings, I'm currently in 8th place, but I can earn second place in the South Division with a win this week. Hell, I could still end up winning the division. Last year I dominated the FLOGG regular season and then went belly-up in the first round of the playoffs. Maybe this year's bizarre regular season means a good long playoff run. Who knows?

I'm loading Earth Wind & Fire's "That's the Way of the World" into my computer right now. My, my, my, that's nice stuff.

And now it's time for lunch. I could get used to this day off thing.

5:51 PM

LBJs

*Novel report: I'm over 29,000 words with nine more days to write. That leaves me about 6000 words behind. Since I'm doing about a thousand words an hour, and I'm now done with classes for the rest of the month, I think I can make up the difference during my Thanksgiving break. I'm definitely learning something about the creative process that I'd forgotten, which is that self-discipline can come in some awfully bizarre forms. But hey, if it works, it works.

*My class schedule is changing slightly in the winter trimester, I've learned. I'm switching from a schedule of three English 500 Drama sections and one Beginning Speech section to a schedule of one English 500 Drama section, one English 500 Honors Drama section, and two Beginning Speech sections. It adds a preparation, yes, but it also give me a chance to work with some very bright and dedicated students, which balances things out a bit. Moreover, my total student load this trimester will be roughly two-thirds the size of my load from the fall--and that definitely makes me a more cheerful guy.

*I've just finished reading my 100th book of the year--a new record. Actually, since I start my reading list on my birthday, March 1st, it's the 100th book I've read in the last eight and a half months. My previous record of 99 was set in 2001, and coming so close to triple figures but falling short left me good and surly, let me tell you. I'd read dozens of Animorphs books that year, which inflated the figure a bit, but I still felt as though I could have legitimately strutted around if I'd made it to a hundred. What I didn't know then, of course, was that getting a sabbatical for three months provides an enormous boost to one's time for reading. I haven't finished that many books since school started, but the spring and summer months were a literary gobfest that made the brunch buffet in the dining hall look positively wambly by comparison. Since I've got the rest of November and all of the next three months to go, who knows what number I'll eventually reach? I do know that I'll be ecstatic to reach 104, signifying an average of two books a week. For an English major, it doesn't get any better than this.

*The 100th book in question--you knew I'd get to it eventually, didn't you?--is a delightful offering from Paul Dry Books, and I deliberately put it aside so it could be my record-breaker. Written by Mexican author Gabriel Zaid, it's entitled So Many Books, and is a brief (144 pages) and pithy musing on the nature of books, publishers, and readers in this age of unparallelled opportunity for reading. Even The New Yorker took a look at it and gave it a mention, which makes two NYer appearances for PDB in the last year. (OK, so mine was in a Barnes & Noble ad supplement, but that should count for something, right?) It's the kind of book, like Anne Fadiman's Ex Libris, that belongs on the shelf of everyone who loves books. If I tell you that it's the best thing Paul Dry has published yet, will that get you to run out and buy a copy? Good. Because it is.

5:22 AM

The novel-in-progress-with-the-working-title-Moving Day proceeds apace. After 12 days, the current manuscript sits at 21,665 words (not counting the thousands of previously-written words based on the same idea.) Since the original manuscript for The Verb 'To Bird' came in at just over 86,000 words, I can at least look at what I've done so far and consider it significant, if not yet complete. My hands hurt, but I haven't missed a day yet.

I've gotten to look at several bits of Kelly's N-I-P-W-T-W-T-Licking Melvin and am quite delighted. Her description of the main character's holiday job at Belk's as a "Giorgio Spray Bitch" is especially wicked and funny. I'm biased, obviously, but when all you people eventually see the name "Kelly Dalton" on a book cover, you really should pick it up. Honest.

I've gotten about nine hours of sleep in the past two nights as I've been devoting myself to a) grading papers (because the end of the marking period is coming up and my students want to revise them), b) doing dorm duty (because they make me), and c) writing the novel (because I promised.) This afternoon, I hope to make up for some of that deprivation.

Oh, and I had another idea for the title: You Must Remember This.

Or maybe I'll cop a lyric from Paul Simon instead of Casablanca and call it All the Crap I Learned in High School.

8:01 PM

LBJs

*I've been keeping this journal for over a year and a half now, so you'd think I'd know not to hit the "Back" button on my browser while working on it. But no, I keep doing it. So this is the third time I've started writing this entry.

*Busy day coming up: it's the annual football game against Episcopal High School (a/k/a ehs) and I'm on dorm duty. Luckily, all but a handful of students opt to spend this Saturday night with friends or family, so it'll be a pretty easy night. Before that, however, I get to wrangle a busload of students up to Alexandria for the game, which might go well or poorly--it's hard to be sure. At least I think our team's got a good chance of winning.

*The novel now stands at 11,795 words, just ahead of schedule. (Whether I'll make today's quota is questionable; I may have to go for 3333 words tomorrow instead.) So far the process has been relatively smooth. One scene was a piece o'cake. Another was more like a piece o'beef jerky left in the desert sun for a couple of days. And one was like a piece of animal pot pie--potentially delicious, but the exact nature of the dish remains a bit uncertain at the moment.

*I'm still not sure about the title "Moving Day." I'll be using the phrase in the novel, definitely, but I'm not sure it has the zing a good title should have. Other possibilities have included A Plague of Starlings, His Name in All the Earth, Robbery, Memories Are Made of His, and First-Person Plural. I'm hoping I'll come up with something better, but I know it often takes a while for a good title to jump out at you.

*I don't know how I missed it until now, but this morning I heard Cake's cover version of "I Will Survive." It's funny as hell on one level, but it's also oddly affecting. And I've got to share it with my sister-in-law.

2:47 PM