August 2007 Archives

Yes, folks, the Fantasy League of Gentlemen/Gentlewomen has completed its draft! The 2007 edition of the Fighting Coelacanths is here!

QB: Marc Bulger (5), Brett Favre (17)
RB: Rudi Johnson (9), Julius Jones (33), Adrian Peterson (34), Jerious Norwood (36), Tatum Bell (47), Chris Perry (unranked)
WR: Marvin Harrison (2), Roy Williams (11), Vincent Jackson (32), Santonio Holmes (40), Jerricho Cotchery (25)
TE: Tony Gonzalez (2)
K: Shayne Graham (3)
D: Jaguars (5)

(ESPN position rankings)

*It's a ten-team league.
*We start QB, RB, RB, WR, WR, TE, K, D.
*I had the 8th pick in our snaking draft (which means I had the 3rd pick in even-numbered rounds.)

Observations:

1) In the early weeks, I'm likely to be a little frantic about my 2nd running back, since Jones, Peterson, and Norwood are all involved in RBCCs ("Running Back By Committee," for those of you who don't play fantasy ball) and it may take a while to settle who's starting and who's riding the pine, both for their NFL teams and mine. Rudi is football's most consistent RB not named Tomlinson, though--1300+ yards and 12 TDs in each of the last three seasons.

2) On the plus side, I got top-five value at every other position, and Rudi is top-ten.

3) Since 2005, our league has allowed to keep one player drafted in round 10 or later. In 2005 I chose as my keeper 10th-round pick Willie Parker, who was a huge factor last year. Last year I drafted Jerious Norwood in the 10th round and held onto him for this year--which may prove very important, especially if Warrick Dunn isn't fully healthy.

4) My picks in rounds 10-15 this year: Jones, Holmes, Cotchery, Favre, Graham, and Perry, respectively. During the tenth round, it was tough watching Alex Smith and Michael Turner, both players I'd hoped to land as keepers, go to my competitors (FC Moose Jaw and the Donkeys, respectively), but landing Jones (a starting RB for a good team, and one whose average draft position is in the early 8th round) made up for it. Cotchery usually goes in the 9th round and Favre in the 12th, so I got good value with my late picks.

5) It was a typically wild draft; FLOGGers are gamers, and they don't follow the typical two-running-backs-in-the-first-two-rounds strategy that often; in fact, only 4 teams did. In the first round, two QBs were taken (Peyton Manning and Carson Palmer), and in round two, three WRs (Chad Johnson, Marvin Harrison, and Steve Smith) and a TE (Antonio Gates, of course) were picked.

6) If you consider ADP (average draft position), as determined by FantasyFootballCalculator.com, I got pretty good value. I took Rudi (ADP 1.09) one pick early, reached a little bit for Marvin (2.07) but couldn't have gotten him in round three, and picked Gonzo (6.08) half a round early. My only real reaches in terms of ADP were Bulger (4.08), who was the last of the five top-tier QBs still left on the board when my round three pick came up, and the Jaguars, whose ADP is a mystifyingly high 13.02. That said, Roy (3.08) and Bell (7.09) should have been gone a half-round before I picked them, I got Peterson and Jackson at exactly their ADPs, and I snagged Jones, Holmes, and Cotchery over a round later than they should have been taken. Overall, my team is about 3 draft positions better than it should have been at my position in the draft. I can live with that, I think.

7) If you're wondering, my draft went like this:

1 Rudi Johnson RB BENGALS
2 Marvin Harrison WR COLTS
3 Marc Bulger QB RAMS
4 Roy Williams WR LIONS
5 Adrian Peterson RB VIKINGS
6 Tony Gonzalez TE CHIEFS
7 Vincent Jackson WR CHARGERS
8 Tatum Bell RB LIONS
9 Jaguars D
10 Julius Jones RB COWBOYS
11 Santonio Holmes WR STEELERS
12 Jerricho Cotchery WR JETS
13 Brett Favre QB PACKERS
14 Shayne Graham K BENGALS
15 Chris Perry RB BENGALS
16 (keeper): Jerious Norwood RB FALCONS

4:52 AM

Book Update: 60,000 words or thereabouts. I stayed up late last night.

I've been thinking about guitarists lately, partly because of a recent blast of invective from the mouth of Ted Nugent. I've never been a fan of Nugent's music, but I don't begrudge him the right to speak out on political issues. Of course, he didn't actually say anything about politics, choosing instead to stand in front of a crowd and invite four sitting Senators to suck on his machine gun. (Obama, Clinton, Boxer, and Feinstein, if you were wondering--and if you see a demographic distinction between the typical heavy metal audience member and the four politicians Nugent targeted, you're not alone.) Of course, as the Secret Service has occasionally taken pains to explain to certain over-enthusiastic commentators, threats are not protected by the First Amendment, and I'm hoping a couple of burly, Glock-packing agents are even now explaining this nuance of Constitutional law to Nugent, preferably in a very small room, under hot lights, using very short words spoken slowly and clearly.

But the most bizarre element of this teapot-sized tempest has been that some people in the blogosphere seem to think that Nugent's status as a rock star should make him immune from criticism. This brings up two points.

First, I'd note that the Dixie Chicks caught hell from Nashville, right-wing radio, and a variety of audience members merely for expressing embarrassment over George W. Bush's Texan roots--no machine-gunning was expressed or even implied--so I hope those same folks are willing to apply the same hell to Nugent's rather more directly threatening comments.

Second, it's certainly true that Nugent is a rock star, but in my personal opinion, his status as a guitar "god" is mystifying. He's loud, yes, but I've never heard anything by him to suggest that he's anything else. I could name a hundred guitarists I'd consider superior.

In fact, I think I will:

PC's TOP 100 GUITARISTS
It's not meant to be a definitive list. You may notice the lack of heavy-metal "stunt guitarists" who often appear atop such lists as this, which is simply due to the fact that I don't listen to them much (and don't always enjoy what I'm hearing that much anyway.) These are just my favorite git-fiddle players, in alphabetical order, with sample song/artist and commentary.

*Duane Allman (Whipping Post/Allman Bros.)
Maybe the best on this whole list.
*Carlos Alomar (Fame/David Bowie)
Funky, gravelly, nasty stuff.
*Dave Alvin (Long Chain On/Knitters)
Twang to burn and speed to match it.
*Chet Atkins (anything at all)
He can play absolutely anything.
*Martin Barre (Locomotive Breath/Jethro Tull)
JT's secret weapon; precise and emotional
*Paul Barrere (Fat Man in the Bathtub/Little Feat)
Brilliant deep-fried funk-rock
*Steve Bartek (You Really Got Me/Oingo Boingo)
Somewhere between punk and Yes.
*Skunk Baxter (My Old School/Steely Dan)
Jazz gone out back to smoke a little doobie.
*Adrian Belew (Sharkey's Day/Laurie Anderson)
Belew can play his guitar with a fork.
*Chuck Berry (Johnny B. Goode)
The man only invented rock guitar.
*Dickie Betts (Jessica/Allman Bros.)
Underrated, but brilliantly melodic.
*Billy Bremner (Back on the Chain Gang/The Pretenders)
A rockabilly artiste.
*Bob Brozman (Twelfth Street Rag)
The unquestioned genius of the slide guitar.
*Lindsey Buckingham (World Turning/Fleetwood Mac)
The brains and backbone of Mac's sound.
*David Byrne (The Great Curve/Talking Heads)
Writer/singer yes, but also guitarist.
*James Burton (anything from King of America/Elvis Costello)
Played with BOTH Elvii.
*Mike Campbell (An American Girl/Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers)
TP's secret weapon
*Martin Carthy (The Great Valerio/with Maddy Prior)
Unique acoustic style--gorgeous.
*Alex Chilton (O My Soul/Big Star)
The lost genius of southern pop music.
*Eric Clapton (While My Guitar Gently Weeps/The Beatles)
Is he really God?... maybe.
*Steve Cropper (Green Onions/Booker T & the MGs)
The Colonel tears it up.
*Mike Cross (Born in the Country)
Multi-instrumentalist and great entertainer.
*Rick Derringer (Rock & Roll Hootchie-Coo)
The poor man's Eddie Van Halen.
*Denny Dias (Do It Again/Steely Dan)
Founding member and sitarist par excellence.
*Elliott Easton (My Best Friend's Girl/The Cars)
New Wave's greatest guitar player.
*The Edge (New Year's Day/U2)
His entrance on this solo is one of rock's great moments.
*Dave Edmunds (Crawling from the Wreckage)
He deserves a Ph.D. in rockabilly.
*Peter Frampton (Do You Feel Like I Do)
It's not just effects, folks: he's good.
*Robert Fripp (It's No Game/David Bowie)
One of the all-time best, period.
*Bill Frisell (Dumbo & Timothy/Frisell & Wayne Horvitz)
Angular, creative, challenging.
*John Frusciante (Californication/Red Hot Chili Peppers)
Funk with depth? He has it.
*Steve Gaines (I Know A Little/Lynyrd Skynyrd)
Best. Skynyrd. Guitarist. Ever.
*Lowell George (Tripe Face Boogie/Little Feat)
Barrere's dark twin--pure genius.
*Billy Gibbons (I'm Bad, I'm Nationwide/ZZ Top)
The only ZZ player who matters.
*David Gilmour (Dogs/Pink Floyd)
Possibly the greatest slow guitar player on earth.
*Johnny Graham (Shining Star/Earth, Wind & Fire)
The best funk guitar solo in history.
*Jay Graydon (Peg/Steely Dan)
"Wah-wah" nails this tasty solo to the wall.
*Gary Green (Free Hand/Gentle Giant)
If you've never heard this one, go find it now.
*Jonny Greenwood (Paranoid Android/Radiohead)
A sonic wizard of the finest kind.
*Dave Gregory (Scissor Man/XTC)
Technically brilliant, yes, but full of power & energy.
*Michael Gurley (Dorina/Dada)
Another unknown who ought to be known. Terrific.
*Steve Hackett (Dancing with the Moonlit Knight/Genesis)
Brilliant, and years ahead of his time.
*Nick Haeffner (The Great Indoors)
Another obscure guitarist who deserves wider fame.
*Kirk Hammett (Sad But True/Metallica)
He shreds, he scores!
*George Harrison (And Your Bird Can Sing/The Beatles)
Melodic and hugely influential.
*Jimi Hendrix (Little Wing)
Do I worship him? No. Do I respect him? Oh, hell yes.
*Robyn Hitchcock (You and Oblivion)
Great writing may obscure his great guitar work. It shouldn't.
*James Honeyman-Scott (The Wait/The Pretenders)
No show-off, but an artist of noise.
*Steve Howe (Siberian Khatru/Yes)
Self-taught, and a mighty fine teacher he was.
*Ernie Isley (Voyage to Atlantis/The Isley Bros.)
A Hendrix disciple with his own feel.
*Jorma Kaukonnen (Embryonic Journey/Jefferson Airplane)
An acoustic masterpiece.
*Earl Klugh (I Want to Thank You/Bob James)
This solo has stuck with me for decades.
*Mark Knopfler (Tunnel of Love/Dire Straits)
Brilliant, inspiring, and unique.
*Alvin Lee (I'd Love to Change the World/TenYears After)
An oldie but a goodie.
*David Lindley (Running on Empty/Jackson Brown)
Master of the lap steel.
*Richard Lloyd (See No Evil/Television)
Punk artistry of the highest order.
*Gary Louris (Ten Little Kids/The Jayhawks)
A fuzz-box orgasm. God, it's good.
*Mike McCready (Yellow Ledbetter/Pearl Jam)
A superb improviser shows off.
*Roger McGuinn (Eight Miles High/The Byrds)
Twelve strings, no waiting.
*Johnny Marr (Armageddon Days Are Here/The The)
The best thing about the Smiths.
*Brian May (Brighton Rock/Queen)
A doctorate in astrophysics AND all this. Wow.
*Dan Miller (Damn Good Times/They Might Be Giants)
He makes TMBG rock.
*Marc Moreland (Ring of Fire/Wall of Voodoo)
Inventor of "the Roswell Sound."
*Steve Morse (Gina Lola Breakdown/The Dixie Dregs)
Great technique meets great instinct. A master.
*Maury Muehleisen (Operator/Jim Croce)
Lost master of the acoustic lead guitar.
*Jimmy Page (When the Levee Breaks/Led Zeppelin)
Obvious, but for a reason.
*Andy Partridge (Books Are Burning/XTC)
Not like other guitarists. That's good.
*Les Paul (anything)
The man built an electric guitar from a four-by-four, for pete's sake.
*Joe Perry (Walk This Way/Aerosmith)
Snarling boogie-metal at its best.
*Glen Philips (Razor Pocket)
Another technician with a heart---awesome live, too.
*Prince (Let's Go Crazy)
Don't let the showmanship obscure his breathtaking skills.
*Robert Quine (Girlfriend/Matthew Sweet)
Clean, stinging, abrasive refreshment. Ahh.
*Elliott Randall (Reeling in the Years/Steely Dan)
One of rock's greatest solos here.
*Vernon Reid (Middle Man/Living Colour)
Hard-edged, fluid, and innovative.
*David Rhodes (I Have the Touch/Peter Gabriel)
The ultimate underrated sideman.
*Marc Ribot (Gun Street Girl/Tom Waits)
His neck has more frets on it or something.
*Keith Richards (Gimme Shelter/The Rolling Stones)
He may be a zombie, but jeez.
*Carlos Santana (Moonflower/Santana)
The Sustain Man; we're still hearing notes he hit in 1971.
*Joey Santiago (Vamos/The Pixies)
Punk? Alternative? I don't know and I don't care.
*Joe Satriani (Surfing with the Alien)
Bald, bold, and beautiful.
*Tom Scholz (Long Time/Boston)
He defined the sound of rock for years to come.
*Bryon Settle (Sway/Trailer Bride)
This solo gives me a little stiffy every time I hear it.
*Brian Setzer (Bodhisattva)
Not just a Skunk Baxter recreation--a terrific solo.
*Tommy Shaw (Blue Collar Man/Styx)
A guilty pleasure, yes, but a sweet one.
*Slash (Paradise City/Guns n Roses)
Just drunk enough for hard-rock brilliance.
*Steve Stevens (Rebel Yell/Billy Idol)
More vital to Billy than even the sneer. Excellent.
*Andy Summers (Demolition Man/The Police)
The Quiet Policeman gets a bit noisy.
*Kim Thayil (Rusty Cage/Soundgarden)
Never approaches a song the way you expect.
*Richard Thompson (Tear Stained Letter)
A legitimate candidate for #1 on this list.
*Glenn Tilbrook (Another Nail in My Heart/Squeeze)
Tastiness personified--and can sing.
*Pete Townshend (Rough Boys)
All-star rhythm guitarist, all-star guitar showman.
*Nigel Tufnel (Hell Hole/Spinal Tap)
You've got to be great to be this funny.
*Stevie Ray Vaughan (Scuttle Buttin')
Another candidate for top of the list. Awesome.
*Eddie Van Halen (Could This Be Magic?/Van Halen)
Big slide--my favorite VH cut
*Tom Verlaine (Marquee Moon/Television)
A punk song that Yes would envy. Superb.
*Joe Walsh (Life in the Fast Lane/Eagles)
Often imitated, never duplicated.
*John Williams (Cavatina from "The Deer Hunter")
Not rock, but dayyammm!
*Ronnie Wood (Maggie May/Rod Stewart)
Just sloppy enough to be wonderful.
*Neil Young (Ohio/Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
Uncompromisingly noisy.
*Frank Zappa (Cosmik Debris)
No one else can do all he could. That's probably a good thing.

There. No Nugent. No machine guns. And it's all First Amendment-protected commentary too boot!

7:19 PM

Updates to the previous updates:

1) I'm back from a week's travels to North Carolina and Georgia.

2) The new book stands at 51,000 words and counting; if this were NaNoWriMo, I'd be done now.

3) My life list hasn't increased, but thanks to a trip to Harris Neck NWR in southeast Georgia, my 2007 year list is now at 152 species (including painted bunting, anhinga, wood stork, glossy ibis, and common moorhen) with four months to go.

4) I'm almost done with Jim Crace's Arcadia, which is a fascinating look at the way people and cities interrelate, as well as yet another display of the man's astonishing ability to create gorgeous prose.

5) I've done five weeks of the ten-week weightlifting program my neighbor Greg & I started in July; we start week 6 tomorrow, and I'm hoping I won't just be dead in 24 hours.

6) Savannah restaurant recommendation: Sweet Potato, where the lemon collards will make you weep with joy.

7) Is there, anywhere in world literature, a more blatant deus ex machina than the one Shakespeare pulls in As You Like It by having the evil duke charge into the forest with fratricide on his mind, but after encountering a holy man in the woods, undergo conversion and restore everyone's titles and property?

8) A new version of Movable Type has just been released, and with the help of the wonderful folks (Hi, Jonathon!) at the Fictional Company, who host this site, we hope to have it installed here sometime next week, which should (knocking wood) restore full archiving function to petercashwell.com after a five-month absence.

9) The 2007 Fantasy League of Gentlemen/Gentlewomen draft is less than a week away! Fear my mad skillz!

10) On a more solemn note, I would like to announce that, for the first time in my life (and possibly the first time in human history), my grandmother has been defeated in a game of Scrabble--by yrs. truly. I accomplished this feat on the second night of my stay there, and I'm not ashamed to admit that I caught her when she was a bit sleep-deprived from waiting for me to get to her apartment, which I did four hours late (thank you, Amtrak.) Also, I should note that I had to do it on the very last play of the game, going out with a nine-point word (DOILY) to get within two points of her--but in the process claiming her rack's four remaining points to earn a 290-284 victory.

Of course, the next night she let me lead her for the whole game and then dropped BLINDEST on me, with the triple word score, for an 86-point swing. Game over.

And if you think I'm unduly proud of having beaten a 91-year-old woman in a board game, all I can say is "You've never seen Mama Lea play Scrabble, have you?"

3:44 AM

August Writing Update:

43,350 and counting.

That's how many words I've gotten down on the first draft of the new book. And since we're only halfway through the month of August, I think the 50,000 word mark is eminently reachable.

Of course, that's only the NaNoWriMo-mandated minimum, so I may actually write a bit more. Right now I'm thinking this will wrap up somewhere around the 70,000 word mark, but I'm also realizing that the story is likely to need more than one book to reach completion. From what I hear, however, it is not entirely unheard of for publishers to release trilogies...

I've discovered that one concept I came up with years ago is dangerously close to an idea that Alan Moore has had more recently, but unfortunately he got his into print earlier--drat!--so I may have to do a little finagling so that I won't be accused of ripping him off. (Ironically, Moore is famous for both his occasional unconscious borrowings of other writers' ideas and his firm ethical behavior in such situations. In one collection of his Abelard Snazz stories, he deliberately left out one Snazz tale in which he realized he'd copped two of the three main ideas from an R.A. Lafferty story. As he put it, he didn't want to compound the theft by reprinting the Snazz story, and he urged his readers to go out and read one by R.A. Lafferty instead. And having read Lafferty's The Reefs of Earth, that's a rec I would cheerfully second.)

August Music Update:

I usually prefer to scour the bins at brick-and-mortar CD stores for bargains and oddities, but I came to the conclusion a week or two back that I wasn't likely to find certain CDs used--I have a pathological hatred of paying full price for things I used to get free or at an employee discount--so it would make more sense to hunt for an online bargain. Happily, I found cheap copies of two long-sought items: Vic Chesnutt's sparse, peculiar, whimsical and unsettling second album, 1994's West of Rome (produced by R.E.M.'s Michael Stipe), and Steve Forbert's earnest, romantic 1978 debut, Alive on Arrival. But since the two of them combined wouldn't get me free shipping, I decided to pick up one more disc to fill a gaping hole in my collection: Special Beat Service, the brilliant final album by the English Beat.

Honestly, it's ludicrous that I didn't own the latter on CD before. Not only is the Beat a band I've loved for years, but they're one of the few that I've both seen live (in Chapel Hill's Memorial Hall back in '83, I believe, with opening act R.E.M.) and covered in my own performances. (Others would include Robyn Hitchcock, the Police, the Balancing Act, Billy Bragg, the Pressure Boys, and R.E.M., who seem to be cropping up in this post mighty frequently.) Yes, back in '85, I persuaded Terminal Mouse (without much effort, admittedly) to cover "Save It for Later," their three-chord pop masterpiece. The chords are extremely simple for even a novice guitarist--D, A, G, rinse and repeat--but there was some quality in the song that escaped me for some time. Eventually I realized the simple trick: the high E string was tuned down to D. A subtle change, but one that adds a wonderful openness to the chiming guitars. The Church's "Just For You" uses the same tuning, FYI.

(Note to guitar nrrds: I'm often amazed at how figuring out a single trick can suddenly turn a ridiculously challenging tune into a very straightforward one. Often it's a matter of putting a capo in the proper place on the neck. My ability to play Jethro Tull songs took a great leap forward when I realized that Ian Anderson almost always plays his acoustic guitar with the capo on the 3rd fret; suddenly all those tunes in F, which I'd guess makes playing the flute easier, became much easier to finger. Similarly, I figured out that Lindsey Buckingham plays "Never Going Back Again" with the capo on the 5th fret, and that George Harrison pushes it all the way up to the 7th fret for the opening of "Here Comes the Sun." So keep screwing around with your tunings and capos--who knows what you might discover?)

August Reading Update:

I just finished Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men, which is full of fascinating detail, gorgeous prose, and beautifully captured dialogue, but is if anything even more bleak than his end-of-the-world novel The Road. I'm supposed to be teaching the former to my 11th graders this fall, and I have to wonder how they're going to handle a worldview so dark and fatalistic. I mean, these are sixteen-year-olds--it's not like they need much prodding to start musing on dark and fatalistic subjects. (And now I've got this bizarre visual of McCarthy in full goth kit, coming out onstage to perform a duet of "Personal Jesus" with Marilyn Manson... great.)

But interestingly, it's a book that matches up well with my recent discovery of Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon's comics series Preacher. I've seen work by both Ennis and Dillon before--the former wrote some excellent issues of Hellblazer, particularly the "Dangerous Habits" storyline, which was probably my favorite John Constantine story since the character's first appearances in Swamp Thing. Still, I was unprepared for the extremity of this book--not just its lusty use of profanity, but its cheerfully blasphemous plotline and its uncompromising gore. It's the first comic I've read in years that made me think "I don't know if the kids should read this one," and I say that as a father who decided his sons could handle the Jonathan-Swift-and-Hunter-Thompson-Drop-Acid-and-Rewrite-Neuromancer experience that is Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson's Transmetropolitan. I suppose Transmet's futuristic setting keeps the more excessive elements at a safe distance from the reader, while Preacher's current-day setting of Texas makes things a bit more immediate, and thus a bit more off-putting.

But despite the fact that both their books involve murder, consider the line between vengeance and justice, call up questions of loyalty and duty, and are even set in the same archetypal American landscape (the empty spaces of Texas), reading Ennis and McCarthy back-to-back shows that Preacher and Transmet share a trait that you'll find almost entirely absent in No Country for Old Men: a sense of humor. Yes, the former books include jokes about subjects not usually ripe for mockery: bowel disruptor guns, cat urine, fast-food baby seal recipes, vampirism, and self-mutilation, among others. The overall tone, however, suggests a furious joie de vivre. (One Transmet collection is in fact titled Lust for Life.) The characters believe they can make a difference, even in a world where angels and demons alike are out to kill and torment innocent humans, or where politicians manipulate the media en route to crimes against the electorate.

McCarthy's tone, by contrast, is world-weary to the point of narcolepsy. Making a difference isn't a goal--in fact, if you try to make a difference, all it seems to do is piss off the forces of entropy. (I don't think it's accidental that one killer favors a compressed-air-powered stun gun of the sort used to kill the beeves that march helplessly to their deaths in slaughterhouses.) Characters who try to escape the consequences of their actions are not merely defeated by fate, but dispatched with a relentlessness that would make Inspector Javert look like a fourteen-year-old with ADHD.

Ellis and Ennis are far from unaware of mortality, but it doesn't entirely define their worldviews. Their theme song would seem to be the Clash's "Clampdown":

Let fury have the hour
Anger can be power
D'you know that you can use it?

McCarthy's theme song? If he had that sense of humor I mentioned, I'd propose They Might Be Giants' "Older":

This day will soon be at an end
And now it's even sooner
And now it's sooner still

But given the grim, almost Biblical tone of the book, I'd say the perfect song has been recorded by the perfect singer, one whose wardrobe and resonant voice would only enhance McCarthy's theme: Johnny Cash's "God's Gonna Cut You Down."

4:11 AM

I think there's a zone, and I think I'm in it.

Yes, I've been very, very good about going to the gym. My next-door-neighbor Greg and I have been religious about our lifting schedule since I got back from the Bay: for four days, we go through the lifting program set up by our football coach, spending ten to thirty minutes after the lifting session doing cardio work (the elliptical for me, the stairmaster for Greg). We then take two days off, one of the "off" days being used for an additional cardio workout, and then we start the next week. And it's definitely helping. The scale's not moving much, but I'm putting on muscle and finding there's more room in the belly of my clothing, so I'm happy.

But that's not the zone I mean. I feel like I'm in a writing zone.

I decided to take the month of August off from a couple of my usual pastimes. One of them is my long-standing habit of contributing to online discussions in the Forum at Readerville.com, still the best $8.00 a month you'll ever spend for lively and intelligent discussion of books and book-related topics. But because I'm a fast typer with opinions on a wide variety of subjects, I spend a LOT of time typing up comments there.

The same is true of Inside Carolina, the forum for UNC fans, where I can easily be sucked into an argument in topics ranging from whether Derrick Phelps or Ed Cota was the better point guard (Phelps--Ed was a great passer who fed Vince Carter a career's worth of highlight-reel dunks, but he was a defensive liability; Derrick was a more complete player, as well as a shut-down defender who led UNC to a national title) to whether it's true that evolution is, as one poster claimed, a "psuedo-science."

With such opportunities for practicing my composition skills available, it's not surprising that I do a lot of writing at both. The problem is that when I'm doing it in an online forum, I'm not doing it for myself. Not that it was the only thing keeping me from writing. I've had an incredibly busy summer, as you may have noticed, and between the WFR course, the trip planning, and the actual trip to San Francisco and back, I had gotten absolutely no writing done during June and the first part of July. But for a week after I returned, still mildly jet-lagged, I wrote nothing that wasn't posted in an online forum. Some of it was fun, and a bit of it was probably even thoughtful, but a lot of it, in the immortal words of Truman Capote, was just typing.

In consequence, I decided to take a little time away from the forums (yes, I know, the proper plural is fora; the proper plural for octopus is octopodes, but you don't hear that one too often, either.) and concentrate on using my summer to do what I can't use my school year to do, i.e. write for myself, rather than grade other people's writing. Once school starts, I'll be more than happy to spend off hours chatting online to keep myself sane, but if the summer's not going to be my creative outlet, I'm not going to have one.

I've had an idea for a fantasy story kicking around in my head for a few years now, but I couldn't quite decide how it ought to be written--as a full-length novel, as a comic book series, as a novella, I just didn't know. I had the three main characters and the basic elements of the plot, but not the structure or the approach. It started out under the title "Eroica," after my favorite Beethoven symphony (today--ask me next week and it might be no. 9 or the Pastorale), but when I sat down to assemble a few notes about the characters and plot, I altered the title to the perhaps-less-pretentious "Student Exchange."

And on August 1, I sat down with my notes--about 1500 words' worth--and started writing it as a young-adult novel.

In November of every year, thousands of people participate in NaNoWriMo--National Novel Writing Month, an exercise in which a participant completes a 50,000-word novel in 30 days. Fifty K is a short novel, but a substantial work of creative commitment--The Verb 'To Bird' was about 86,000 words--and I figured that a NaNoWriMo pace of 1667 words per day was a good mark to shoot for.

As of last night, August 9th, the manuscript of Student Exchange stands at 27,800 words. So I'm averaging not quite twice the pace I was hoping to manage. And most of it is good stuff, if my own judgment and Kelly's occasional comments are to be trusted. I keep planning to wrap up for the day, then looking back at a scene and tinkering, and then suddenly having a new scene explode out of me. I hadn't planned to have Dennis and Jude menaced by skinheads or sent on a shopping spree, but the scenes just happened that way. I even feel like I'm mixing dialogue with action in a reasonable balance, which is not something I often do. (Hint for anyone who's ever talked with me: which do I do more, talk or act?) But whatever is happening, it's happening fast, and it seems to be happening well.

I don't know that I have any call to imitate Wizards guard Gilbert Arenas and yell "Hibachi!" every time I let a shot fly, but if I'm really in that kind of zone, I might have a book to sell by Labor Day. Here's hoping.

3:42 PM

Sure, I could crow about how I've actually gone to the gym to lift on every scheduled day for the last two weeks... or I could go into a lengthy and occasionally coherent rant about the offense to our Constitution that Alberto Gonzalez represents... or I could explain my strategy for the upcoming fantasy football season.

But I know what you want.

Yes, you want PHOTOS OF BAY AREA BIRDS.

Allow me to oblige; click on any pic you want to enlarge:

 

 

A mallard at the Palace of Fine Arts pond. (Note the great shot of the speculum.) This may be one of the photos Ian took.

A Black-crowned Night Heron across the pond at the PFA. (I'm pretty sure I took this one.)




Cormorants off the headlands near Chimney Rock at Pt. Reyes National Seashore. Note that the one at left is my first confirmed Brandt's Cormorant, as evidenced by the dark bill and mostly-dark throat patch. Note also the vast amount of cormorant poop.




Adult Western Gull on Alcatraz. Note the red-rimmed yellow eye, the red spot on the yellow bill, and the clean, slate-grey back. Beautiful bird--and one of thousands on the Rock.




A flock of Heermann's Gulls on a sandbar at Crissy Field. The grey body, white head and red bill are field marks of the adult Heermann's; the clean solid-grey gulls are immatures.




Also at Crissy Field, a beautiful Long-billed Curlew. (Not a lifer, though I thought it was at the time--I'd seen one in NC decades ago.) I like the symmetry his reflection provides, too.




One of the 73,988 pictures of pigeons that Ian took when he had the camera. For a guy who swears he's not interested in birds, he suuuuuuuure likes photographing them...



NOT TECHNICALLY BIRD PHOTOS:



We didn't believe it at first, either, but yes, it's a dead skunk in the surf of the Bay at the SF Aquatic Park. And no, it's not a bird.




Also not technically a bird: a Mule Deer grazing near the path in Muir Woods, unperturbed by Ian's flash or pretty much anything else.




Also not technically a bird, but how often do you see Dixon hugging a tree, let alone a redwood?

3:29 AM