My story, in 100 words or less

Just for fun, I ran Microsoft Word's "autosummarize" tool over the 50,000 words of fiction that I just finished writing, to see how a computer-automated reader would sum up the story in 100 words or less.

I think you'll agree that the Cliff's notes edition of this story is destined to be hugely popular. Here are the key "sentences" that Word picked out for me:

*
Meet Professor Toulos

Professor Toulos stirred his soup thoughtfully.

"I'm Professor Stephen Toulos."

"Hi Stefan."

"Stefan, hey man."

"OK, thanks Stefan."

"How is Stefan doing?"

"Hey, it's Stefan."

"No, Stefan."

Tiffany asked.

"Stefan!"

"Stefan!"

Tiffany gasped.

How did Professor Toulos know about her and Stefan being involved?

"Tiffany?"

"Professor Toulos?"

"It's me, Stefan."

"Stefan! What happened?"

"No, Stefan."

"Professor Toulos?" Stefan asked in disbelief.

"Tiffany, hi."

Professor Toulos stopped her.

"OK, Tiffany."

Stefan shouted in the professor's ear.

Stefan asked him.

Stefan paused and glared at the professor.

Toulos asked.

Professor Toulos expected that very answer.

Tiffany knew.
*

Summarized this way, it sounds much more melodramatic than I meant it to be -- feels almost like a soap opera. Of course, you still have very little concept of what actually happens in the story, which I think is why Microsoft all but dumped the autosummarize feature from its latest versions of Word.

Useless tools like this give me some reassurance that the evil computers aren't quite ready to take over the world yet.

Woo hoo

Done.

Microsoft Word counts 50,236 words. NaNoWriMo's website counts 50,339. But let's not dicker over 103 words. The important point is: it's more than 50,000. Feels pretty good, I must say.

There's still work to do to make this a complete story. It's probably 90% complete. (Of course, that's a first draft, a very rough first draft. Once that's finished, there'll be more than a little rewriting to do.)

It's been fun to feel like a writer for a month, instead of just some guy who claims to like writing but doesn't have the time or motivation.

For now, I'm gonna take a break and celebrate with some Famous Amos cookies. Thanks for cheering me on, everybody. And thanks to Meaghan for taking several double shifts of caring for Logan while I wrote.

Must... get... sleep

Writing is hard work, apparently, even when you get to just make up all the details -- or maybe especially when you just make up everything.

I had envisioned myself writing through the night and finishing up before Saturday morning dawned, but after writing 11,000 words today I am just a little tired. (It's good tired.)

I am happy to report this long day of writing has brought me up to 47,000 words to date, which means I need a measly 3,000 more on Saturday. Psshaw.

Well, seriously, it might be a little tricky. Throughout the contest, weekends have been the most difficult time for me to write because Logan is home all day. He demands quite a lot of attention, and he's cool enough that I'm happy to give it to him. But it does mean that I have a hard time getting anything else done.

So... I'll be back in a few hours, refreshed and ready to top the big 5-0-0-0-0, I hope.

For those of you actually interested in the story and not just my word count, I have realized without a doubt that the story I have begun telling will require more than 50,000 words to finish. I don't know how many yet, or how long it will take me to finish it, but it will not be finished when I hit 50,000 words tomorrow. But soon after, I hope.

Good night.

The final sprint

Let the countdown begin. I am now about 40 hours away from my personal deadline in the NaNoWriMo contest -- midnight Saturday.

If there's good news for me, it is that I have kept a pretty good pace in the last week, adding 13,000 words since I updated you all last Friday. The bad news, though, is that I had not maintained that weekly average all along. Here I sit with 36,000 words in front of me, which means I have to write 14,000 today and tomorrow. Zounds.

Well, I suppose I should get started. Recall that I have scheduled to take the day off from work today to write. Is that a sad way to use a vacation day? Maybe, but sometimes in life a man just has to set a completely arbitrary goal for himself and then skip out on work to get as close as he can to accomplishing it.

So off I go to write. Wish me luck.

Down but not out... and something to read

Ladies and gentleman, as you have probably guessed because of my silence of the past week, I have fallen terribly far behind in my NaNoWriMo schedule. Last weekend was really busy with non-writing activities, and much of this week I have been an unmotivated slug. Excuses, excuses.

Point is: here I am only eight days away from my personal deadline, and I have just crossed the 23,000 word mark. (The goal is 50,000, remember.) Yikes.

I do plan to make a comeback, although it's going to be tricky. I might have to pull a few late nights, a la the days of college newspapering.

Well, instead of an excerpt from my writing, today I recommend you read this really interesting social commentary article from Vanity Fair on the rise of cute culture. It will make you laugh and feel a little sick to your stomach.

Act 1, Scene 3

Here's another excerpt, for those who are interested. This is currently set up as my third scene of the book, but the organization could change of course.

Again, more scene-setting and foreshadowing and all that jazz. I hope those of you who want to know where this story is actually going don't get too frustrated. I promise, for anyone who's interested, I will e-mail the full rough draft when it is completed (just more than two weeks, yikes). Crap, I think I just dismissed my readers from this blog.

Well, if anyone's still here:

**

Professor Toulos parked his car tight against the curb of his wide, unpainted street, lined with decades-old oak trees. His home, comparable to its neighbors, was a quaint bungalow, small but detailed in its architectural touches --- a bit of gingerbread trim lining the top of the porch, decorative brackets pretending to prop up the eaves of the roof, and thick wavy glass window panes telling the home’s true age, despite its well-kept, good-as-new appearance.

The home, surrounded primarily by homes of other unmarried professors from the university, plus a number of retired couples and widows, sat roughly a half mile away from the university’s business school where Toulos kept his office. The close proximity allowed him to walk to work most days, barring bad weather or some longer range travel plans during or after his work day that would require him to drive his car.

A gray cat meowed to him from its perch on the back of the couch as he eased the front door closed behind him. “Hello, Adam Smith,” Toulos said in a high-pitched voice, reaching out to pat the cat’s head. The cat ducked the hand and took a swipe at it with his clawless front paw.

Toulos pushed off his leather loafers and slid them into their designated resting place, underneath a side table beside the foot of the stairs. He slipped off his sport jacket and hung it over the newel post, to be carried up to his bedroom momentarily, then made a detour into the kitchen, to refill Adam Smith’s food and water dishes. He poured himself a drink -- a glass of cognac -- and headed upstairs to his computer.

Switching on a little classical background music, Toulos sipped at his cognac and began to respond to comments on his latest blog, a semi-fictional piece about plastic surgery gone wrong for actress Tara Reid. His story ended with the twist that she surrendered her body for invasive experimentation by the likes of a fictitious scientist of questionable repute (based loosely on a number of comic book villains).

“OMG, Tara used 2 B such a cutee, but now shez Trashy w/a cap T. Hope the sicntist figurs out the jeans that makes prety girls turn to skank hos,” reader 2Cool4Skool commented in response to the story.

Toulos, writing under his screen name CelebriScooper, licked his lips and fired back a response: “That would be a terrific discovery in the field of genetics, 2Cool. So if they could find the gene sequence responsible for skankiness, would we want them to eliminate it or promote its spread throughout all of Hollywood? LOL!”

The professor chuckled to himself and took another sip of cognac. The stereo softly played Tchaikovsky.

Another reader, boicrazy14, wrote: “Awesome story as always, Scooper. Love love love Tara Reid and hope those scientists can get her all put back together again soon. Hey Hollywood: More Tara and Ashton movies!!! Those two are soooo cute together!!!”

CelebriScooper replied: “Thanks boicrazy. We’ve got connections around here, so we’ll talk with Hollywood about your Tara-Ashton request.”

The reader comments went on, 31 of them on this post, which had turned out not to be one of the blog’s more popular stories. The really hot topics commonly drew upward of 75 comments. Tara Reid and her surgeries were pretty old news by this point, but Toulos remained fascinated by her. It was not a sexual fascination, at least not in the usual sense, as Toulos actually found her rather repulsive. He tended to agree with 2Cool’s assessment of her. But something about her devil-may-care attitude had sparked his curiosity during the holiday break, and this post was the fifth story he had written on her in two weeks.

Toulos always read every comment word for word, although he often replied to only three or four of them for each story. His strategy leaned more toward using the comments as feedback and guidelines, to know which way to steer his future posts to keep the readers interested – even though ultimately he would decide on his subject matter based on his own personal obsessions at any given time.

His favorite subjects were generally pretty similar to the favorite subjects of the supermarket tabloids – the fouled-up love lives of famous actors, actresses and musicians, the bad-boy antics of hot-tempered tough guys, and the like. Plastic surgeries added some nice fodder from time to time. But Toulos toed a careful line between strict gossip site and fan fiction site. Since his first taste of celebrity gossip, his greatest interest had always been in exploring the subject imaginatively. Perhaps letting his mind add far-fetched details and structuring his blog posts as narrative works let him convince himself that this hobby held some intellectual merit and that he was not totally debasing his mind with superficial nonsense.

Still, even if he had himself partially convinced of the respectability of his hobby, he remained sufficiently unconvinced that he felt it vitally important to keep this interest of his a secret from the world. Not only did his close friend Sandra not know about it, no one knew about it. On the blog, he was wholly anonymous. He made no mention of his identity, not even his first name. He did not disclose his location, not even “Iowa” or “the Midwest”. He never discussed celebrity gossip with his peers at the university or with his students, although he often discreetly listened in to their conversations on the subject.

The closest he came to exposing his secret interest was in having a couple of celebrity-centric magazine subscriptions mailed to his home: People and US Weekly. Still, those were mainstream enough that he could perhaps pass them off as just ordinary coffee table material. And almost no one ever visited his home anyway.

Naturally, the majority of his obsessions focused on actors, actresses, pop musicians and similar figures of national or even international fame. He took interest in the occasional political or sports personality, only if he or she had some exceptional bit of charm or intrigue. In this last category, he had found an opportunity to mix in a bit of local interest the previous year, when as a junior Iowa’s own All-American linebacker Stefan Jones was awarded the Heisman trophy. Toulos had never actually met Jones in person, nor even seen him up close so far as he could recall, but the fact that he studied and played football at the same university where Toulos taught made him an obvious choice to write about. Not wanting to give away his own locale or identity, the professor had been careful to blend Jones in with other sports figures, writing forward-looking fiction about his future glory days in the NFL -- partying with pretty ladies yet also serving as a heroic figure who tackled would-be robbers in convenience stores.

Toulos’ interest in Jones had tapered off not long after his Heisman win, and he probably had not written about any sports celebrities at all in several months. As he sat at his computer on this night, crafting a tale about an unwed Hollywood starlet pregnant with triplets by three different men, the professor gave no thought to the young football player, who would very soon reenter Toulos’ life and lead him to a kind of notoriety that he had always strived hard to avoid.

Day 13, Words 17,000-plus

I am happy to report that the writing continues. With a current word count of 17,291, I'm a couple days behind schedule, although I haven't done any writing yet today. If I were precisely on pace, I would have just over 21,500 words by end of day, and I need to reach the halfway point by the end of the week.

I must admit: I was fairly nervous and unsure of myself when I began this. I feared that I would run out of ideas to flesh out the story's skeleton or that my schedule would get too busy to write. I read on the NaNoWriMo website that last year only about 18% of the people who registered to participate actually completed the 50,000 words within the month. But I've got to say I'm feeling pretty good about it now. I'm determined to succeed, and I'm even scheduling a vacation day from work just before my deadline so I can catch up if I'm still a little behind schedule. It is rather motivating having you blog readers watching for my updates and excerpts.

Got to tend to my day job for now. Maybe I'll add an excerpt later.

11,000 and counting

Whew. I've had a late night here, trying to catch up on some NaNoWriMo-ing. I started off the day (Friday) way behind schedule on my word count pace, but I knew Meaghan was having a night out with some friends and figured I could catch up a bit tonight after putting Logan to bed.

So, the count now is just over 11,000 words after eight days of writing. (If you do the math, I should have just over 13,000 now, to be on pace for 50,000 in 30 days. Ah... still some catching up to do, but not terrible.)

I'm really feeling good about this. It feels good to be regularly writing and moving the story forward. Every time in the past I've "tried to write a novel", I have worked on it very very sporadically. (We're talking: write a 1,000- to 2,000-word section once every three months or so.) Obviously, that's a very bad method. For one thing, the story never actually gets written. Secondly, it's almost impossible to maintain any kind of steady flow or a consistent voice in the writing.

Also different this time: I did a fair bit of planning ahead of time before starting to write. I actually know all the major events in the story and how it will end right now. I still don't know those details about any of the other drafts I have hanging around in the My Documents folder. I've even partially completed an Excel spreadsheet listing the individual scenes of the story, as part of the Snowflake Method, which I used as a rough guideline for my planning process.

So... for an excerpt. I won't be offended if people don't read these. I know it's hard to enjoy them without the rest of the story in tow. But, if you're interested, this is actually what I plan to be the very first scene of the book. (Pretend you haven't read that other scene yet.) Fair warning, it's about 1,200 words:

***

The professor pushed his shopping cart up to the back of the checkout line, behind a trio of young girls, maybe 13 years old, who stood scanning through the magazines that lined the end of the candy and gum display rack on this Saturday evening.
His pressed with an index finger against the noise piece of his wire-rimmed glasses, each lens of which made a perfect circle around each eye, cutting an odd-looking line through each thick eyebrow. He moved the finger a few inches higher to wipe away a film of sweat he felt forming at his hairline. The store was warmer than he would have liked, but its managers probably set the thermostat with people like these girls, who wore tank tops in January, in mind, rather than Professor Stephen Toulos, who wore a long-sleeve shirt and tie, vest, tweed sport jacket, slacks and leather loafers everywhere he went, all year round. Whether intentional or not, he wore a vest of charcoal gray that was nearly a precise match for his dark but graying hair and neatly-trimmed beard.

He stole a quick glance at what the girls were waiting to purchase. One held a purple blouse with a fringe of cream-colored lace lining the V-neck. Another girl held a two-liter bottle of soda, and the last held nothing but the magazine she was reading.

In the professor’s own cart, he stored an assortment of grocery items that likely would not be available for purchase in this Iowa town if it were not for the demand from the university’s faculty: Nutella spread, an unpopular brand of imported wine, an assortment of specialty cheeses, meats and bread.

Toulos took a deep breath, trying to create some form of cool draft in his lungs and to expel some heat. He stepped to the side of his cart and plucked a Newsweek magazine from the rack beside where the girls were congregated. He tried to be nonchalant but instead looked as if he were moving in slow motion, approaching the magazine rack and then slowly retreating from it, all the while examining closely each publication, most of them populated by attractive young women, wearing either highly fashionable clothing or else very little clothing at all.

“Excuse me,” he muttered to the girls, although he hadn’t been in their way.
Stepping back behind his cart, he thumbed through the news magazine, pretending to read its contents. What he was actually doing was reading the headlines of the celebrity gossip magazines close by and eavesdropping on the girls’ commentary on the latest celebrity dirt.

“God, Britney is so ugly and fat. When will she go away?” one girl questioned tactlessly and quickly flipped ahead in her magazine for something more interesting.
Toulos also could have cared less about Britney and would be satisfied to see her go away. He scanned the magazine covers again for some more interesting gossip – couples splitting up, couples getting back together, actors allegedly battling alcohol and drug addictions. It was the typical fare, but the professor was more of a special interest guy. He had a few particular people he wanted to know about, and the rest were just the subjects of trivial rumors.

“Paula to launch her own TV singing competition… and taking Randy with her?!?” blared one magazine. This caught his attention. He found his obsessions came easily for performers who were popular more than a decade ago and continue to try to remain relevant. He desperately wanted to read more about this idea. Given the question marks at the end of the sentence, and despite the exclamation point sandwiched between them, the report clearly had no official confirmation, but Toulos wondered who the source was for the suggestion, or whether the rumor had been picked up by any mainstream news sources. He checked whether the girls or anyone else in line were watching him and nearly stepped over to pick up the magazine, but he stopped himself. Even here, in the grocery store, where he saw no one he recognized, Toulos considered it important that he maintain his image as a widely respected university professor. Devouring the gossip of the supermarket tabloids did not fit well with this reputation, he realized fully well.

Just as he finished winning this internal struggle, one of the girls’ voices broke through his thought process: “Did you hear about Paula’s new show?” one of them said in her toneless, apathetic voice.

“I think it’s BS. It won’t happen,” another answered without looking up from her magazine.

“Oh, well I heard they were out doing auditions. Supposed to come to Chicago next month,” answered the girl who raised the topic.

“Nah, that’s just a rumor. Try to find it online; they’d be advertising the auditions if it was going on,” the other girl replied confidently.

Toulos found himself leaning forward and resting his arms on the handle bar of his shopping cart, having forgotten the need for discretion to hear what the girls were saying. The third girl, who apparently had no opinion or information on the singing show gossip, glanced in the professor’s direction as her friends debated the rumor.
After a few seconds, she took a second look, then leaned into the skeptical girl’s ear to whisper something with a smirk. Toulos straightened up but continued listening to the conversation. Suddenly the skeptical girl turned to look him directly in the eye: “What do you think, sir? Is Paula really starting a new show?” she asked him, then turned back to her friends who all laughed giddily.
“Me? Oh uh…” Toulos said, preparing to excuse himself from the topic and plead ignorance, but the girls had already returned to their own conversation, not really expecting or wanting an answer from him.

The professor suddenly felt it to be unbearably warm in the store. He loosened his tie and waited impatiently for the line to move forward. Much to his relief, the girls checked out soon after the confrontation and left the store without ridiculing him further, at least not to his knowledge. Even with them gone, Toulos couldn’t help but feel embarrassed that the cashier might have witnessed the exchange and probably would be thinking what an absurd fool he was as she rang up his groceries. He returned the unread Newsweek back to the magazine stand while his items were bagged up, then paid the bill and walked quickly out the door and to his car.

Toulos removed his jacket as he sat down in the car and his face gradually cooled off during his drive home. As much as he would have liked to laugh at himself over the incident, he couldn’t stop thinking how one of those girls could someday be a student of his at the university, and he hoped that they were young enough that by the time they were of college age they would have forgotten about this evening, or at least would no longer recognize Dr. Toulos as the professor who had eavesdropped on their girl talk.

As he awaited the start of the spring semester on the coming Monday morning, the professor was clueless to the fact that his secret obsessions would soon bring him more than enough humiliation to make the grocery store incident seem entirely trivial and hysterically funny by comparison.

Slowly but surely...

This is day four of my customized calendar for NaNoWriMo, and I'm happy to report that I have indeed been writing -- unfortunately though, not quite as fast as I should be. To hit my target of 50,000 words in 30 days, I should have roughly 6,500 words written by the end of the day today. Thus far, I have written 4,000.

It's early in the "contest" -- as the organizers call it, even though you don't actually compete against the other writers -- and so I have time to catch up. I hope the story will flow more easily once I get deeper into the action of it. Right now, I'm sort of setting the scene and introducing the characters.

I have written three scenes of the story so far, and my rough plan was to have 30 in total.

Below is an excerpt of the scene I wrote today. As I explained Thursday, this contest is all about speedy output and so I must be excused if the quality is low. My hope is that I'll create a rough draft that can someday be revised into something readable. Also, this section is out of context with the rest of the story, of course, so I'm not sure how enjoyable it will be to read by itself.

I'm quite the salesman, aren't I? You all must be dying to read this now:

***
About 75 students trickled into Toulos’ Monday morning class of Economics 101, in groups of three and four mostly. The social scientist in him had observed that freshmen (which made up the majority of this intro-level course’s students) tended to travel in packs far more frequently than the university’s upperclassmen, despite the fact that many times they were clinging tightly to “best friends” whom they had just met a few weeks earlier. Toulos was tempted to conclude that students came to like each other less and less the longer they knew each other and therefore became less devoted to taking classes together, eating lunch together, etc. This might have been partially true, but he figured the more likely reason for the freshman pack behavior was to quell their insecurity about being at a new place and ranking as the lowliest members of this new society. Progressing through the ranks into sophomore, junior, then senior status meant students could traverse the campus with more self-confidence and less fear of social failure.

Perhaps his fascination with this and other freshmen phenomena was part of the reason Toulos insisted on teaching at least one entry-level course every year. His seniority and impressive academic record at the university easily qualified him to demand only upper level courses, populated by business majors and graduate students. In fact, these were the courses to which the university preferred to assign him. Still, a part of him felt refreshed by revisiting the basic theories of his field each year. He also had traditionally liked the opportunity to scour the ranks of freshmen and sophomores for potentially promising minds that he could then recruit to the business school, but that was years ago, before his less intellectual interests had taken center stage in his mind and detracted from his former vigor for academia.

This was the path of thought down which his mind was ambling when Toulos’ eye was pulled away from a group of students seated at the back of the lecture hall toward another group passing through the doorway. Leading the group -- flanked by more of a loyal, adoring entourage than a pack of insecure peers -- was a tall black man sporting a leather-sleeved letterman jacket, which matched one worn by a member of the entourage. He stood taller than his followers, at maybe 6’3”, and his thick neck muscles flexed against the itchy woolen collar of the jacket when he smiled and waved to a friend already seated in the hall. Toulos was almost certain he recognized the young man from photos, but the way that the rest of the class, even the unknowing freshmen, sat up at attention when he entered the room removed any doubt from the professor’s mind: Heisman winner Stefan Jones was taking his economics class.

Professor Toulos felt his pulse speed up and throb against the side of his neck. He felt embarrassed, as if the artery might be visible to the students, hammering away beside his throat in nervous excitement. Since beginning his fan fiction hobby almost five years ago, Toulos had never met one of his subjects, not even in a chance encounter on the street. He lived in Iowa, after all, not exactly a hot bed of celebrity sightings. Now, he was not only meeting one of his subjects but would be teaching him for the next semester. ...

Toulos swallowed what felt like a helmet-sized knot of anxiety and prepared to call the class to attention. He watched Stefan and his friends for another moment over the top of his glasses, ensuring the athlete had taken no special notice of the professor. It was silly, he knew, but he couldn’t shake a bit of uneasiness that somehow the linebacker might recognize Toulos as the author of some obscure, anonymous blog stories about himself. Even in the unlikely event that Stefan had seen the blog, the professor knew there was no way for him to know who wrote it.

“Hello,” Toulos attempted a loud call, but his voice hung up in his throat. He cleared it and took a deep breath. “Hello class,” he almost shouted. “I’m Professor Stephen Toulos. Welcome to Economics 101.”

Something to write about

It's always been a goal of mine to write a novel. I have enjoyed writing ever since junior high school and like the thought of being able to make a living by writing whatever I please (just as I declared in my "about me" description in the righthand column when I first established this blog).

I realize that those of you who try to read this blog -- and are met with the frequent disappointment of me not providing anything to read -- might question whether I actually enjoy writing. Well, I do. Convinced? Good.

I think the reason I so infrequently write on this blog is because I have significant doubts about whether my day-to-day activities or random thoughts are interesting enough to be worth reading, even for a small group of friends. I have often considered selecting a theme for the blog that would guide me, so that I wouldn't just end up writing sporadic commentary on the news or telling you about my son's loose bowel movements.

Anyway, the point of all this rambling is that I have signed up to participate this year in the National Novel Writing Month, and I want you all to know about it because there's nothing quite as motivating as the fear of public humiliation. Or so they say. I'm not sure if that really works for me, but we'll see. At any rate, maybe each of you could provide a mindless word of encouragement, like: "I know you can do it!" or "Sounds like fun. Best of luck!" or "That's awesome. I can't wait to read it, if you decide to let people read it. But if not, that's cool too!" That would be swell.

The idea of the project is that people all over the world spend the month of November writing a short novel of at least 50,000 words. It can be about any subject, and there's no requirement that you ever let anyone read it. The NaNoWriMo website features a computer automated word count program that verifies you wrote 50,000 words and then deletes your text without anyone ever seeing it.

On the one hand, it's a rather daunting idea, to write 50,000 words in a month. I've tried (half-heartedly, at best) for the last seven or eight years to write a novel, and to show for it I've got two or three unfinished, plotless drafts of prose worth 20,000 to 30,000 words each. This is not to mention the fact that I can't even manage to come up with a single 500-word blog post per month.

But, the key here is this: The nature of the project requires the writing to be so fast-paced and spontaneous that you have to excuse yourself entirely from quality. I can reassure myself that it's OK to write total garbage, and no one else ever has to read it if I so choose. All the pressure to produce quality prose is gone, and I suspect that is a major factor that has kept me from writing regularly all these years. (Of course, I'm secretly hoping it will be good, and then I will let people read it. Shh. Don't tell me.)

The other positive factor is the deadline pressure. I've been in the journalism business for a while, and so I am accustomed to the idea of deadlines. I thrive under deadlines. This is probably the toughest one to which I've ever been subjected. And for some reason, it's very exciting.

Speaking of the deadline, this brings me to a final important note, since you all will be my official scorekeepers in this game. The last week or two of November is very hectic for me, with Thanksgiving-related family gatherings, a first birthday party for Logan and also hopefully some form of birthday outing for Meaghan. So... I'm modifying the calendar for myself. Rather than writing my short novel in the 30 days of November, I'm going to write it in the 30 days running from Oct. 16 to Nov. 14.

That's right: I start tomorrow and must finish by midnight, Saturday Nov. 14.

I hope to provide updates along the way, perhaps with an occasional excerpt to keep you entertained or confused or both. Wish me luck.

Loose stools sink ships

Here's a fun fact to kick off your Monday: Georgia leads the nation this year in the number of bank failures. The FDIC announced two more on Friday, bringing the count to 18 institutions that regulators have closed down in the state so far in 2009.

I don't know what you can do with that, but there it is. You'll think of something.

I'm sure Georgia holds some other, more honorable records, but that's the one that sprang to mind after reading the news this morning.

I suppose there's not much else to do but give you a mindless listing of my recent activities and whereabouts. Actually, let's just stick with the activities, because my whereabouts have just been here mostly, and most of you know where that is.

My brother and I ran a 5K race together about a week ago. Not my best time, but not too bad considering my running has been only slightly more regular than my blogging this year. He beat me by 18 seconds, so I've challenged him to a rematch.

There has been lots of poopy to clean up lately for me and the wife, some of it the runny variety (hence the title of this post). I'm talking about the baby's poop, by the way. Everyone got that, right? I know this is a mundane blog, but I'll be damned if I start telling you about my own bowel movements. (What I read during said movements, however, is an entirely valid topic, as previously discussed.)

The vegetable garden soldiers on, although I suspect it has grown tired of the heat, overcrowding and neglect. Each plant has produced a little, but I have been far from overwhelmed by anything. I did get enough ripe tomatoes a few weeks ago to make some fresh homemade salsa. And last night I made zucchini bread.

I just finished reading The World According to Garp by John Irving. I mostly read it because I had enjoyed A Prayer for Owen Meany so much. Garp was pretty enjoyable; I still like Irving's style a lot. But Owen Meany was better.

So uh... apparently my strategy here is to bore away what's left of the readership that waits so patiently for these posts. I'll see if I can't come up with something more interesting to say in October or November, maybe.

This is a test of the emergency blogcast system

Um... so... what have you guys been up to? Anything fun?

Yes, OK, scaling Kilimanjaro? That's good. Final engineering on your better mouse trap? Very nice. What's that? You in the back corner? Oh, sir, please put that away. This is not that kind of website.

I myself have been a little on the busy side, you might say, which is a minor excuse for why I have not written on this blog since sometime in the 1970s. (They did have blogs in the 70s. You just had to go to the nearest research university and punch out your posts through a complex code of zeros and ones. Frankly, I think the quality of the Internet has really plummeted since just anyone can post anything from the comfort of their homes. See Exhibit A here. And Exhibit B here.)

Aside from being busy, I also have a tendency to get burned out on things and go looking for some more interesting outlet for my creative energy (or nonsensical babbling). Having found none, I have returned to this blog. I think.

So, a quick catch-up... here are a few of the highlights of the last five months of my life:

-Been raising a baby. I have reason to suspect he isn't mine, but he's adorable and so I've decided to play along for a while. He has mastered rolling over but is still working on crawling, sitting upright without assistance, and fetching. We'll be enrolling him in evil medical school in the fall.

-Planted a small vegetable garden, consisting of four tomato plants, two bell pepper plants, and one zucchini plant. (There were originally more zucchini plants, but most of them died while sitting in our laundry room waiting to be planted, while the spring monsoons kept the ground too wet to work.) I also believe these plants to be illegitimate, but they're growing tall and some of them have flowered. What else can I expect from the bastards thus far?

-Started a larger compost pile alongside the compost bucket that started last winter. The pile is corralled between a couple of homemade trellises, fashioned from the sticks trimmed off an overgrown crepe myrtle bush earlier this year. It's all very Little House on the Prairie.

-Made more minor progress toward the Attic Insulation and Ventilation Project of 2008. (Yes, I know that it is now 2009, thank you.) I figured, I had so much fun working in the attic last July and August, that I should postpone further activity in there until the temperatures eclipse the three-digit mark again this year. Meanwhile, we're just going to have to fork out the money to add another A/C unit for the upstairs. At least there's a tax credit to be had for Energy Star units right now: for example, the unit we're looking at.

Jeez, this doesn't sound very convincing. I promise I've been busy. What have I been doing? Washing baby bottles, changing diapers, giving baths, playing, protecting the child from two dogs that desperately want to French kiss him, and so on. It's all very exciting, I know. Oh, and, miraculously, I still have a full-time job, even one that depends on the very financial services industry that has been crumbling all around us for the last nine months or so.

Good, I think we're all caught up then. I'll see you all again in six months.

Kidding, kidding. I plan to return soon with riveting tales of adventure and mystery. Unless my wife brings home another child, in which case all bets are off.

How can big business not take these guys seriously?

Accordion-wielding protester sets back credibility
of environmental movement by 25 years

Not much time or energy (or motivation) to blog these days, so here's just a passing thought:

An accordion?!? Seriously?!? As if Mr. Scruffy's camo jacket and other dude's pink hat weren't enough to kill any chance of your message being heard upstairs, this genius has to show up with an accordion and, presumably, play it.

Makes me want to build my own coal-fired power plant, just to distance myself.