George Harrison died today and although I was too young to really know anything about the Beatles, I really loved their music and feel sad that he died. My older sisters were just starting high schhol when the Beatles came to America so their music was always playing in our house, so I know their music but I don't really know them.

Nanowrimo finished today and I made my goal and wrote 50,150 words. My novel is 25% complete and I think I will finiish it by July if I work on writing it three days a week. At least, that's my schedule for now. While I love the freedom of writing a novel, I miss the snapshot in time storytelling of a short story. With a short story, you capture one moment in time like a snapshot and for me it's more a more intense kind of writing. I have so many stories I want to write and I didn't let myself write any of them in November. Now I want to work on my novel part time and work on the my short stories the rest of the time. We'll see. Perhaps the call of writing my novel will win out in the end. I still want to keep to the 1,667 words a day schedule because that amount was definitely doable for me.

Below is another excerpt from my novel. This is the ending scene for the 50,000 words I wrote. Again it's rough so beware.

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“Do I want to be Jake’s love slave?” Did I? The thought was exciting and dangerous. Part of me wanted to get up and rip the tie blindfold from my eyes and get the hell out of Jake’s condo and never look back. The other part was dying to become Jake’s love slave. And as so often happens in real life, the passionate side of you, the danger loving secret part of you always wins out. And who knows why?

Maybe it’s simply because you’ve been ignoring these impulses all these years and when they see an opportunity to come out, they take it and get out, regardless of the consequences. Maybe it’s because it’s like Allie says, that everyone has a secret death wish and that each moment you either choose life or death. Most of the time, you choose life but every once in awhile you choose death. Allie’s theory certainly explained why certain people go off the deep end. And it’s always the normal ones too; the ones who lead quiet lives, never hurting anybody, never calling attention to themselves. These people usually have families and children and parents who love them. Then one day, something happens, a choice is presented before them and they choose death and next thing you know they’re an item on the 6’o clock news with the lead headline; man shoots whole family and then himself.

Was I at a precipice facing a choice between life and death? God, I sounded like such a drama queen right now. But it really felt like that. I had the distinct feeling I was standing at the edge of a precipice with the wind howling through my hair and the air freezing cold. My shoes were half off the cliff and one false move and I would be plunging head long into the rocky crag below. I tried to look down and I couldn’t even see down to the bottom. Was Jake my metaphorical death? I had a vision of myself slowly stepping back from the edge and getting down on my hands and knees, trying to peer down into the bottom of the gorge. I couldn’t see anything but I could a voice even through the rustling noises made by the wind saying softly, “Come on in, it’s fine. You have nothing to worry out. Jump. You never know what’s going to happen till you jump”. The voice was Jake’s.

I could hear other voices crying my name and when I turned around, I saw my girlfriends in the distance begging me to come back. I was wondering why they couldn’t come any closer and then I saw that someone was blocking their way. Two people actually me. The first person looked a little like Jake and was dressed in a black suit, with a white shirt, black tie and sunglasses. The other person sort of looked like me and she was wearing a black suit, white shirt, black tie and sunglasses, only her skirt was thigh high and she was wearing over the knee black suede boots.

I could hear and see them calling out to me but they seemed so far away and their voices were garbled and faint. The two guards stood there holding them back, firm and unyielding. I could see Allie’s face and she was crying and shaking her head. My poor Allie. Out of all of my friends, Allie was my favorite. She was so emotional and wore her heart on her sleeve, you couldn’t help but totally love her.

Then I saw a shadow fall across me and when I looked up, it was Jake. He was standing there looking down at me with the most beautiful smile on his face. But he wasn’t alone. Behind him was an older gentleman with a cane and what looked like crooked foot. I got up and brushed the dirt off my clothes. It was weird because Jake and I were wearing clothes, yet we weren’t wearing clothes. Our clothes looked and felt like imaginary ghosts wrapped around our body.

The older gentleman was peering at me from behind a weathered face. He had his white hair cropped closed to his head and a black bowler’s hat on. He kind of looked like a painting I’d seen in a museum especially with his black bowler hat, gray pin striped vest and old fashioned Edwardian jacket. When I looked down at his crooked foot, I felt a sudden wave of compassion because of his deformity. When I looked into eyes however, my compassion faded. The old man’s eyes were cold, icy and dark. There was no welcoming smile on his face. Instead he looked over my insolently inspecting my wares and stripping my clothes off with his eyes. I looked back at Jake but I saw nothing odd about him and I wondered who the old man might be. Warning bells were going off in my head but like my girlfriend’s voices, the sounds were far away and muffled. I wanted to ask Jake who his friend was but when I tried to open my mouth and speak, no sound came out. Strangely I wasn’t freaked out by this and just closed my mouth again.

Jake held a hand out to me and I stared at it because it was the biggest hand I’d ever seen in my life, kind of like one of those giant cartoon hands. I looked up at Jake and his wonderfully radiant smile was beaming at me like the sun had suddenly risen in his face. The light emanating from his whole face dazzled me. And it was ordinary sunlight either but something stronger, like an artificial searchlight. My eyes hurt and I kept blinking them because his light was burning my eyes and they felt raw.

I looked down again at Jake’s hand and saw that it had shrunk to normal. His hand looked so welcoming and looked like the only normal thing in this weird vision I was having. I put my hand in his and felt Jake’s fingers close around mine in a vice like grip, which oddly did not hurt. I mean, I thought that I should be feeling pain because I could see my hands turning white but no pain sensations were registering in my brain.

Jake turned toward the edge of the cliff and started slowly walking towards the edge. I had no choice but to follow him since he was holding my hand so tightly. I noticed that the creepy old man had stepped ahead of Jake and was now in front of him. We got to the edge of the precipice with the old man in front, then Jake then me. The old man turned around, tipped his hat off to me, then to Jake and then jumped into the void still holding his cane. I watched in horror as the old man disappeared into the mists below. I knew Jake was going to do the same and that he was going to take me with him.
Jake stepped to the edge of the cliff and made me stand along side of him. We both stood there and looking out across the voice at the mountains on the other end. Jake turned his head towards and I looked and heard him say. “Don’t be afraid Jennifer. It’s just dark down there. Just follow me and you’ll be okay,.” Jake sounded so achingly sweet and so comforting. What did I have to lose by jumping with him into the dark? I knew he would take care of me. I smiled at Jake and he smiled back and then he motioned with his eyes that we should jump. Then we jumped and all I saw was black.

“Jen?”. I heard Jake’s voice cutting through my reverie.
“Yes.”
“Yes, what?” Jake was whispering in my ear and nibbling. My ears were very sensitive to breaths, kisses and nibbles and Jake was sending shivers up my spine.
“Yes, master.”

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Below is a portion of my novel. This is a first draff and as such very rough and wordy.

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Torture. It’s such an odd little word for me. It’s a subject I’ve been obsessed about for a long time and something I keep secret. I mean, none of my friends even know about it, not even Allie. And it’s not that I don’t trust or anything like that. And it’s not like I think she would think I was some kind of nut or something because she’s told me some S&M and stories of her own. But that’s where she and I differ. To Allie and I think to most people, torture, S&M is something you do when you’re bored with regular sex. It’s different and it’s exciting because it’s so forbotten in our christian culture to want to be hurt or give hurt. But that’s not how I think about torture.
I think it all started because my mother was such a catholic nut and made me go to church with her several times a week. I mean, you can only look at the statue of Christ nailed on the cross with the blood trickling down his hands and his feet so many times, without wondering what that felt like. And then if you’re an imaginative young girl like me, you get into the whole catholic thing of wanting to suffer with Christ and hearing stories about stigmata. According to my American Heritage dictionary, and I should know because this definition has been reverberating in my brain since I was eight years old, stigmata is the mark or sores corresponding to and resembling the crucifixion wounds of Jesus, sometimes occurring during religious ecstasy or hysteria.
Maybe it was the part about religious ecstasy or even religious hysteria that I liked. All I know is that at eight years old, I prayed for stigmata to appear in my hands and feet. I wanted to be like Christ and I especially wanted to suffer with him. I wanted to be called to Christ like the Catholic nuns said they were in Sunday school. I wanted Christ to call me to suffer with him and make stigmata appear in my hands. My favorite time of the year was Easter because every Friday we went to Stations of the Cross Mass where you relive Christ’s journey to the cross. Every catholic church has scenes of this journey, fourteen of them in all, so the parishioners can suffer weekly with Christ in the weeks leading up to Easter every Friday after Ash Wednesday.
Looking back on it now, I think the Catholic Church does it to whip up hysteria so when Easter finally arrives you’re so glad that Jesus has resurrected because you’ve been racked by guilt every Friday during the Stations of the Cross mass. Of course, the Stations of the Cross mass is only attended by the very devotional like my mother and their children who they drag along because unless you have family or older children, Friday night is the worse night to get a babysitter. But even if my mother could get a babysitter, I think she’d still drag me along with her every Friday thinking it was part of my Catholic education. Perhaps it was her way of making up for the fact that she never wanted me to go Catholic school like all my other friends at church.
Mama always said that girls who went to Catholic school went in as innocent young girls and came out as chain smoking sluts who wore too much makeup. Mama went to a catholic school so I guess she knew about that. She said she was determined that I would never suffer the same fate, so I attended public school where I grew very cynical about the Catholic church and all of its teachings and doctrines.
But when I was eight, I was innocent and very catholic and I cried during every station, especially during station 11 when Jesus is nailed to the cross. I could imagine the force of every hit of the hammer as the nail went into first his right hand, then his left. The nail crushing through the skin, the tendons and into the bones and finally coming out the other side. And then the same procedure repeated on the left hand and then finally the nailing of the feet so he didn’t just hang off the cross by his hands.
Sometimes someone in the mass, almost always a woman, would wail and cry as if it was actually happening to her or as if she was actually there. And when I looked around, I sometimes saw other women with tears silently flowing down their faces through their black veils. My mother never cried. Her face was always the same, stoic and I often wondered whether she felt anything like what I did. I guess, she must have because we attended Stations of the Cross every Friday during Lent until I left home for college. Funny for a religious family, we never talked much about religion so I never really knew what she thought about the Stations. Except for than one time I asked her about Stations when I was fifteen years old and had stopped wanting to go to church with her on Fridays for Stations; one of very few of episodes of my teenage rebellion. My mother looked at me in the kitchen and said, “The purpose of the Stations of the Cross young lady, is to remind us of the effects of sin and salvation won for us through the suffering and resurrection of Jesus. You are supposed go to mass so you can think about your sins during each stations and then renounce them and Jesus to be your lord and savior so he can forgive your sins.”
“But mom, I’ve already accepted Jesus as my lord and savior when I got confirmed. Why do I have to every Friday night?”
“Because you are not sinless and neither am I?” I kept arguing but I knew it was useless; I could never talk my mother out of sin argument. My mother had a memory like a computer when it came to my wrongdoings and whenever I tried to get out of going to church, she would throw in my face every sin she thought I committed. After about half an hour of listening to a litany of my sins, I just gave up.
Of course, stigmata never appeared in my hands that Easter or any Easter after that. But I never forgot how I longed for the feeling of pain and stigmata and to be called by Christ. When I got older, I used to dream of being a nun like all good catholic girls, because that would mean that Christ had chosen me to “a bride of Christ”. Maybe he wouldn’t give stigmata, but at least he would ask me to his bride and suffer and shave my head and wear those hot and ugly outfits the nuns wore.
But like the stigmata, the call never came and instead boys and sex became my religion. The only other time that torture came up in my youth was in my ninth grade english class was when I had to read Nathaniel Hawthorne’s book “The Scarlett Letter. The Reverend Arthur Dimsdale used whip himself for his sin of having an affair with Hester Pryne. It was then that I found out that whipping was an acceptable form of self punishment for a catholic as well as a christian. It’s funny how that never came up in Sunday school. Maybe you had to go catholic school to learn that and that’s why my mother never wanted me to go to one.
When I researched it at the library, I found out that catholics and christians throughout the centuries used to whip themselves for their sins and do all sort of other sorts of self punishments to atone for their sins. After the whipping or other self-punishment, the person felt absolved and some might say achieved some sort of religious ecstasy through the process. After that I tried to whip myself once with my own belt, but I couldn’t quite hit my back and when I finally succeeded, it hurt too much. Self-punishment was definitely not for me. No, if I was going to be tortured I would have to someone whip me or make me feel physical pain in some way. I could never do it myself like Reverend Dimsdale and those early christians.
After freshman year in high school, I never really thought much about my feelings about torture. I mean, sometimes it would come up when I was having sex with a boyfriend but it just a sexual game like being blindfolded or being tied to the bed with ropes or having anal sex as some of my friends would say. But it was never anything serious; it was always just for fun. With Jake, I knew it would be different but I just didn’t know how. And part of me, maybe that part of me that’s still eight and still loved stigmata and wanted to know what it was like, really liked Jake for that very reason.

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Day 17, almost 18 of this National November Writing month challenge and I'm a day ahead in my word count, YEAH! I was so tired on Friday, I didn't write but I made up for lost time and wrote over 5,000 words today. I'm glad it's Saturday and I had the luxury of spending five hours on writing. I wanted to be ahead in the count because I don't want to have the 30th roll around and me panicing about not having 50,000 words written.

I felt really guilty about not wanting to write on Friday, like I'd broken my 15 day writing streak. I wrote every day for 15 days straight and I'd never done that before. It's been harder to write because starting this week, my story was diffcult to write on my breaks at work. It was easy in the beginning to write at work because I was just getting into telling my story. But now, the story is really starting to go somewhere and I'm in the middle of it and I feel better able to write it at home than I do at work. I just can't give the story my full attention at work, even if I'm on a break. At home, it's just me, my computer, my music and my own thoughts. There are no distractions like there are at work.

Thanksgiving is coming up and I have the day after Thanksiving off as well and then the whole weekend to write. I'm going to try and devote the same kind of energy I had today to my four day weekend. I should be able to get a whole bunch written and maybe even finish earlier than on November 29 as planned.

I think I was afraid to write on Friday because my story is startng to come across as boring to me. Like my characters are in this rut of a world that I've created and I was running out of a story to tell. But tonight, the story kept going on its own and I made it to over 30,000 words. Maybe I just have to get over the thought that I can't write unless I feel like it. I think I'll be able to sit down and write no matter if I feel like it or not, kind of like how I am at my job. I do my work even though most of the time I don't feel like doing it. And my work comes out well, despite my atitude. Perhaps writing will be the same way. At least that's what I hope. I don't think I can wait around for the feeling to hit me to put me in the mood to write. If I did that, I'd never write. And that's been my biggest problem, up until now; I wasn't writing every day. At least now I am and even though most of what I'm writing may not be very good, I am writing every day and tha't s what really counts for me right now.

Day 11 of this National November Writing Month or Nanowrimo as the website says. I am still on target to finish 50,000 word by November 30. My current word count total for Day 11 is 16,675. I am keeping to the schedule of having to write 1,667 words a day. I write sometimes a little more but not much. My goal has always been to get to the 1667 word count for the day and so far this strategy has worked.

Unfortunately, keeping on this kind of writing schedule seems to zap my creative energy and I really feel tapped out to write anything other than my novel. I haven't been writing in my own personal journal and I haven't been writing in my blog. Of course, I've also been on a 3-day lemonade cleanse again, which was really, really hard on my system this time and made feel really tired, so maybe it was the double whammy of cleansing and forced writing schedule.

God, writing 1,667 words a day is exhaustive. I feel really drained after each period of writing. Some days I want to write more, but I stop myself. The goal was to get to 50,000 words and to develop the habit of writing every day for a set number of pages or words. I know that if I get ahead, I'll start slacking and stop writng thinking I've earned myself a break and I don't want to do that. I really would like to develop the habit of writing every day on a piece. I seem to be in the habit of writing every day in my journal, I'd like the same habit for my story writing.

I was at a seminar today and I met another women who writes and all of a sudden, felt inadequate about my own writing. This woman seemed so accomplished and so creative and when she told me she'd won some editing award in high school, I think I freaked out. I started thinking that my writng really sucks rocks and it's just bad, really bad and that no one is every going to want to publish anything I'd wrtten. I felt like the village idiot next to this women. I don't why I do it, but my self esteem just takes a nose dive to the seven lower worlds when I meet another women who writes.

I heard noise outside my window and went to take a look and there' s a bunch of people riding around in motorized cable car hooting and howling in the rain and playing the theme from "Flashdance". Since it' s November, I think it must be people from some kind of homecoming football game I think. Either that they're couple who came of age in the 80''s who just got married and they're playing their favorite high school/junior hgh music or something. I mean why else would the be playing the theme from "Flashdance" - What a feeling by Irene Carra.

Anyway, back to writng. Meeting that women, who was the by the way very, very sweet, just made me feel like I had the writing of two year old. I don't know why this happens it just does. And I know people have told me that my writing is good, but it just never seems to ever sink in. I've been told that other writers feel this way, even the ones who write perfect prose and are considered literary geniuses, but that's small consolation. I mean, my writing may just really be bad and I'm just living one big ass fool's dream thinking I'm going to be published writer one day. My friend Mel, from my writing group, says that if you want to get published you can, there are ways. Mel says that's not the problem. The problem is getting people to actually read your stuff and then god, make a living at it, and a damned comfortable living at that.

I think Mel may be right. I mean, I don't know if I'd even read my own stuff. I doubt it. I've never been able to watch myelf on film or on video without freaking out and thinking, god, that woman is a bad actress. I honetly don't think I'll ever be able to even pickup one of my books and start reading it, without having the same kinds of feelings of revulsion.

I did it again. I typed a whole message and something happened and I lost it. When will I ever learn? I just hate when I do that because I don't think I can recreate what I just wrote. But I guess I'll try, because I do want to post something tonight.

Day 3 of this National November writing month challenge and I've written 5,126 words. I'm on pace right now to be able to complete 50,000 words by November 30.

Writing a novel is very different from writing a short story. Usually, I've been in a class and writing a short story with a ten page limit. When you have a page limit, you really have to organize your story and start write in. You also end up leaving out alot of detail. You don't have to necessarily do that in a novel. You can more or less write about everything in detail and your story doesn't have to be as organized when you first write it. All that comes later in the editing process.

When I write a short story, I pretty much know what's going to happen and in what sequence and I know what the ending is going to be either. In this novel that I'm writing, I only sort of know how it's going to end but I don't know how the character gets to the ending and I'm finding out as I write. I have been thinking about trying to put together some kind of outline, only so I know what to write about from day to day and I still might do that. Right now, I'm just reveling in the freedom to write whatever is coming out of my head. It is just so vastly different than short story writing.

In some ways, writing without a care to length and plot is freeing and at the same time it feels like all I'm writing is crap. My short story writing is very efficient. I write the story and I don't make many revisions other than grammatical and some tightening or a little more detailed explaining in a section that's confusing. I don't feel efficient at all in this novel. I feel like I'm writing alot of backstory that will most likely be thrown out in the editing process. This thought freaks me out because part of me feels like I'm wasting a lot of time. I have to tell myself that this okay, that it's better to overwrite than to underwrite and I can always edit myself down later into a tighter story. But god, the garbage monitor seems so high. I guess I'll just have to get used to it.

I wanted to watch the world series today but I was afraid to watch because I just did not want to see the Yankees win aother world series. I know, I'm supposed to want the Yankees to win for the sake of New York City and what it's been going through after the September 11 attack. But I can't. The Yankees represent everything that's awful to me about professional sports. The Yankees are the team with the highest payroll in the league. They're also in the biggest television market in the country. The message this sends to small market and small payroll teams is that they don't have a chance in hell of winning the world series. And I think that's the wrong message to send about America's supposedly favorite sport.

Why can't major league baseball have a salary cap like the National Football league? It's worked really great for football. You never know who's going to be in the superbowl and it's really evened the playing field. Football manages at some stadiums to have over 70,000 fans. Baseball, even at the biggest stadiums, seat only 50,000. Why is there this audience discrepancy if baseball is supposed to be america's number one pastime?

I think major league baseball has a tough year ahead of them. On Tuesday, the baseball owners are meeting on whether to get rid of the Minnesota Twins and the Montreal Expos. If they do decide to get rid of these teams, it will be very divisive for the sport The contract negotiations between the baseball players' union and the owners is also coming up. With Alex Rodriguez and others bringing in millions of dollars, I believe that those talks will very contentious and that the result, will probably be a strike or at least a walkout. I don't think major league baseball can afford another strike or walkout. Baseball as a spectator sport is barely recovering from the strike in 1994.

I hope the Yankees lose the world series tomorrow, just to show that a team with a smaller payroll can win. I hope this happens for the sake of baseball and its fans.