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.

I signed for that National November Writing Month challenge. You have to write 50,000 words in 30 days, which people have calculated to be 1,666 words a day. Every three days you should have completed 5,000 words. It starts tomorrow on November 1 and ends on November 30.

I decided to work on the Following in the Dark novel, only because I've been kicking around this novel idea since 1998 and haven't ever written anything for it except a few odd lines here and there. I'm going to start it from scratch and just keep writing and hopefully I'll get 50,000 words of it completed. I think it might be longer than 50,000 words but who knows.

God, I'm nervous. I dont' know if I can do this but I feel compelled to do it just so I can start writing my novel instead of just talking about writing it. I don't think I can even hand write it because I don't really have time to type. I've been thinking I need to buy a little baby laptop but I can't decide what kind to get. I'd get a real laptop if I could get more than a 2 hour battery usage time, but the technology isn't there yet. Those baby laptops have at least an 8 hour battery life span and they're so small you can bring them anywhere and type.

I am looking forward to doing this writing challenge and whatever happens, at least I'll have my novel started.

I saw a preview of the musical version of James Joyce's 'The Dead" yesterday. I am an avid theatre goer, attending at least over a dozen plays a year. This new play is very good. I rarely cry at theatre performances. The actors have to really be very good to get me to cry and I teared up at least three times in this play. Part of me wonders if I am still emotinally raw because of September 11. I don't know and I'm not sure I'll ever know. It's just very unusual for me to cry at theatre.

I was surprised by how touching this play was and I am tempted to reread Joyce's short story. There were some very raw moments in this play. And by raw moments I mean, moments that are so true to emotion that it's almost embarrassing to watch. Very few playwrights show how life as how it really is sometimes; so painful that it sometimes feel like you got decked right in your stomach, where you hysterical and unreasonable, where afterwards you sit and wonder how you could have acted that way. And the actors let us see it all.

When I tear up at a play, for me it's a combination of great playwriting and a very good performance. I don't believe you can have one without the other.

Other thoughts floating through my mind. I've been watching TV sports today. When I was into my tennis craze in junior hight and practicing my strokes in front of a mirror, I thought Jimmy Connors was so cute. I was flipping channels and he was playing a match with John McEnroe. And much to my surprise, I thought he was still cute. I felt like I was 13 again for the briefest of second. Speaking of boys, Jim Haslett also looks very good looking to me. He reminds me of this guy that I dated in 1999 with his reddish blonde hair and soft voice and every time I see him, I think cute.

I've also been watching the baseball games and I've decided that Kurt Schilling is also very cute in teddy bear kind of way. I also like his story of how he came back and has become the great pitcher he is today. My A's have lost and now the Yankees are playing the Diamondbacks. My best friend from NYC says I should be rooting for the Yankees to win since it would be good for a city that will be mourning for a very long time. I like the Diamondbacks. I don't like them when they're playing the Giants because I am also Giants fan, just because I live her in SF. But for the world series, I like the Diamondbacks. I think they're a very good team, much better than the Yankees on paper. But you can't count the Yankees out just yet. They have so much experience playing in the post season, but it would be nice to have another team win the world series this year.

I really want to rewrite my Hot Day in Dallas story over and I'm thinking that a four part flash fiction story might work. Four parts to the story, all written in 2000 words or less or 1000, I think the more concise the scene is the better, so it would be like images on
on top of the other, but still creating a story.

No title yet but I've got subtitles for the four parts.

1) Right Between the Eyes - January
2) Reality - April
3) Expectations - August
4) Past History – March

Here's a few lines I wrote part 1.

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Right Between the Eyes - January

I got to know him before I ever met him through that wonderful modern invention called email. In my estimation, he was smart. His emails were always grammatically correct, worded correctly and polite, so polite. Each time I asked him a question he always had an answer that sounded good, even though I knew that he was sometimes totally full of it. If you were going to be totally fully of it, I think you should at least sound like you know what you’re talking about. Sometimes attitude is everything, even in an email. And Marshall definitely wrote like he had an attitude.

He was in my Dallas office and to me he was a new species of person. I didn’t know anyone from Texas, let alone a Texas male. My head was full of images of cowboys, Lee Harvey Oswald, LBJ, and George Bush Sr. I could imagine him wearing a ten-gallon cowboy hat, tight jeans and rattlesnake skin cowboy boots. I pictured him tall with a handlebar mustache or some kind of facial hair. He’d like his women busty with big blonde hairsprayed to death hair, a big toothy grin and the IQ of a loyal puppy dog. He'd walk with a swagger and be bow-legged like he'd spent all his life on horse. I couldn't wait to meet my walking and breathing stereotype.

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