So I decided to join the National Novel Writing Month group again, and I'm about to write a novel in November. I wasn't going to do it, but I think the exercise of writing every day will keep my mind off my roller coaster ride of a life. My life is one big trauma right now, and I need to do some serious writing to keep me from getting too depressed.

I got into this habit where I'm writing constant letters to my future self 20 years into the future, to ask advice about what I'm going through. It's really trippy because my future self writes back about a future I'm supposed to have which seems so impossible. My future self says she went through the same things I have, but she never wrote letters to her future self the way I'm doing right now. She keeps saying some things in a person's timeline can't be changed. Anyway it's kind of like having an running argument with myself, and it kind of keeps me amused and thinking about things.

But my future self letters have me really interested in writing a story about a character trying to change her future. So I titled my new novel "Changing Timelines", and it will be about a character who discovers a way to remote view into the future and who of course (like her creator) so does not like the future she sees that she tries desperately to change the timeline.

My future self keeps writing to me that while I do have free choice and free will in my life, some timelines cannot be changed. And when my future self says timelines, she means that a certain person will always be in my life no matter what I do. She says it doesn't matter what I do or don't do, if the other person does choose to take a different path, then the person remains in my timeline.

I hate her vision of the how the future works, because it makes me across like a passive victim and I don't believe I'm that. But my future self insists that there are other forces, divine forces at work, that brought us together and which I cannot tear apart. And I hate this interpretation! So I spend many letters arguing about free will, free choice, divine intervention, god's will, god's plan, and on an on with my future self. I am definitely at war with myself right now, and I guess it helps psychologically to argue with myself on paper.

Anyway, all this traumarama makes for an interesting novel about what a person would be willing to do to change a future they don't want. Like how far would my character be willing to go to change her future? Would she be willing to commit crimes, maybe even murder to change her future? I couldn't do that myself, so maybe I need to write about a character who does just to see how far I would really go in a fictional world.

I could explore the ethics lesson I had in grade school. Does the ends equal the means or the means equal the end? In other words, would I be willing to kill if it meant I would be preventing something equally horrible happening. And in grade school I told my teacher I don't know, it depends on the situation. And she just looked at me and said I was "situationalist" and that I saw the world in shades of grey and not in black and white. Looks like I was a post modernist thinker even in my youth. You can thank my hippie grade school teachers for it. They started us on the post modernist track very young.

It's definitely a sign of something that the Boston Redsox beat the evil NY Yankees empire. Yes, there are miracles sometimes in life, if only for a little while.

Pray for my repose of my uncle's soul who was sick back on memorial day. He passed this afternoon. My aunt said he knew it too, and even though he was serene and peaceful at the end, tears rolled out of his right eye. My aunt said it was sad, very sad. He was young too, only 61 years old and about to retire. He and my aunt were looking forward to spending their golden years together.

You just never know when you're going to go.

After all the dramarama of running into my ex-hubby, and then spending half an hour talking to a friend of mine in front of Blockbuster as she tried to calm me down about running into him, I did manage to get to Starfreaks and write for an hour.

I had some more things to write for Elf Girl story, mainly how my main character hated the younger brother for dying and leaving her to defend the kingdom and lead the armies. It's irrational to hate a six-year old for dying because it's not like he had a choice, but my main character is a child herself and she has to be angry at someone. So why not hate the younger brother for dying and leaving her to deal with the mess?

Plus there's the guilt she has for being unprepared to fight, the guilt for the irrational hatred of her brother, the anger for being robbed of her childhood, the guilt for all the mistakes she made in those first few years which almost led to the complete decimation of her army.

Irrational anger and guilt intertwined like challah bread is really weird and interesting to write about. And I wrote it all on my new Palm Tungsten E with my mini free foldup keyboard. I love it. I don't need to be near an outlet, and I can just type away. I probably should figure out how to get an extra power source, should I ever run out of juice. Writing for an hour wiped out about 1/3 of my battery power. Still, it beats having to lug a laptop around right now.

My past is coming back to haunt me.

Haunt # 1 - On the way to the movie rental place last night, I ran into my ex-husband. Talk about shocking! I hadn’t seen him in what, 14 or more years. We talk on the phone and we email, but I haven’t seen him in ages. I think the last time I saw him was at a gathering in Portland Oregon of mutual friends.

I was so freaked out, I think I was kind of rude to him and then when he wanted to me to meet his girlfriend, I was like "I don’t think so." It’s not like I’m jealous, it’s more like I don’t really want to know that much about his personal life. My ex-hub was his usual nasty self and he lashed out and said "she loves me more than you ever did", which was really quite uncalled for and very inappropriate. But you know, the guy was probably right. We were never a good fit, and we couldn’t love each other the way we each needed to be loved to make the marriage last. He’s been with his girlfriend longer than we were ever together, although they still aren’t married and don’t even live together.

Haunt # 2 – While waiting in the rain for the train to take me to work, this guy comes over and starts talking to me about how late the trains were. Talk about blast from the past. The guy looked exactly like the kind of guy I wanted to marry in college. He was your typical New York City jewish looking intellectual type with glasses, a little nerdy, tall with dark hair and brown eyes. He was the kind of guy I would fantasize that I would be married to, and living with in an apartment on Central Park West. We would go to old movies and argue about them like in a Woody Allen movie. We would take walks in Central Park, explore the Village on the weekends, go to the Met or the Guggenheim to see art, and hunt around furiously for cheap sushi places in little Tokyo. We’d spend hours arguing about finer points of harvard liberal politics, books, philosophy, and why jazz after 1970 isn’t as good as jazz in the 1950’s.

When we got on separate trains, I was berating myself for not following him. He got off at my stop, but took a different escalator. Maybe I’ll run into him on the train again.

I haven’t met a guy quite this one in a very long time, and it was kind of like having an old fantasy come to life and start talking to you. Very strange. Red-haired guy is the kind of guy that I would never have been attracted to in college, and up until a few years ago wouldn’t have even bothered talking to. Maybe red-haired guy was right when he teases that I’m at heart "a snobby girl". There’s more truth to what he teases me about than he’ll ever know.

Haunt # 3 – I received an email this morning from a co-worker at my last job. I haven’t heard from her in six months. She was just emailing to say hello, and said nothing has changed at my old company. It makes me wonder if there’s more to the email than what she’s letting on, but she hasn’t emailed back. I hope she’s okay. Maybe she wants to come and work for my company.