At some point, as much as I love it, politics bores the heck out of me. All that media hype, all that meaningless mudslinging by the candidates, and sloppy journalist reporting is just boring.

That's when I turn off the new stalk radio programs and listen to sports talk radio programs. Sports is always interesting and always changing.

Okay, the 49ers and the Raiders are each sucking the big ones right now. But there's the NFL football playoffs to think about, the college bowl games and the mysterious thing called baseball transactions in the off season.

Curt Schilling, that fantastic pitcher from the Arizona Diamondbacks, was traded to Boston after the Yankees came sniffing.

Oakland traded away Terrence Long and Ramon Hernandez to the Padres.

I just finished reading The Legend of Bagger Vance by Steven Pressfield. Screenwriting marina hottie boy told me last year that the book was modelled on the Bhagavad Gita, so I decided to read it.

It's a golf book, and I don't do golf, but I loved the book! The author mentioned that Vance came from Mu, which is Lemuria and I was so floored. I'm setting my elf stories in Lemuria, and I was so freaked that another writer actually used the name in a book. Lemuria, according to the legends, was the mythical land and civilization before the fabled kingdom of Atlantis.

I've been reading the Bhagavad Gita off and on since I was 13 years old, and it was so fun to read this philosophical tract in a fictional book. I haven't read the Gita in ages, and it makes me want to read it again along with the Mahabharata and the Ramayana.

Pressfield apparently wrote a couple of other books on war, and I want to read those as well. On Amazon.com, some of the reviewers mentioned another book called "Golf in the Kingdom" by Michael Murphy and now I want to read this book too.

The 50K version of my novel is finished. I came in at 50,088 words. I received a certificate and a winner's icon, that I will update on the blog tomorrow.

Now if I can just finish the novel to the end, I'll be very happy.

I've been writing all night. I want to finish my 50K total tonight, and take a break tomorrow. I'm not done with my novel yet, but I plan to keep writing till it's finished.

I was thinking of relaxing the 1,667 words per day pace, but I know if I do that I'll never finish the novel in December. And I do want to finish the novel before the end of the year.

If I finish the novel, it will be a first for me and I think it's an important stage for me to get to in my writing life. A novel is such a big undertaking, such a big step to take for me as a writer. I've finished writing short stories and even a 110+ page screenplay, but a novel is different.

A novel is more involved, and it's definitely longer than a screenplay as far as word counts go. My novel, double spaced is 169 pages. I have five more chapters to go. I can see the novel going into the 200+ page range by the time I'm through. Darn! That's a ton of pages.

My first goal is get the novel done by the run off election date, which is Tuesday December 9. I have a writing seminar to attend that night on character development, which means I'll have to be done during the day or finish when I get home from the seminar.

Ending on December 9 would mean adding 15,000 more words to my novel. I hope that's enough to finish the five chapters. If not, I guess I'll keep going till I finish. But I have to absolutely be done by December 31st. If I keep up the 1,667 words a day pace, and I have more to write, I'm sure I'll be finished way before the end of December.

I heard this song at the gym today, and it brought back so many good memories. The song was "Lips like Sugar" by Echo and the Bunnymen. I was trying to dance while running on the eliptical trainer, what a riot!

I want to hear Joy Division, New Order, The Style Council, and Pere Ubu!