Saturday Grab Bag Forever

E = 3! I haven’t blogged about the Yankees lately because not only were they playing out of market earlier this week, but way out in Anaheim where the games start after 10 p.m. local time. So I wasn’t even tracking the games on the interwebs – I was just kind of vaguely aware that they were happening while I slept each night. But last night the Yankees were back in the Bronx, hosting the Sox, and Joba Chamberlain actually had a decent start (all the more impressive as he was up against Lester) and the offense more than backed him up (A-Rod’s box score line was, as the kids say, SICK) and for some weird reason I still haven’t pieced together, the game was broadcast on TBS so I got to see it. (Well, most of it. I fell asleep in the 8th inning but I woke up to see the 9th. I’m an old man.) So yeah, all the Yankees need now to clinch the AL East is to win enough games in combination with Sox losses to add up to three. And since they are playing the Sox today and tomorrow, every game involves either both a NY win and a Boston loss, or neither. The Yankees could clinch by the end of Sunday’s game. Which would be great and all – except one of the announcers last night felt compelled to point out that ever since the Yankees lost the ALCS to Boston in 2004, the Yankees have not won a single post-season series. I was stunned to hear it put that way and thought it couldn’t be true, but it is. So I’m confident the Yankees will snag the pennant, if not this weekend then some time this week (because they have the Royals next … not exactly contenders), but then I will just fret about what’s going to happen in October.

Annnnnd as I wrote this the Michigan Wolverines just took down Indiana in the Big House, so they are now 4 and 0. Go Blue!

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Today while my Little Nemo was taking his morning outing in Slumberland I finally read all of the comics that I bought a few weeks ago and left on a shelf until I had time. Then when Nemo woke up I fed him lunch and took him to the comic book store, so I could buy the comics that had come out over the past few weeks. So now I’m right back where I started, except I’m a little bit farther along in the plot of the epic cosmic soap-opera I’m committed to keeping up with. (Up with keeping to which I am committed?) No cure for comic book addiction. Nemo had fun at the comic book store, too, pointing and babbling at expensive resin statues of Superman which I assume he wants for Christmas.

The comics I read this morning were good, for what it’s worth, but I’ll hold off on saying any more than that because the storyline is very much still going, and it should have a definitive ending in a few more issues, and I’ll be able to judge its merits more meaningfully then. For now I’m just happy to have had a chance to gorge on brain candy for the first time in a while.


That cover above is from a comic from 1986 or so. I used to own that particular comic but that was before I became really geeky about saving every issue, so it has long since disappeared. But the two guys on the cover? They figure pretty prominently in the current epic, which makes today's story a more-or-less direct continuation of what was going on 23 years ago. Seriously. In reference to the more socially unskilled trolls out there I've been known to say "Sometimes I am ashamed of our people." But when I think about how long I've been a Green Lantern nerd, most of the shame is self-directed.

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National Novel Writing Month starts on November 1st, which means I have about a month to decide if I want to do it this year or not. I’ve done it twice before, first in 2001 and then in 2006, but I haven’t had great success. National Novel Writing Month is a crazy web phenomenon where people encourage each other to write like fiends for 30 days and produce a 50,000 word story in that time. (50,000 words is a “novel” like The Old Man and the Sea is a “novel”. But National Really Long Short Story Month isn’t zippy.) The results aren't necessarily good, but it's all about crossing the finish line and realizing that something seemingly unthinkable - writing a freaking novel - can actually be done when you disregard hang-ups like quality and coherence. The math breaks down to writing about 1600 or 1700 words a day. Yesterday’s post was about 600 words, by comparison. But at least I’m in the habit of writing every day, so that’s encouraging. Also, I have an idea for a story that would be fun (for me to write, at least – no guarantee anyone would have fun reading it).

My two previous attempts went like this: in 2001 I tried doing something that was very close to a straight memoir. I succeeded in the sense of writing 50,000+ words between the first and last days of November, but those words did not constitute a complete story. They barely covered setting the stage. Every so often I think about returning to that and working my way through the middle and end, but I haven’t yet. In 2006 I came up with a completely fictional story (sci-fi, and pretty dark in a way that bore absolutely no resemblance to my mood that year) and a plan for how I could cover the whole thing in 50,000 words, but I lost focus about two-thirds of the way through and so that also remains unfinished.

This year’s idea is somewhere in the middle, and ideas for it keep popping into my head so it’s got some legs, and like I said, I’ve been able to carve out writing time every day for the past month, so … we’ll see.