Not a Resolution

Okay, this isn’t a resolution. More like a goal, really. A desire. A vague outline of a plan. A post a week. It can be done. Right? The post a day thing that WordPress is encouraging is a little much and would devolve into posts like: “Dear Diary, Today I went to work. That sucked. Then I came home. I wore black pants. TTFN.” I can’t be that person. The plinky post things are interesting but I’m not sure if that’s what I want to do with the blog or not.

I remember starting this as a place to post book reviews. Then I started posting trip reports and random musings. Then the book reviews stopped and the posts were few and far between. So the vague outline of a plan involves posting weekly and generating more of a focus for the blog. Is it a review site or a lifestream blog? I have a feeling it will be the latter. But who knows?

Stay tuned…

NaNoWriMo

No, it’s not another secret command Klaatu uses on Gort. It stands for National Novel Writing Month. In a nutshell, people sign up to write a novel throughout November.

That’s right. A novel. Not some collaborative muddle with everyone else on the site. An honest-to-goodness novel written by each participant. Defined as 50,000 words.

You’ve got 2 more days to sign up if you’re the creative type. The project is about quantity, not quality. The idea is to write, putting it simply. Consider the output a rough first draft. If you churn out 50,000 words, then your Great American Novel moves out of head and into reality. It’s not just a pipe dream you tell yourself you’ll get to some day when you hit the lottery and retire early or some day when the kids are old enough or some day when you’ve stopped going to the gym because you’ve lost that last 10 pounds and are keeping it off.

I know a lot of people who say they’re writers (not professional writers, I’m talking creative writing here). Some of them actually do put pen to paper or fingers to keyboard and come up with something regularly or now and then. But the majority (and I’m ashamed to count myself among them) are no better than the drunk at the club who swears he’s the best pick-up artist but never makes a move from his stool.

When I Win the Lottery

Someday I will be rich. Filthy rich with enough money to buy small countries or one medium-sized country, preferably with an ocean view and plenty of closets.

When that day happens, I will take myself to Bauman Rare Books in Philadelphia (with a branch now open in Las Vegas at The Palazzo). Take a look through the April catalog; it’s a 5MB download on the site. Pick out your wish list.

Me? I’m picking up a Rackham-illustrated and -signed copy of A Midsummer Night’s Dream for a mere $6,000. And a first edition of The Lord of the Rings ($48,000) and a first of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz ($16,000). There’s a signed first edition of The Grapes of Wrath ($32,000) and a first of The Cat in the Hat ($14,000), that I may have owned at some point and then carelessly let mildew in the basement. The piece de resistance of the dripping-with-money-and-forgetting-my-friends shopping spree will be the 1691 second quatro of Julius Caesar for a piddling $40,000.

You may all come view my collection, housed, of course, in a sterile, humidity-controlled environment. Providing you promise to wear white cotton gloves naturally.

Coming soon…

Does the world need another blog? Maybe not, but adding unnecessarily to the universe’s cacophony has never stopped me before.

What will you find here? Reviews of books, movies and other entertainment thingamabobs. Domestic adventures. Random thoughts. I’ll do my best to avoid posts that tell you what time I got up in the morning, how many strokes I used to brush my teeth and so on. Because no one, not even I (me, myself?) cares about that.

Please comment early and often on anything that strikes your fancy.

Stay tuned …