What I’m Blogging

When things go really bad for a professional soldier, there is an expectation that they will improvise, overcome, and adapt to get the job done. When this is, by all practical measure, an impossibility, there is another option open to them. They can fall on their swords. Romans did it in the bath tub, Samurai had a nice cup of tea first. My thoughts on Day 22 of the NaNoWriMo is what the heck are writers supposed to do?

…raising the white flag of literary surrender…

If I fall on my laptop, even with a cuppa fist, I’m really just going to break it, and the tea will make the keys stick even more than they do now. Not really an option. I suppose the best I could do would be to fall on my pen. It at least is sharp and pointy. This is at least in the spirit of the whole falling on something genre.

I am raising the white flag of literary surrender. The word count is too far behind, and life, family, the job, and even the alignment of the planets do conspire against me. OK I made that last bit about the planet alignment up, but the tires on my 12 year old Mercury Sable need an alignment, does that count?

Where did I go worng? Well interestingly, there is an interesting book put out by the founder of the NaNoWriMo called No Plot, No Problem. In the pages of that book are explained all the reasons for my capitulation. Not locking up my Internal Editor. Falling too far behind in the count. Allowing self doubt to creep in after 4 days of writing nothing… Boy If only I had read this before I started!

“But there is suffering in life, and there are defeats. No one can avoid them. But it’s better to lose some of the battles in the struggles for your dreams than to be defeated without ever knowing what you’re fighting for.”

-Paulo Coelho (Mystical author, one of Brazil’s most successful novelist)

Final Tally:

This is a post about, what else, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Don’t worry. It’s not what you think. It’s really a tale about a Dad, his son and daughter, and a fairly good way of killing a Sunday morning and a good chunk of the afternoon as well.

…we are not in Kansas anymore and heading like a speeding bullet into adolescence…

The Kids had been well behaved and as a result, eager to claim their reward of going to see the latest of the Potter flicks. There was no chance that I was going to take them on opening day. I mean it was a good movie and all, but I didn’t need to see it that much. I aimed for the 11:30AM show on the Sunday. Heck we even got there at 11:00 AM and the darn thing was still sold out. Sure I could have bought tickets on-line, but then I wouldn’t have had my little rant now would I? In any event rather than join the queue for later show tickets, I waltzed (yes literally) over to the the “auto-ticket-kiosk-thingy” and swiped my credit card right into the next available show at noon.

Now of course, I was in a theatre with about an hour to wait and two kids to deal with. What to do, what to do? Well don’t these huge massively googleplexed cathedrals of entertainment have that all sorted out. There was food to eat, air hockey to play, video bad guys to shoot, and all other sorts of activities of the video game aperture type to hold our limited attention spans for the next sixty minutes. Insert credit card, receive tokens, Cha Ching! Children’s entertainment increased in direct proportion to the increase in my debt (and by extension a decrease to their eventual inheritance). Time to see the flick!

No spoilers here. Even if you are one of those rare individuals on the planet who have not seen the movie, I will not ruin your experience, except as it relates to the point I’m trying to make. So bail now and don’t say I didn’t warn you. My daughter loved the movie entirely. She wants to run away and be a wizard at Hogwarts. She’s eight. Heck, I’m in my forties, and I want to do that too. My son used to think this way, but recently he’s added a new spin on it. It was the scene at the ball, all of the characters were dressed in their finest robes. The climax of the scene was building, the audience was held in silent anticipation, and then we see Hermione in her gown transformed from little girl into beautiful young woman. The scene is magical and breaking the silence the audience is treated to a very loud “Whoa!” coming from the lips of my son. He’s eleven and swears that he hates girls. I, and several hundred witnesses think that perhaps he doth protest too much.

And so it begins… he either has a huge crush on Hermione, or he’s really into dress design (not that there’s anything wrong with that). Either way, we are not in Kansas anymore and heading like a speeding bullet into adolescence.