Another band?

Okay, so I haven’t posted since Monday. Gee, you must be wondering to yourself, I bet Jordon’s busy. Wrongo. I just haven’t had anything worthwhile to mention. My last two posts were sub-par, in my opinion. They were short because I couldn’t scrounge up a lot to say.

Anyway, on Wednesday I got invited to be in a band. My friend Mandi and her friend Nicole are starting it, apparently, and they want me to be a guitarist and lyricist. I thought it would be cool if I could provide some songs that I’ve written — I’ve written songs for a long time and I’ve always been itching to have them played by more than just me.

Mandi would be the lead singer, and Nicole would play the bass. They were trying to get Mark (from VRT, the band I’m already in) on drums and my old friend Jeff on the saxophone for a touch of ska, but those positions weren’t confirmed.

Besides ska, they named Taking Back Sunday as one of their influences. I had heard of them, but I had never heard them (of course), so I listened to some samples at Amazon. They don’t sound that bad. (My friends who don’t like them can shoot me or something.)

I think I would be the only guitarist, so the whole thing should just be a matter of playing power chords, unless they want me to play a solo. (The only problem is that I can’t play that fast without getting tired.) They also hinted that they would want me to sing occasionally, and in that case, Mandi could play the violin.

Considering that VRT is no longer playing live (but still is going to get together), I should have more time to focus my energy on this new band — if everything works out, that is. I’m going to meet Mandi and Nicole today so that we can “do lunch” and talk about how things would work.

Here’s a song (Flash, sound) created entirely out of sounds from Windows 95/98 (although I’m pretty sure at least one of them is from AOL).

If you have AOL Instant Messenger, plug your screen name and a friend’s into AIM Fight to see which of you has a larger network of friends.

Big chair

On Saturday some guys in a truck came over and brought in a big chair. I had vaguely heard some mumblings about bringing a new piece of furniture into this “computer room” as part of my parents’ master plan to make it less “computer” and more… “room.” (The other parts of the plan are moving the computer to the opposite wall so that incoming guests cannot see it, and painting the former computer wall red.)

The chair is brown leather and it shows some signs of use because it is used. It looks to be about one and a half times the width of a regular chair, so it’s not quite a loveseat, but it can fit two people. It’s very comfortable also. Already I’ve spent many a minute lying across it. I imagine I could take a nap in it if I were tired enough, but that hasn’t happened in recent (or not-so-recent) memory.

On Thursday my friend Michelle asked if I would be interested in going to an anti-war protest in Washington over the weekend. I said I’d consider it — it didn’t sound like a bad idea — even though I knew my parents would say no. (It was something like $90 for the 20-hour bus ride there, plus the cost of food.) Needless to say (even though I’m saying it), they said no, so I was basically stuck at home over the weekend. (I had a lot of homework to do anyway.)

You can imagine my surprise when I saw footage from the demonstration on TV — I had thought it was going to be a little thing. Ĝangalo, an Esperanto news portal, reported on its main page that there were 100,000 protesters. I printed out the article and showed her today at school. She said that they had made front-page news just about everywhere. Also, she had a souvenir for me: a poster from the demonstration.

Square America is “a gallery of vintage snapshots & vernacular photography.” I find this interesting because my dad just showed me some old photographs of my grandparents and the boat that they apparently used to have. You can learn some cool things from old photos.

Tim Burton’s Corpse

Today I went to see Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride (a Tim Burton film) with some friends. I thought it was a pretty good movie. It’s reminiscent of The Nightmare Before Christmas without copying it too much. And even though Danny Elfman does it again with some good songs, they aren’t as memorable. Some people complained that, like Burton’s other stop-motion films, it was too short (only 76 minutes), but that wasn’t much of a problem for me.

Of course, the animation is spectacular; I thought it was CGI from watching the TV commercials on the small screen, but it is indeed stop-motion (for the most part, at least). The animation in Tim Burton films is such a step above all others that in my mind it is something more. In fact, while watching a preview for Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, I actually thought to myself, “Who would want to see a lousy stop-motion movie?”

After we got home, my sister (who was there also) looked at her ticket and realized that the full title of the movie (“Tim Burton’s” and all) was too long to be displayed fully. The most that could fit was “Tim Burton’s Corpse.” I doubt many people would want to watch that, even for 76 minutes.

Did you ever wonder what it would be like to pop a water balloon in space? Me neither, but that page has some pretty cool videos of water balloons floating around and being popped in low gravity.

Really bad Rita

Hurricane Rita, like Katrina before it, passed by South Florida without much trouble. But apparently conditions are more favorable for hurricanes as they move into the Gulf of Mexico. At its peak, Rita was one of the strongest hurricanes ever recorded and is now barreling toward the Gulf Coast, just like Katrina did only weeks ago.

I know people (and know people who know people) who live in Texas, and I can imagine how they must feel. And the irony of it all is that Houston is housing the victims of Hurricane Katrina. Actually, my web host is based in Houston, and when the evacuees arrived just down the street from them, they received donations from members to buy food and other necessities. Now that Houston itself is a target, the company is assuring its members (such as me) that they are doing what they can to keep safe They also say that their hosting facilities are not located in Houston for this very reason. The World of Stuff is hosted in Phoenix, Arizona.

Other than that, there hasn’t really been much going on. On Wednesday I saw my friend Nick wearing a tie to school. We decided that on Thursday we would get as many people as possible to wear a tie. Only a few people did, but I was one of them. Then we came up with the idea of wearing a tie every Tuesday, for no reason at all other than to see how much it would catch on.

Some people, however, do think there’s a reason. Some months ago my friend Mark started a “cult.” The only thing about the “cult” (which has no name) is that it exists. All he does is go around asking people if they want to be in it. When he told me about it, he had gotten 200 people (by his own account). I said I didn’t want to get involved in anything like that, in case the school took it the wrong way (because all cults are about human sacrifice, right?); so, I said that if he got 999 members, I would be the 1,000th. This week he had at least 994, but I might not join anyway because some of Mark’s friends have apparently been told that Tuesday Tie Day is a “cult” activity. When the principal’s bootlickers and thugs hear about both Tuesday Tie Day and the “cult” in the same breath, they’ll chew out Mark and ban ties. I know it.

I have a science project to do for chemistry class. Apparently most junior high schools repeatedly had science fairs that the kids had to do projects for (my school only had one when I was there). Thus, any science project they call a “science fair.” But I call it a science project.

Anyway, my chemistry teacher is made us choose a science project from a list of topics that are like things you might see at a science fair: really simple experiments or things like “Which soda cleans corrosion the best?” But she’s making us write a whole ton of stuff about it, like a real science report that some scientist would do. We have to write five pages, double-spaced, of research (and she’s counting the lines!). But the topics are so agonizingly simple. It’s like writing five pages about what two plus two might be and how you could figure it out.

Also, we have to get research from at least four science journals, but they always have articles like “Spectroanalysis of the Multipolyplexiumbersate Hoobatriskajabbers.” You’d never find “How does the amount of salt in a solution affect the conductivity of water?” (That’s the topic I chose.) Oh well, I’ll just have to do what I can.

Cows can’t go down stairs, but they can go up. That can lead to a problem if you bring a cow upstairs. Fortunately, Bovine Descenders provides solutions. “Cow stuck upstairs? You’ve tried the rest – now try the best!”

Not-so-lovely Rita

As Hurricane Rita passed to the south today, we got a day off from school. Yesterday there was a rumor that school would also be closed tomorrow, but it doesn’t seem that that will be the case. It’s already passed without much trouble. The winds picked up and the characteristic gray cloud cover appeared, but I think they’re retreating now. So I’ve tried to enjoy this holiday in the middle of the week without worrying about losing electricity.

What a hurricane season this has been; and although the peak of the season (mid-September) has passed, it’s far from over. There are only four more names left on this year’s list of 21 names to be used: Stan, Tammy, Vince, and Wilma. Should there be more hurricanes, the letters of the Greek alphabet would be used to name them, starting with alpha. I don’t know when this idea was devised, but I only found out about it. Since the naming of hurricanes began, there have never been more than 21 storms.

Pictured here is an undated drawing by my sister, found by her today. I don’t know what the speech balloon (crossed out) said. I could make out “Thank you…” but not much else. In any case, I dig the lip thing. And those sideburns.

Here’s a list of national mottos for the countries of the world. To my surprise, only English-speaking countries seem to use Latin mottos (for the most part); other countries make more use the vernacular (or, often, a minority language if it is a former colony).

Have a look at this gallery of various covers of The Catcher in the Rye from around the world. It’s interesting how the book has been treated over the years, and how the covers reflect that.

Hey now, they’re All-Stars

Like I said, last night we went to Sarasota to see Drew Carey’s Improv All-Stars, featuring Drew Carey, Greg Proops, Chip Esten, Jeff Davis, Jonathan Mangum, and Sean Masterson. All of them appeared on “The Drew Carey Show” and all but the last two were on “Whose Line Is It Anyway?.” (Also scheduled to appear was Kathy Kinney, best known for her role as bitter, gaudily-clad Mimi on “The Drew Carey Show,” but she had to cancel.) The tour was intended to promote “Drew Carey’s Green Screen Show,” so all of them have also appeared on that show, but I didn’t really know that because I’ve never watched it.

When we had gone to see Colin Mochrie and Brad Sherwood in February, we left the show satisfied. But then my sister saw that someone by the screen name of anaerosmithchick waited by the stage door after the show and got to meet Colin and Brad. So this time we did our research, looking at floor plans and satellite photos of the theater, so that we could meet the performers at the stage door. However, our research indicated that because the All-Stars were playing two shows, they would only step outside after the second show. We were going to the first show.

We left a little after 1 P.M. and made it into Sarasota in maybe three and a half hours. So we got our tickets and sort of hung out. The venue was really fancy and purple. In the lobby they were selling T-shirts (which had pictures only of Drew Carey) and posters. My sister and I bought posters. We wandered around the place looking for where the stage door might be. By chance I saw a large sign that said “Stage Door” and had an arrow pointing down a long, winding high-walled ramp that led down to a door. I was confused because it was exactly the opposite of where I thought it was going to be, but we had found it.

Eventually they opened the doors and we found our seats. We were in row number 4 (actually the 7th) at the end, where one could easily get picked to go up on stage. I had said that I was going to hide my camera in my sock. I ended up doing no such thing; my mom put it in her purse. We were also really close to the ushers, so covertly taking pictures during the show seemed to be out of the question. Nevertheless, when the show started and Drew Carey did a little bit of stand-up, I tried to take some pictures. They were horrible and I deleted them.

Overall, the show was very good. They played some singing games that would have been impossible without Laura Hall, best known as the resident keyboardist from Whose Line. They ended the show with the same game that Colin Mochrie and Brad Sherwood used when we saw them. Drew and Sean acted out a game while walking on 100 mousetraps barefoot and blindfolded. (Greg joined in the fun by throwing some mousetraps at Drew.) Sean seemed to be having a good time, but Drew seemed genuinely hurt. It was all the funnier.

After leaving, we went over to the stage door. Several people were in the general area, including a woman and a small boy (the latter of whom was sporting a homemade Whose Line t-shirt). My sister thought it might be the ever-lucky anaerosmithchick and her son whom she had mentioned on the various Whose Line-related forums that my sister reads. But we didn’t really want to ask, because that would have been awkward. Eventually we converged by the wall beside the ramp to the stage door. We started striking up some conversation. She was a die-hard Whose Line fan, and she showed us a picture on her cell phone: it was Colin Mochrie and Brad Sherwood, the same picture my sister had fretted over because it could have been her waiting there also.

We waited for a while, and somebody stepped outside the door. It was Jonathan Mangum, who I knew because he was on a commercial that you might have seen. It was the Frosted Flakes commercial where he’s sitting outside a cafe or something, and he eats a spoonful of the cereal and then gets drenched in a wave of milk. Alas, he was only talking on his cell phone and went back inside shortly thereafter. After more waiting, someone went down to the stage door to ask the security guard if they could go in. Of course, the person got snubbed.

Our efforts paid off. Anaerosmithchick sighted Greg Proops coming out and called to him. He came up to do the photo and autograph thang. He autographed my poster, asking me what my name was. I shook his hand and told him he was awesome and that I loved his show (even though Whose Line wasn’t really his show). “Thanks, Jordon,” he said. He was very soft-spoken, kind, and maybe even a bit shy. As I marvelled at the photo my sister and I got with him, anaerosmithchick was pointing out to her son that Greg did a voice in Star Wars: Episode I (he was one of the podracing announcers). Greg then retreated back by the stage door and called his wife on his cell phone — not that I was listening, but that’s what the others told me they heard.

Even though my parents were hungry and tired and quite frankly, my dear, didn’t give a damn about meeting the performers, they let us stay a little while longer. When no one else came out, we left in search of a restaurant, all the while trying to convince them to let us stay in town a little longer so we could meet the performers after the second show. We found a Tijuana Flats, a Mexican restaurant known for its hot sauces, and ate there, making it the fourth Tijuana Flats I’ve eaten in. After a megajuana-sized chimichanga and a soda too large (I was done in by the old trick question, “Do you want a large?”), my parents talked to each other a bit. I knew that that was good, because by default they weren’t going to let us stay. They were taking time to discuss it.

When we got back into the car, my dad took it in the direction of the theater, and we pulled in. Yesss! While waiting for the second show to end, we admired the bayside scenery and the rats, crickets, and cockroaches that populated it. At a certain spot outside the stage door area we could hear the show very well. I felt kind of bad because I was sort of enjoying this show I hadn’t paid for, but the security guards didn’t make any effort to remove us. In fact, they quite informatively told us that the performers had cut the mousetrap game due to timing reasons. I’m sure Drew Carey wasn’t disappointed.

A stampede of people came out the doors, and two of them were anaerosmithchick and her son, who had gone to see the second show (after all, it’s improvised; no two shows are the same). So we waited. We were also told that there was a meet and greet inside after the show, so they wouldn’t be out immediately. We were afraid that they would just dash into their two black SUVs, which were already waiting. So, I had my pen, poster, and camera ready in case I only had about four seconds or something.

Jeff Davis came out first. Even though he only appeared in 8 episodes, he his remembered by Whose Line fans for being a talented singer and for having a good Christopher Walken impression. He was inclined to chat with anaerosmithchick, who complimented him on his Christopher Walken, which he had also done during the second show. Everyone else came out afterward, so the performers did their duties of meeting fans, signing autographs and posing for pictures.

Sean Masterson was an enigma to me; I had never heard of him. According to the poster, he was on “The Drew Carey Show,” but his IMDb page says he was only in one episode. Nevertheless, I told him that I enjoyed his performance (he was funny) and that we had actually gone to the first show, not the second. “That’s dedication,” he said. It might have been around this time that I noticed that Greg was sulking around away from everyone else. We were lucky to have met him beforehand.

Laura Hall passed by and anaerosmithchick got her autograph. I wanted to say something to her, but I didn’t. I mouthed to my sister, “Laura Hall is standing right next to you,” but she didn’t get it. She blames it on Laura’s different hairstyle. She can’t recognize her anymore! My sister approached Jonathan Mangum and told her that she liked the cereal commercial. We each got his autograph. Poor him; we didn’t realize it, but the poster misspelled his name as “Magnum,” and we had been pronouncing it that way. Luckily we didn’t say it to his face, though.

Next we approached the one person I wanted to see the most: the venerable king of comedy, Drew Carey. My sister told him that our dad’s from Cleveland (Carey of course being a Clevelandite also; in fact, “The Drew Carey Show” was set in Cleveland). I had worked up what I wanted to say, and it was this: “Hi, I love your shows. Every day when I get home from school, I watch ‘The Drew Carey Show’ on TBS.” He replied, “Thanks for the money,” and I said, “I’ll buy from their advertisers.” Okay, so it might not have been the best thing to say, but it’s what I said. He was a nice guy.

Finally I sought Chip Esten, another singer from Whose Line. When signing autographs outside this theater, flat surfaces were lacking, and others had sought creative solutions. Jeff Davis had signed for me on a wall, Jonathan Mangum on his leg, and Sean Masterson on the back door of one of the SUVs. Chip, seeing nothing else, signed on my back. My pen kind of ran out of ink right there, so he borrowed anaerosmithchick’s marker, and so his signature is bold while the others are kind of weak and lacking ink.

With that, we left. I tried to sleep in the car, but I’m not very good at it. Call me crazy, but when I go to sleep I like it to be quiet and I like to be lying down comfortably. So I didn’t get any sleep at all, but I did rest my eyes, and that sort of counted as sleep to my body. We got home just after 3 A.M., and I slept for less than 5 hours. Now I have a couple of essays to do that are due tomorrow. But I don’t really care. I met the Improv All-Stars! All in all, it was a very cool experience and I’m glad I didn’t miss it.

And now, the obligatory photos.

Greg Proops:

Jeff Davis:

Drew Carey:

Chip Esten:

If you read all the way down to here, way to go.

Improv All-Stars

I’m a big fan of the improvised comedy show Whose Line Is It Anyway?. (Improvisation is called “improv” for people who like to abbrev. everything.) In February I even went to see Colin Mochrie and Brad Sherwood live. So when my sister found out that Drew Carey’s Improv All-Stars were coming (well, going) to Sarasota, she decided that we had to go. So we’re all going. The All-Stars are a touring improv troupe led by Whose Line host Drew Carey; they are composed of performers from Whose Line and The Drew Carey Show (many people made appearances on both shows).

My sister was really mad when she found out that we could have met Colin and Brad if we had hung out by the stage door after the show. So we’re going to try to meet the All-Stars: Drew Carey, Greg Proops, Chip Esten, Jeff Davis, and more. We’ve examined satellite photos and floor plans of the venue, and it may just be possible to sneak over to the side entrance, but we’d probably (a) get kicked out, (b) not see them, or (c) both.

In any case, I’m bringing my camera. I know cameras aren’t allowed, but you always see someone who managed to bring one in. I think I’m going to hide mine in my sock if they’re really rough with searching people. We have fairly close seats (yesss!) so I’ll have to be very careful and make sure the flash and auto-focus are turned off, as both of them make bright lights. Maybe I’ll even take some videos, ’cause my camera can do that.

No, you didn’t misread the first paragraph. The show is in Sarasota, a good 4 hours away (if you go the fast way), on the opposite side of the state. I think we’re taking the long way through the seedy towns during the day, and the fast Interstate way on the night trip home. So how will I entertain myself? Because I have an essay due for European history, I need to read the prerequisite reading (a very boring chapter from Guns, Germs, and Steel about how societies formed). To get me to read the darn thing, I’m bringing no books and no music.

I hope the trip is worth it. I think it will be, if we don’t spend the night in Sarasota (we’re undecided on that point). I just hate sleeping in hotels and stuff like that. I’d be perfectly fine with stumbling back into the house at one in the morning, and I know my dad likes driving at night. Anyway, it should be cool to see Drew Carey in person, as I am a fan of both of his shows, so that should make up for everything.

This is a most interesting site that I found from Google Blog Search: It’s called The World of Stuff, and it’s got a blog with random things. Sound familiar?

When I started The World of Stuff, I made sure there were no other sites called The World of Stuff. There’s WorldOfStuff, The Wide World of Stuff, and So-and-So’s World of Stuff, but there was no The World of Stuff. And indeed, the aforementioned site’s domain name, theworldofstuff.net, was registered on June 29, 2005, making whoever runs that site the impostor. (For the record, I registered theworldofstuff.com on July 15, 2003, and the site existed before then.)

Well, I think I’ll just let it pass. I doubt that site will ever achieve the high level of popularity that this World of Stuff has.

Things work out

I know I said that I would never again mention Nacole, who seemingly snubbed my offer of a date by instead going out with another guy. Out of angst and sadness, I cut off communication with her in almost every way. But on Saturday I broke the embargo and shot her a not mean e-mail asking why she did what she did and basically placing the blame on myself, because I know she didn’t mean it.

Still, she didn’t say anything to me. In other words, she was treating me like I was treating her. I wanted to tell her something else (like, “Did you get my e-mail?”) but I didn’t know exactly what to say.

The other day she posted on her LiveJournal (which I was still occasionally reading) an acknowledgement of the situation, affirming the rumor that she “broke a heart” by going out with that other guy. She also said that they had broken up. I was relieved to hear those things. I tried several times to post a comment discreetly, but I didn’t know how to say it without it being taken as some snide sarcastic remark.

Today I decided to break the ice by means of AIM. “Hey,” I said. “I thought you didn’t want to talk to me,” she replied. She had found out! But who told her? Nevertheless, I apologized, and she apologized, so we quickly moved along to discuss other things.

But questions were still weighing heavily on my mind. I asked her why she didn’t think I was asking her out, and she said that she just didn’t realize it because of her self-consciousness and that she just couldn’t imagine that guys liked her like that.

I asked when she found out that I didn’t want to talk to her. She said that Michelle, a mutual friend and a reader of this site, read it on this site and told her. Amazingly, she was afraid to say anything to me (which is why she didn’t talk to me), and she was left speechless by my e-mail (which is why she didn’t e-mail me back, although she did try to just like I tried to post a comment on her LiveJournal).

In the wake of this awkward standoff, she affirmed that we are still friends, and that’s a good thing because I’d hate to lose a friend like that. So I guess things are back to normal between us. And all I had to do, as she put it, was say “Hi.”

In China, the “Grammar Police” is becoming a reality. Here’s a translation (a bad one, because it’s by me) of an article posted today on the Esperanto portal Ĝangalo:

If you read other blogs, you’ve heard about this, but I’m posting it anyway. It’s Google Blog Search (in beta, of course) and it searches blogs’ RSS and/or Atom feeds. You can sort the results by relevance or date, and (the coolest thing of all) you can subscribe to the search results in RSS or Atom format — effectively enabling you to keep tabs on certain topics and stuff. I’m sure there’s some other site where you can do it, but since Google’s doing it, it’s cool.

Doing nothing is fun!

Like yesterday, I’m here in a computer room waiting for the freshmen and sophomores to finish taking their tests. We have even more time here today — they’re doing math — so I decided I’d get my daily European history homework done. As I write this (not as of posting time) there are more than two hours to spare.

I kind of like English class. I think either I’ve just been lucky with the teachers I’ve gotten over the years, or it really is my best class. Yesterday, instead of having a vocabulary quiz, the teacher had us write something — anything — using at least 10 of our 50 vocabulary words. She said she would give extra credit for more words and particularly good pieces.

I labored for about 45 minutes on mine until it was time to go. I handed on her desk a three-stanza poem that filled only half the page. Each line except the last contained a vocabulary word we had learned. She said, “Thank you for saving me time in reading yours,” and I said, “Yeah, well, it took me forever to write it in iambic pentameter.” So here it is. Bonus points for you if you know what all the words mean.

(The teacher replied that it was very good. “And I’m not being cynical,” she added.)

Now I shall answer those who Ask Jordon.

Yellow Chicken: In a day, how many times do you type in a login name and a password?

I hardly ever have to do the actual typing of the user names and passwords unless I’m on a computer other than my own (like right now). At home I have Firefox (and Thunderbird) remember most of my passwords. I estimate that if I had to type in all of my login information, I would do it probably 5 to 10 times a day, maybe more.

Crystal Jones: Do You Like Writting?

I don’t like to Writ, but I like to write; I do enjoy correcting spelling and capitalization errors (sorry, Crystal!). You can probably see here that I am a prolific blogger. I could probably blog out my armpits if I had a few days to recharge in between. I also enjoy writing short, structured things like songs and poems. It’s fiction that gets me. The novel I’m kind of working on will probably (if it’s finished) have flat characters, boring dialogue, and a predictable plot. Creating extended works from the imagination is difficult like that.

Oh, and if you’re the very same Crystal Jones who suggested this writing tip (get ideas from listening to your family), thanks for that; I’ll have to try it sometime. And thanks for reading my blog, because one can never have enough 20-year-old female readers who are fascinated about one’s life.

I’m not sure if this is a joke or not. It’s fixr, supposedly a free service in which you tell them about a photo opportunity that you missed, and they recreate it for you and send you the picture. It appears to be targeted toward Flickr users, but apparently anyone can use it. I’ll have to try it out and see what they come up with.

Detainment

Today and tomorrow there is testing for the freshmen and sophomores (they’re taking the BATs, I think — not to be confused with the OWLs or NEWTs). That means that the juniors and seniors (well, the ones who bothered to come to school, anyway) are being held in the classrooms that the other students aren’t using for testing. These are rooms such as the health classroom, the band room, and the computer labs, whence this middayish midweekish entry comes. There’s hardly anyone here in the classroom of Ms. Bruton, whom I had for my first class during the first semester of my first year of high school.

Sunday afternoon was one of those afternoons where I have a little more homework to do but I’m so bored that I don’t feel like doing anything and I can’t nap (I can’t go to sleep if it’s not dark). Even blogging is boring then, but it passes the time. It was on Sunday that I got a good idea for a novel. So, I started searching the web for advice for writing a novel. There are many sites that can help you. They all say this: “Writing is really hard. You can’t do it.” Nevertheless, I persevered for a total of a few hours before I realized that I can’t write fiction and that I’d quickly lose interest in trying to drag out this mediocre story.

Here are some reasons not to write a novel.

1. Months of wasted effort; no one will ever want to publish your story.
2. If someone does want to publish your story, it won’t be popular and so you won’t make any money.
3. You have a day job to stick to.
4. This is reason number 4.

But the next day I figured why I would want to write a novel. A novel exists for the author to convey a message, and I feel that I have a message that I want to convey. Besides that, I realized that a novel has several subplots, so I threw one in. Maybe I can think of another. I’ve already finished designing the characters, and I’m currently working on outlining the plot. I’ve got that about halfway done.

But writing it will be another story. I think a work must be at least 40,000 words long to be considered a novel. I did some math with that. A seven-page story that I wrote has about 3,000 words. If a single chapter is that long, and there are, say, twelve, then that’s about 36,000 words on 84 pages – a pretty shrimpy novel. Each major event will be a chapter, except for the climax, which may span several, and the exposition, which will have its own. Of course, that’s all subject to change. Whether or not I write it is subject to change.

I don’t remember being told this. Last Wednesday, the Miami Herald reported:

I wonder what other crimes are being committed here that we don’t know about? Google News knows all.