Except, well, I’m not doing it this year.

Heh. For all I proselytize about how awesome NaNoWriMo is, I’ve only ever actually attempted it once. School and work got in the way each year I thought about giving it a shot; as much as I love the concept, it’s kind of hard to swing 1,667 words a day when you’re in the middle of finals season. But I did finally give it a shot during that (apparently requisite) period of underemployment after undergrad, and I didn’t even finish. Got to just shy of 29,000 words, hated my characters, hated my “plot,” hated every word I’d written thus far, threw up my hands in despair and walked away. Several friends (and my dad) have finished NaNovels over the years–my friend Beemer was my NaNoWriMo buddy that year, and she actually finished hers–but I just couldn’t cut it.

And you know, even then? I loved it. I hated the result, sure, but I loooved the process. I loved hauling my laptop over to St. Mark’s Coffee (in Denver), setting myself up in a corner with a coffee and a big chocolate chip cookie, and spending a happy afternoon jamming to the weird mix of music they’d always have playing and trying to figure out how the hell character development is supposed to work when your sorry attempt at a novel is the most thinly-veiled of thinly-veiled roman a clef EVER and nobody cares in the second place. Love! Even though I didn’t get a spiffy winner’s certificate (or a finished novel) out of it, I wouldn’t trade that experience for anything.

But this year, hoo boy. Grad school, first semester, ’nuff said. No NaNoWriMo for me, since it’s going to be my very own personal National Final Paper Writing Life Oh My God Someone Help Me over here. Luckily, the lovely Mags has thrown her pen in the ring this year, and is documenting the process on her blog, so I can live vicariously through her triumphs (and I have no doubt she’ll cross that 50,000-word line in, like, two weeks; girl’s a pro). I kind of love her novel already, from the tiny excerpt she’s posted on her author page (I hope you don’t mind me linking to it here, Mags; it’s not like anyone reads NPoR anymore) (…or ever did, hee), because oh lord can I identify with that online-dating first-meeting sinking feeling and the internal monologue of “okay, no offense, you seem like a nice person, but you just declared your unironic love for Ayn Rand, out loud, in public, and I have to go now.”

Anyway, I’m excited to cheer Mags on, and Beemer, and any other of my friends or relations who are launching themselves at those 50,000 words. Rock on. I want to read your novels when you finish them, because you will, because you’re awesome.

…Funnily enough, Mags had something of a cameo in my abortive attempt at a NaNovel–thinly-veiled roman a clef, remember?–as a badass college RA. Art imitating life, I guess. And you know, looking back through the fifty or so pages in this word document (titled “Five Beers and a Resume,” which really had nothing to do with the plot as it stood, but I think the phrase came up during an email exchange with my dad and I apparently found it hilarious enough to use as a title), there are at least a couple of paragraphs, or turns of phrase, that I don’t entirely hate. Not that the novel’s salvageable, by any means, or that I think I possess any great facility for creative writing beyond slapping self-consciously long run-ons on the page and thinking myself clever, but, you know, there are one or two sentences that aren’t the worst. Maybe? I don’t know. But most of it’s just sort of vaguely ridiculous.

Want proof? Heh. As a gesture of self-humiliation for the betterment of society, here’s a totally out-of-context excerpt from that ill-fated literary endeavor. (It’s actually one of the least roman a clef-y parts, and because of that, I think it actually ends up being a little more successful than the rest of the dreck I managed to produce. Who knew fiction worked better when it was fictional?) Schadenfreude awaits you after the jump.

—–

That night, in some faceless hotel outside Chicago, Melanie wandered down the hall in pajama pants and a tanktop, clutching the ice bucket, toward the telltale blue glow of a Pepsi machine. A piece of paper was taped to the ice machine: out of order, sorry. “Of course,” Mel sighed, and leaned into the stairwell door to give another floor a try. She was halfway up the first flight when her phone chirped. Pulling it from her pocket, she glanced at the screen and flipped the phone open, grinning.

“Kate! Hi!”

“Mel? You’re all…echo-y.”

“Stairwell. It’s the ice machine’s fault.”

“I—what?”

“Never mind,” Mel laughed. “How are you?”

“Oh, you know. I’m still packing, so.”

“So you want to die, pretty much.”

“Pretty much.”

“Anything I can do to help?”

“Well, I’d normally suggest you come over here and help me sort through my shoes and decide what I’m taking, because for some reason that’s become, like, the biggest problem of my life, but since you can’t really…do that, since you’re, you know, over there, I guess you’ll just have to distract me for a little while instead.”

“Yeah. Sorry about that.”

“Heh. It’s cool.”

“Okay, but the shoes. I can still help, maybe? Talk to me.” Mel stopped climbing and sat down on a stair tread, cradling the ice bucket in her lap, forgetting where she was and what she’d been doing. “What seems to be the beeg eessue?”

“Well. The biggest issue is that my shoe wardrobe—my shoedrobe? I don’t know—is perfectly suited to, you know, the Midwest. Snowy winter, hot summer, no hills. Lots of heels, you know?”

“Yeah, I know. You wear more heels in a week than I have in my entire life.”

“Well, you’re tall.”

“Not that that’s news. So the issue is really—”

“That I need to go shopping, like, pronto, because San Francisco has its own weird subclimate, so all my boots are overkill and my summer shoes won’t cut it, and also I am totally unprepared for all those hills.”

“But.”

“But I’m poor and I’m running out of time.”

“Yeah. And not to compound your problems or anything, but there’s also the issue of, like, aesthetic flexibility. You know? Because there’s going to class, but then there’s going to a class with a cute boy in it, and then there’s going on a date, and then there’s going on a date when it’s raining, and if you throw a skirt into the equation—”

“And I only have so much room in the car, I know, exactly my point.” Kate huffed impatiently, the phone distorting the sound into crackly telecommunications fuzz. “I thought I was good at this stuff! When did I start sucking at it? I look at this pile of shoes and think, ‘I just don’t have the energy for this anymore.’”

“I think that’s just college. Like, goodbye everything you thought you knew about not failing at life, hello weird Proustian breakdown over your mom’s chocolate chip cookies at three in the morning.”

“Heh. Are you speaking from personal experience?”

“Maybe.”

Kate chuckled at that, then sighed. “I don’t know. This really isn’t that big of a deal. I have a few good pairs of all-purpose shoes that’ll get me where I need to go for now.”

“Pun intended?”

“Shut up. No. Hee.”

“And you can always go shopping there.”

“Yeah.”

The girls were silent for a moment, and Mel thought about how strange it was, the two of them connected across hundreds of miles by this invisible line. She had never quite understood how that worked, cell phones and satellites, no matter how many times she looked it up on Wikipedia, no matter how many times her father tried to explain it. How did their voices find each other, in all that tangle of radio waves and television signals?

“I can’t believe you’re going to San Francisco,” she said at last, quietly.

“I can’t believe you’re going to New York.”

“Yeah.” Silence again.

Colin: So I bought my tickets for New York. Just sayin’.

Megeen Mike: YAY! What are your exact travel plans, so I can resume my intensive stalking of you?

Colin: Well, first of all, I’m going to pack seven shirts, three pairs of pants, two long-sleeved thermals, eight pairs of underwe—oh, wait. Not that specific?

Megeen Mike: …What color underwear?

Colin: Grey, blue, other blue, other other blue, olive green, multicolored stripe, Hello Kitty…

Megeen Mike: Oh, I miss that Hello Kitty underwear.

Colin: I know you do.

Megeen Mike: I haven’t seen it since I had my telescope trained on your bedroom window.

Colin: Well, I know you had at least three other identical pairs when I stole it from your panty drawer, so you can’t miss it that badly. By the way, did it ride up as badly on you as it does on me? Because daaaang.

Megeen Mike: Tee hee. “Panty drawer.”

CURTAIN

Yeah. Meet Tanya Davis from Halifax. She’s amazing.

A friend showed me her “How To Be Alone” video, below, in the middle of last week. I’ve watched it upwards of twenty times since then; it’s so perfect and beautiful and true that it hurts. If you’ve ever had a broken heart, if you’ve ever had that awful feeling of being totally alone in a crowded room, or of hurting from something you can’t quite name, “How To Be Alone” is a wonderful salve. Even if you’re not familiar with any of those things, it’s still worth watching, because it’s just the right mix of charming and poignant and Canadian and I hope you adore it as much as I do:

In addition to spoken-word stuff like this, Davis has released albums with some great songs like “Art” (another video, also very worth a watch—the rosy cheeks! So cute!), a handful of which you can download from her website; “Gorgeous Morning” is a must-listen for anyone who’s ever had That Job, the one that makes you question your self-worth and life choices and what would really happen if one day you just didn’t get out of bed. I can imagine that some might not care for the aesthetics of Davis’s music, its spareness or her imperfect voice or whatever, but I’ve always had a soft spot for spoken-word/music crossovers and I think it’s lovely. Especially as a sometimes-poet my own self, I admire her deftness with rhythm and rhyme; some of her slant rhymes are absolutely killer, and, okay, “chow-downers”? Genius.

Crap. I want to watch “How To Be Alone” again, right now. It’s the harmonica that gets me every time.

"Alcatraaaaaz."

It begins, innocently enough, with a Facebook message. STC’s boyfriend, Matt1, wants to surprise her with a birthday weekend a thousand miles away, and he wants you and The Onion Juggler in on it. You think this is a fantastic idea, because STC is one of your oldest and closest friends and deserves nothing less; you haven’t seen The OJ in more than a year, because she lives in the godless north (or Ohio, whatever); and Matt1 is quickly becoming your hero. Yes, you say. Count me in. And so the planning commences.

Here’s the thing: keeping a secret is hard. It’s especially hard when the secret involves plane tickets, hotel reservations, time off work, four people in three cities. You will almost spoil the surprise approximately thirty-seven times. The others will too. You and The OJ will call each other and giggle about the close calls. There will be a panic one afternoon, the three masterminds frantically Facebook-messaging each other back and forth, when it looks like STC can’t get the necessary day off work and everything is ruined; luckily, this will be a false alarm. You should win an Oscar for all the IM conversations you have with STC, not to mention that time you had coffee with her and Matt1, mere weeks before the trip, where you managed to keep a straight face while she complained about missing The OJ and hoped to see her soon, where you managed to avoid knocking over your coffee and shouting “WE’RE TAKING YOU TO SAN FRANCISCO.” Seriously. You’d like to see Meryl Streep top that shit.

And suddenly, after months of planning and secrecy, it’s The Big Day and you’re driving to the airport, squinting against the early-morning sun. It feels like you’re getting away with something, because you know at that moment your coworkers are eating breakfast or sitting in traffic on their way to the office, while you’re barreling east on Peña Boulevard with your carry-on in the passenger’s seat, rocking out to…to…what is this song, anyway? The hell, iPod? You didn’t think you even owned any rap. Whatever. You will gladly listen to all the rap in the world, because you’re headed to the airport. You have a ticket to a city you’ve never seen before, and you’re going in the company of some of your best friends, and the sun is shining and you’re so young and cool and it feels like someone else’s life, someone else’s story, and you wouldn’t have it any other way.

Thanks to some stealth texting, you discover that Matt1 and STC are running late. You might have to scrap your elaborate text message/phone call/“it’s coming from inside the house” plan to surprise her with your presence, which is lame, but somehow, she STILL doesn’t know that her boyfriend isn’t, in fact, taking her for a romantic weekend in the mountains, and she doesn’t know that they’re going to have company. Oh yes, this is going to be good. Once you get to the concourse, you get a coffee and hide behind a column and hope that when they arrive, STC is too freaked out by the fact that she’s in the airport to recognize the back of your head.

Your flight starts boarding. You sit gripping your cell phone, anxiously awaiting text-message updates from Matt1. “Found parking.” “In line at security.” You wonder, vaguely, whether STC is getting suspicious about all his texting. You wonder how long that damn concourse train can take. You regret drinking that coffee, because you have to pee, again, and they could be here ANY SECOND. You pee anyway. They’re still not here. Your flight’s still boarding. You start to sweat.

Finally: there they are THERE THEY ARE quick FOLLOW THEM. STC looks so confused. Hee. This is exactly as excellent as you’d hoped. Matt1 and STC get in the boarding line for the flight, and you sidle up behind them, grinning ear to ear, completely forgetting the clever lines you planned, and say something lame like “fancy meeting you guys here.” It doesn’t matter. STC squeaks and, by pure reflex, hugs you.

She doesn’t get it, quite: “What are you…doing here?” You stare at her. And gesture vaguely to the line the three of you are standing in. Her expression as she figures it out is adorable. You wish you were quicker on the draw with your camera.

The flight itself passes uneventfully enough. Your seat is on the opposite side of the plane from STC and Matt1, so you sip your ginger ale and read your fancy architecture magazine and hope that the other passengers in your row are duly impressed with your worldly, designerly ways. Ha. You’ve never flown west of Colorado before, aside from a trip to Seattle in high school, and out the window you watch the wondrous, alien landscapes of Utah and Nevada scroll past. After the veritable troop movement it took to organize the trip, it’s at once strange and satisfying to be stuck in this air-travel limbo. The OJ is due to arrive in San Francisco twenty minutes before the three of you, and you will fret, when you land, about how she’s planning her Big Reveal, and whether it will work, but for the moment, you can’t do a thing about it. Just put the iPod on shuffle and imagine living another life in the desert below.

As the plane starts its descent, you look out the window again. The ground looks, in places, just like Colorado, all dry hills and junipers, and for a moment you are displaced from your displacement. (Meta, dude.) You remember that The OJ is waiting for you, probably, and the second the plane’s landing gear touch earth you turn your phone on to see if she’s texted you. She has: “In position.” You wonder what that means, precisely, but you figure she’s got it under control. Waiting in the aisle to leave the plane, you look back and exchange a knowing glance with Matt1. And then—wait, how did STC get so far ahead of you? She’s booking it up the jetway, leaving you and Matt1 stuck in a chatty, slow-moving group of Chinese tourists, and you panic that you’ll miss the next crucial part of the surprise. It mustn’t be.

On the concourse, you catch up to STC just in time. She steps out into the main walkway; she looks to the right, around a shop corner. She turns left. You hear The OJ protest “HEY,” and see her step out from around the corner—STC looked right at her. Didn’t even register. STC double-takes, laughs, and: starts crying. Heeeeeeee hee hee. “I hate you guys!” she wails, and you and Matt1 can’t stop laughing, and it’s so good to see The OJ, and somehow, perfectly, the four of you are in San Francisco.

You did it. You pulled off the biggest, best surprise you’ve ever been a part of, except maybe your mom’s 50^th birthday party, which still lives in family-history infamy; you made an avowed anti-crying friend cry in public; you’re in a beautiful city with three excellent people. You will be tempted to rule that the planning of it, all that work and skullduggery and tingly anticipation, was the best part. But that’s only because you’re just on Day One of the weekend.

Part Two: coming soon.

***

THE SCENE: A copyeditor’s computer monitor, with Firefox pointed to Gmail. A Gchat window blinks open.

Colin: Yo, newspaper girl. AP style question. “Caregiver” or “care giver”? A quick Google indicates the former, which is also my instinct.

Mags: You should always use as few letters and spaces as possible.

Colin: Yeah. And “care giver” seems so…antique. It’s, like, a hyphen away from the Victorian era. “Whither went my care-giver to-day?”

Mags: “To yonder field, sir, to find my glove. …And do the nasty.”

Colin: “Be ware not to knock your bustle askew, madam.”

Mags: Askew you.

Colin: Askew yourself, YOU SOP-WENCH.

Mags: Hee!

Colin: Wait, what is a sop-wench, exactly? Did I make that up? Is that…a thing?

Mags: I think it works.

CURTAIN

***

SECRET ALTERNATE ENDING

Mags: Askew you.

Colin: Gesundheit!

CURTAIN

But sometimes, I run across something that demands attention, a small convergence of time and space and other people’s garbage that’s just a little too pointed for even my obliviousness to miss. Shopping earlier today in The Best Bookstore Ever, I came across a used copy of a David Sedaris book I didn’t own—Sedaris is, it should be mentioned, an absolute master of the mundane observation himself—and, while I was flipping through it trying to decide whether I could justify buying it for myself (“It’s only eight bucks! When’s the last time you saw a David Sedaris book for only eight bucks? It’s in good shape, too. And reading it will help me become a better writer. And if I get it, I’ll totally go for a run every morning this week. Yeah. That. Sure.”), I came across a ticket stub nestled somewhere in the second chapter. Not just any ticket stub—I’ve found movie and theater stubs as forgotten bookmarks before, and it’s always a fun time trying to reconcile the show with the book, like, okay, a matinee screening of Alien vs. Predator in a Maeve Binchy Lifetime-movie-in-written-form novel, I think this person and I should be friends (…what? I only read them because they’re set in Ireland, okay, jeez)—but this time it was an airline boarding pass, truncated at one end where the ticket agent had ripped it. American Airlines, Denver to Chicago, early last month. Seat 9C.

Ticket stubs have plenty of potential stories wrapped around them already—U2 at Red Rocks, Regina Spektor at The Fillmore, the Colorado Symphony Orchestra pops concert—but there’s something about a ticket for traveling that just packs even more questions into that little piece of paper. Business or pleasure? Solo, or with a family, or a best friend? And the book: a last-minute airport-bookstore purchase, desperate for some reading material because the girlfriend insists on getting to the airport four hours early? The security lines aren’t even that long, Jesus, it’s forever till our flight, I’ve heard this guy’s stuff on “This American Life” and it’s not too bad, I’ll give it a try, what the hell.

Or he grabbed it off his wife’s nightstand before leaving, she said it was good, why not (I know the ticket-holder is a him, because the ticket stub included the guy’s name, printed there in the upper left-hand corner, one Mr. S.L.; I don’t want to print his full name here, because finding the ticket felt a little like being entrusted with a secret, and I don’t want the dude to end up Googling himself and finding that some creeper wrote a whole rambling essay about his old ticket stub), and his macho buddy in Chicago saw him reading it and said, “Dude, Sedaris? That’s so gay,” or something, so he decided to chuck it as soon as he got home. (Fool.) Maybe someone in Chicago gave it to him as a gift, and he loved it, but a week after he got home to Denver, that someone called and told him they needed to stop seeing each other, this long distance thing isn’t working out, I love you but it’s time for both of us to move on, and in the throes of breakup misery, S.L. had to get rid of everything that reminded him of that someone, so When You Are Engulfed in Flames ended up in the Used Books section at the Tattered Cover, still hiding the ticket stub he used as a bookmark when he put the book down to look out the window during takeoff on his flight home, because it was the only scrap of paper he could find in his carry-on, and besides, he didn’t really like the idea of reading a book whose title included the phrase “engulfed in flames” while he was on an airplane, even though he still (at that point) loved the person who gave him the book and would read anything at that person’s recommendation, because that’s what you do when you’re in love, you pretend not to hate Ani DiFranco, you eat the mushrooms even though they’re not your favorite, you read the books the other person likes because it makes you feel closer to him or her, even (or especially) if they’re a time zone away, and after a while you find yourself humming along to “32 Flavors” in the car and, for the first time, you don’t feel like making fun of it, not even a little bit, and that’s when you know you have it bad.

Poor S.L. Where did it all go wrong?

Maybe he lives in my neighborhood. Maybe on my street. In my building, even. Maybe he’s still pining after that someone in Chicago, trying to ignore the empty spaces on his bookshelves from all the books that someone gave him over the years they were together.

…Or maybe the dude just didn’t dig the book all that much and needed to make some room in the apartment. See, that’s the trick with these stories, the Stories Of Things; once you get going, it’s easy to get caught up in the little signs, to look at the bouquet of flowers lying in the street on the morning after a rainstorm and triangulate from there into a veritable Aeneid about the meeting that ran late and the ruined dinner plans and the attempt at reconciliation and the argument in the middle of a rainstorm at night, with all the neighbors opening their windows ostensibly to catch the cool night air but mainly to listen to Unit B ripping her boyfriend a new one, again, because it just never gets old. And then you wonder if you’re just being dramatic, and sometimes the bouquet is just a bouquet, the cigar really is just a cigar, and you think you maybe need to worry a little less about the interpretive significance of litter.

But airline tickets are such semiotic mysteries themselves that it’s hard not to wonder about the backstory, the way they’re printed with all the little boxes and bars and old-school type and the hypnotic wavy-line background so airline folks can tell it’s not a fake—it’s like a computer punch card and a traveler’s check had a love child. What does all that mysterious choppy text mean, anyway? Does anyone, airline employees included, actually know? “PNR code DEITVA/AA”? “Conj. tkt. no.”? “Seq. no. ALLOW ck. wt.”? For heaven’s sake, “PRIORITY AACCESS***********”?  “Access” doesn’t have two As, for starters, but: eleven asterisks. Eleven! What makes those eleven asterisks necessary? At what point during the ticket-design process did someone say, “Okay, and here we’re going to have eleven asterisks,” and someone else nod in agreement and say, “Yep, that’s just the ticket,” then chuckle at the pun? What problem, exactly, did those eleven asterisks solve? What need did they fill?

I used to fly through Chicago all the time, going and coming from school in New York, and standing in the bookstore today, holding this little piece of paper I’d found, I had some wicked flashbacks to O’Hare airport. My layovers were never quite long enough for me to be relaxed about the flight change, so, being the paranoid traveler I am, I always ended up booking it from terminal to terminal, pausing just long enough to grab a meal from the McDonald’s in Terminal C, rushing past the Apatosaurus skeleton, my McD’s bag and drink clutched in one hand and the other supporting my too-heavy messenger bag, booking it through the trippy underwater-Greateful-Dead-concert-light-show tunnel, just wanting to get to the gate and sit down and eat my french fries, my heart in my mouth because I was either anxious about starting school or Done With It and ready to be home, to come up the escalator in Denver and see my parents there, waiting and smiling. That was always the most stressful part of the trip, the between-planes dash, because those forty-five minutes of layover were dictated by people other than me and—being the kind of person who shows up at the airport three hours early for a 9:00 am flight on an off-season weekday at the podunk Syracuse airport, where there will be precisely three people ahead of me in the security line but it was okay because you never know, better safe than sorry, just in case—I really dislike having my timetable so out of my hands.

But then I’d get to the gate with plenty of time to spare and finally start breathing again. I’d sit and eat and wish I’d gotten more napkins, calming down, a book open and ignored in my lap, because I can never really concentrate enough to read in airports; I just end up listening to my iPod and watching the people around me. If a discarded object on the sidewalk, or a lost ticket stub in a book, can generate a whole short story in a writer’s head, the other people waiting for a flight can, without fail, spawn whole novels. And while I’m sitting there making up dialogue for the teenaged goth girl and her mom in a kitten-festooned sweatshirt, I can never help wondering what they might think of me, what stories they themselves must make up about the tall awkward guy with the glasses who’s clinging to that Coke like it’s the only thing left in the world.

…And so, since you just can’t ignore these kinds of things, I took the ticket stub as a sign that the universe wanted me to buy the book and spend an hour sitting in the shade of the bookstore’s patio with an iced coffee, reading Sedaris and giggling to myself. So I did just that.

Maybe. Sort of.

I originally started this site, back when I was but a wee college junior, with the intention of chronicling my semester abroad, and thereafter turning it into a slice-of-life blog that would, indubitably, contain my witty (yet profound) observations on the trials of life as a middle-class 20-something. Needless to say, that fell apart pretty quickly, as you can see from even a cursory glance through the archive. I made it maybe three-quarters of the way through that semester still blogging, always playing catch-up (“Hey guys, just had an awesome time in Istanbul, I’ll tell you all about it later…oh, whoops, I have to go to Ireland now!”), never quite getting there. Then I came home, and the task of retelling all those wonderful beautiful eye-opening experiences just seemed too large to tackle.

Then senior year happened, and the less said about that milieu of sleep deprivation and overcaffeination and nervous breakdowns in diner parking lots at 1:00 in the morning and thesis-writing and some of the best times I’ve had with some of the best people I’ve met, the better, probably. After a while (and it’s been a while, over a year, Jaysus, when did that happen?), the college war stories stop being interesting to anyone except the people who lived them, and while there are a few experiences here and there from which I might still be able to pull a gem worth writing about, I think those stories will have to wait for a while. I miss them a little too much, still.

So Nine Points has sat in a lonely, dusty corner of the Internet, unused, unloved, unlooked-at since 2008. But I’ve been having the writing itch like mad, lately, and being no good at fiction and embarrassingly self-absorbed when it comes to poetry, what better way to satisfy that urge by boring everyone who comes across this blog with tales of the completely interesting (read: not really at all) things that happen in my life? I’m so envious of the blog-writers I follow regularly (Sars, Holly, Pamie—look at me, pretending I’m on a first-name basis with them; sorry, guys—my good friend Maggie, my sassy potato [...don't ask]), of their abilities to turn a week at the job or a business trip or a photograph or a conversation from last night into a beautifully-rendered story without it sounding like someone’s high-school Livejournal. I want to be able to do that, someday, and the only way to do that is to practice. There’s a quotation about writing I love, and I can’t remember who said it, or if I even have the phrasing right, but it’s something like “Writers write. That’s all there is.” Not to put too fine a point on it, but: exactly.

So, kind readers, if there are actually any of you out there (…I’m terrified that there are still some RSS subscriptions floating around, from back when I actually wrote here; sorry if this post shows up in your e-mail and you’re all “the hell?”), please be forgiving as I go about this completely self-indulgent exercise. I’ll try to make it at least a little interesting, and a little bit regular.

No promises, though. I am working three jobs at the moment. It’s hard out here for a recent college grad.

Ireland! Back on the 6th, guys; then one last day in London, lots to get done, and home.

(Well, Syracuse, at least. Close enough.)

But rest assured, I’m keeping extensive mental notes on everything that’s happening. The retelling will be epic. Be excited.

Aaand back to work. See you…um, soon?