Half-Time in the Writing Game--Or Is It Just a Clever Excuse?

[I wrote this back in August, when I really was stalled out on my novel. Now I’m in a totally different place, but thought these words might be of interest or encouragement to the many writers—and procrastinators—out there.]

For three months earlier this year, I wrote furiously on my novel, The Sleep Diaries; then, as has happened so many times before, I reached half-time or the seventh-inning stretch. In other words, I stalled out.

Deidre says that the first half of a novel is much more difficult than the second half, and I know what she means about the first part, but I haven’t written many second halves.

The fact is—and I’m hardly alone in this—I’m at least as talented at not writing as I am at writing. Or, to quote a great line from a song by the Jayhawks, “I’m perfecting the finest art of wasting hours.”

Yet as I’ve watched Deidre work relentlessly on Parallel Seduction, the third book in her series, I’ve felt convicted in my procrastination.

She debuted Parallel Attraction in April, and Parallel Heat came out in October (also her deadline for delivery of the third manuscript), and did all this on top of her other responsibilities as a mommy, business owner, and so forth. The tight schedule, and the fact that she actually has a publishing contract, certainly explains a great deal of her dedication, but she wrote with the same sense of purpose five years ago, when she was just doing it for pleasure.

In that same period, I’ve begun three novels, each of which would be great if I’d just finish them. The first, There’s This Girl, is a thinly veiled chronicle of my own experiences in college. Much further removed from personal experience is Sol Invictus, in which an Indiana Jones–like figure battles the demonic incarnation of a Roman deity.

If that sounds farfetched, then consider the premise of The Sleep Diaries: a man in his early forties, with an extremely dynamic wife and two beautiful little girls, lives in a giant house and tries to write a novel even as he confronts his own demons. Imagine that! (Anybody who knows me will get the joke here. But seriously, all fiction is autobiography.)

The story is essentially written, or at least heavily outlined; now I just have to sharpen it, and that requires typing up the handwritten pages so that I can begin editing. One of the big discoveries for me in writing this book is the fact that, for my first draft at least, writing by hand in a bound journal works much better than typing my thoughts directly into a computer. There are several reasons for this.

At the most obvious level, writing by hand affords an organic, intimate connection with the text that’s difficult if not impossible to achieve with modern technology. There’s also the sense that when you compose by hand, you’re working within more or less the same physical parameters as Tolstoy or Proust—though it should be noted that the writing instruments available to them were far less user-friendly than my beloved (yet disposable) fine-point Pilot™ Precise V7 Rolling Ball® pen.

And because this novel is loosely built around the idea of a journal, it seemed all the more appropriate to compose it as though it were. It’s almost as though I’m acting out the role of the protagonist, which brings out some freaky thoughts about the relationship of author to narrator.

Finally, writing by hand has somehow made it easier to jump around: whenever one part wasn’t working, I would simply begin work on another part. Eventually, though, I realized I could go on scribbling indefinitely—my handwriting is unreadable to anyone, sometimes even me—and needed to switch to the computer to get it organized.

So maybe it really is just half-time. Or maybe I’m afraid to finish because I told myself at the outset that I didn’t care if I ever wrote another novel, so I would pack everything into this one. Maybe it’s because I’ve always had this erroneous belief that a novel is supposed to take years and years, and this one just flowed out of me in a few months. Or maybe I’m just lazy.

These are some things this writer thinks about—especially when he's not exactly writing.

Mama Said There'd Be Days Like This: My Personal September 11

For more than twenty years, every time September 11 rolled around, my mother reminded me to be careful. Not that she was being morbid; I appreciated the fact that she remembered—and helped me remember—what happened on that day in 1974.

My parents gave me a bicycle on my seventh birthday, an occasion marred only slightly by a sign of the times. Earlier that day, when a neighbor looked out her back window and saw two hippies—my brothers Tom and Jon—carrying a kid’s bike across an open field, she assumed they’d stolen it to buy drugs, and called the police. (She wasn’t wrong about their behavior in general, but certainly wrong in that instance—not to mention the matter of being a busybody.)

But I got my bike anyway, and learned to ride on a hill with a lot of trial and error and skinned-up knees. Training wheels, in my mind, were for girls, and I prided myself on never crying at physical pain, no matter how severe.

Despite, or rather because of, a fairly strict home life, I ran wild whenever I got the chance, and that little yellow bike was my vehicle of escape. I couldn’t wait for them to unpack it from the shipping crate in Manila.

This was a different time, a different world, when parents didn’t worry as much about their children—partly because they didn’t have to, and partly because most weren’t as involved in their kids’ lives as parents are today. So I roamed more or less free.

Some other American kids and I formed a gang and rode around “spying” on people, throwing eggs, and generally causing mayhem. We got really out of hand when showing off in front of older kids. One time a couple of high schoolers dared us to climb up on a roof and toss a big porcelain toilet-bowl cover onto the tile beside some hapless guy’s swimming pool. Guess who took the dare? Hearing it shatter scared us all—even the big kids—and we fled like chickens. (Yes, it’s regrettable that we represented our country so poorly. But we were just kids.)

That’s how I spent my time outside of school, when I wasn’t busy being a Cub Scout and publicly upholding virtues belied by my extracurricular activities. But my days as a hellion on a bike came to an end on September 11, just a few weeks before my tenth birthday.

As I prepared to cross the busy street that afternoon, I looked to the left and saw the cement truck speeding toward me, which is a good thing, because otherwise I wouldn’t be sitting here writing this. Then again, if I hadn’t been hurrying to avoid it, I might have noticed the Jeep coming from the right.

Next thing I knew, I was crawling out from under the hood with my head bleeding. I kept calm as the couple who had hit me scooped me up, along with the crumpled bike, and put us in the back seat. I told them our phone number (999-142—I still remember that, and yes, it was only six digits), so they could call my parents from the hospital. I looked down at my white shirt and saw drops of blood, felt the pain starting to emerge from under the shock, and still my lip didn’t tremble.
But then they started talking.

They belonged to Iglesia ne Cristo, a semi-cultish group known for their elaborate church buildings. The man told me I was lucky it wasn’t a member of a rival sect who had hit me, because they would have just driven on and left me to bleed on the pavement. The woman chimed in: members of that other church were scum.

That’s when I burst into tears. I didn’t care about theological grudge matches; I just wanted my mommy.

The doctor put a couple stitches in my head, and that was that. The entire bill was 40 pesos, about five dollars at the time: this was, after all, the third world. And, being the third world, nobody thought about taking X-rays, thus leaving me with permanent back problems.

That physical pain has always been there to remind me of September 11, 1974, and for a long time, my mother remembered. She had an excellent memory, but by the time 9/11 became a bad day on an infinitely greater scale, Alzheimer’s had robbed her of it. She probably never even knew what happened on that day in 2001, nor did she remember what had happened in Manila long before. She didn’t remember me at all, and though she went on living for fifteen months, she had died in my mind much earlier. But her love remained alive in me, along with her warning to be just a little extra-careful on September 11.

Returning with a Vengeance

Many thanks to all of you who reminded me of what a sluggard I've been with regard to updating this blog: Michele, Robin, Mel, and of course my wonderful wife Deidre. I won't even try to use the excuse of being busy and distracted, because that's true of just about anyone in this age. But I have had a pretty full schedule, what with my responsibilities as a father and a partner in The Knight Agency, along with two "hobbies" that have taken a lot of time that might otherwise have gone to blogging: playing guitar and writing for the hometown paper. Some of those newspaper columns are about purely local issues, but a number of them are appropriate for posting here, and I plan to include a number of them on this blog in the next few weeks. But first....

A million thanks to my good friend Beth Holley, who converted a set of old family slides from the 1960s to digital format. Below you'll find a number of these, along with notes to explain what you're seeing.



Mom feeding me. This would have been some time in the fall of 1964 in West Chicago, where my family was living at the time I was born.


Herewith I join the ranks of those who can proudly say, "I've posted nude pictures of myself on the Internet." That's Tom, my oldest sibling (he was fifteen at the time), giving me a bath. Isn't it funny how a baby can look like an old person?





Engaged in a favorite activity--even today, though I have no idea what became of the teddy bear.













The five Knight kids on their first Christmas together. That's Joe, Tom, Jon, me, and Anne.









First birthday, Manila, 1965. This and the two pictures that follow constitute a short biography--a sort of portrait of the artist as a young man. So much of what was to follow for me is encapsulated here.





Enticed by beauty and wonder...










...But now a little older and wiser, a postlapsarian self.








Second birthday--proof that I'm capable of learning from past mistakes!









The end, as it were, or at least my (rear) end. Will post more pictures soon. And again, to all of my friends out there in blogland, thanks for giving me a swift kick in said rear end!

Cheesecake Factory

[To first-time visitors--and may your numbers increase!--what follows is not my typical post. Not that there is a typical post as such, but in any case, if there were such a thing, this would not be it.]

In honor of both my wife Deidre and my ever-faithful reader Michele, I'm posting a gallery of my favorite celebrity women. I say "in honor of" those two because both of them have what D and I call "beefcake blogs"--shots of hunky men in various stages of dress and undress. You can find Deidre's here, and Michele's here. (And I'll have to say that I'm pretty partial to D's choice for a "hunk" to feature in her Mother's Day post.)

So anyway, here are a few of my faves--women I think set the standard for loveliness. As you'll see, it's not exactly your typical American male's gallery of beauty. There are a number of conventional hotties here, but quite a few that I chose as much for non-physical qualities as for anything else. Also, you'll notice a preponderance of brunettes--good thing, because I'm married to one. In fact, scarce are the images here of skinny blondes, not because I have anything against them, but I'm more inclined toward the darker, voluptuous type, and I figure that SBs have no shortage of admirers anyway.

Then again, wit and intelligence count for a great deal, which is why Laura Ingraham, a definite SB, makes the list. (In the interests of equal time, a counterpoint to the nation's leading right-wing blonde--I'm no big fan of Ann Coulter, thank you very much--is a less well-known left-wing brunette, Katrina Vanden Heuvel.) You'll also see comediennes well-represented here: in fact, as I've admitted to Deidre on more than one occasion, my dream girl (other than her, of course, in case she's reading this!) is Mo Collins of Mad TV.

And speaking of the Laura Ingraham-Ann Coulter dichotomy, I tried to avoid repetition: who needs Maggie Gyllenhaal, for instance, when there's Mandy Moore--who didn't blame America for 9/11? Nor is Salma Hayek a necessary addition when you have the more compelling Sarah Shahi. (And if you think the photos I chose for Ms. Shahi and Katherine Heigl are a bit racy, then just click over to Michele's blog and take a look--my choices seem pretty tame, and Michele herself assured me that my mostly female readership would not be offended by a little skin here and there.)

Mary Tyler Moore, c. 1970, was always more of a crush for me as a kid than Marlo Thomas, though they looked a great deal alike. On the other hand, Barbara Feldon from Get Smart--be still, my first-grade heart! I used to love that show, and she was no small part of that; in fact, one of the proudest moments of my life, years later, came when somebody said that my wife looked like Agent 99. These and others appear in their own special category, of youthful faves. These include Dawn Wells, a.k.a. Mary Ann from Gilligan's Island. Terrible show, but a great premise--and even though they always presented Ginger as the hottie, anybody with intelligence recognized that the little chick from Kansas was far more compelling. Less well-known is Audrey Landers, who was on a few shows in the early 1980s (hence the hair), and whose picture on the IMDB shows that she is still gorgeous.


Patricia Arquette. Okay, so after that disclaimer/apology about the paucity of blondes, what do I start with? Well, she's not a skinny blonde, anyway. And besides, she is Patricia Freakin' Arquette--the usual rules don't apply. Never cared for her sister at all, but I've loved PA ever since Ed Wood, one of my very favorite movies.

Mo Collins, formerly of Mad TV, who manages to be beautiful even when she's playing ridiculous characers.

Irish pop singer Andrea Corr, who I first noticed in The Commitments.

Roma Downey (obviously.) As with Andrea Corr, even if she weren't gorgeous, that Irish accent is a killer.

Jennifer Ehle, best known for her role opposite Colin Firth in Pride and Prejudice.

Tina Fey

Jodie Foster: Forget about John Hinckley, forget about the rumors (who cares anyway?)--she comes across as sexy-smart, always a great combo.

Teri Hatcher. Long before Desparate Housewives, a show I've never bothered to watch, I loved the way she delivered that memorable line in Seinfeld: "Yes, they're real, and they're fantastic!"

Katherine Heigl. This one's a little embarrassing, because she's young enough to be my daughter by a long shot--a consideration that kept Lindsay Lohan and Christina Ricci off this list--but Katherine here is obviously no child. I loved her as Isabelle Evans, the super-sexy alien, during the first two seasons of Roswell--before they decided to "dowdify" her by cutting her hair short and coloring it a mousy brown that didn't suit her.

Faith Hill. I realize she might seem like a rather "ordinary" choice, but I like her style, her husband (Tim McGraw is one of the few country singers whose music I genuinely enjoy), and her backstory (poor girl from Mississippi makes good.)

Elizabeth Hurley. With that perpetual look of devilment in her eyes--which is what makes her so alluring, more even than her sheer beauty or that accent--she was a great choice to play the great tempter himself in that one movie with Brendan Fraser.

Laura Ingraham

Crime writer Aphrodite Jones. She's a little over the top, as her name suggests, but as far as I'm concerned, she can get away with it.

Norah Jones

Catherine Keener

Jayne Kennedy. Never much cared for watching sports, but I always made an exception when she was serving as commentator.

Debra Messing. The fact that Will can spend all that time around Grace and still prefer men tells us that he's not kidding about being truly gay.

Mandy Moore, who, despite the bubblegum image she's been working to shake, has a great presence.

Thandie Newton

Kelly Preston. Almost makes you willing to give Scientology a listen. As noted below with regard to Sigourney Weaver, though she played the bad girl in Jerry Maguire, I still found her irresistible. (One of my favorite movie lines--which I will not reproduce here--is the first thing we hear her say in that film.)

Lisa Rinna--one of my very faves, in terms of sheer looks. The image of feminine loveliness IMHO. (And btw, "lovely," for a straight man, is a term reserved exclusively for describing women. Neither a plan to meet for lunch, for instance, nor the table setting, nor the lunch itself can be described as lovely, usages available to women and out gay men. But for a straight guy, the only possible lovely thing about a lunch meeting might be the person sitting across from him.)

Lynne Russell of CNN, who made the Nineties just a little more bearable.

Jeri Ryan. She was a killer as "Seven of Nine" on Star Trek: Voyager. Her husband, who had to withdraw his candidacy for the Senate due to sex scandals, is proof that some guys just never choose to be satisfied.

Greta Scacchi. I had a hard time finding any picture that did her justice--even this one is a bit blurry--because let's just say that she doesn't now look much like she did in The Player, The Browning Version, or Jefferson in Paris. But thanks for the memories, GS!

Sarah Shahi. Ditto for what I said above about Lisa Rinna. Or in the words of Frank Ockenfels of Men's Fitness, who took this picture, "She's truly one of the most amazing women I've ever shot." Ms. Shahi, who is Iranian American, exemplifies the beauty of women from a part of the world that is currently not very high on our nation's Hit Parade of Love.

Ione Skye. Her star has faded, but she was slammin' in Say Anything and even Wayne's World.

Madeline Stowe. I especially liked her opposite Daniel Day Lewis in Last of the Mohicans.

Charlize Theron. Aside from her obvious charms, she really impressed me with the risks she took in Monster.

Janine Turner. Loved her character in Northern Exposure.

Katrina Vanden Heuvel, editor of The Nation. Though I disagree with her on a lot of things, she's impressively level-headed--and I can't imagine getting bored arguing with her!

Sela Ward. I suppose one could call it redundant to include both her and Teri Hatcher, but this kind of redundancy I find perfectly acceptable. The quintessential MILF.

Sigourney Weaver. She hasn't been seen much lately, but in the late 1980s she was the bomb. Even though she was Melanie Griffith's wicked boss in Working Girl, I found her ten times more appealing than MG. I even thought she was way hot in Aliens, where she spent most of the time running around in a dirty, sweat-soaked wife-beater with alien slime all over her.

Renee Zellweger--last in the alphabet, but certainly not last in the hearts of her countrymen. An underappreciated hottie, perhaps because she's never been afraid to take roles that deemphasize that aspect of her--e.g., Jerry Maguire or the Bridget Jones movies. As I've noted several times, a great accent makes a major difference, and RZ's natural southern drawl (she's from Texas, as is Janine Turner) is extremely charming.





Some Favorites of My Youth

Jennifer Beals, who, though she's still quite attractive, was positively smokin' in Flashdance--so much so that it took me several viewings before I realized what a stupid movie it was. And as noted below with regard to Audrey Landers, for guys born in the mid-1960s, there's something special about the now long outdated look associated with women who were hot around the time we were nineteen or so. Someday, perhaps those leggings she wore in the movie will come back into style.

Barbara Feldon. Though I never cared much for Toto, I could certainly understand the sentiments behind their song "99."

Mary Tyler Moore. Back when she played the sweet girl roles--as opposed to portraying her actual self in later work--she was a major babe. I always sympathized with Murray's crush on his coworker.

Glynnis O'Connor. Hardly a household name now, but as a seventh grader I became so enamored of her character in The Boy in the Plastic Bubble (opposite a very young John Travolta in an unusual role) that I developed a crush on a girl in my class simply because she looked like her.

Dawn Wells, a.k.a. Mary Ann. Had I been the Professor, I would have ditched all the other losers and left the island with her. (Well, okay, I would have sent back a boat for them later.)





Historical Faves: There's something a little strange about admiring the beauty of a woman who's long dead, but this list wouldn't be complete without these six.



Josephine Baker. As someone who's always had a "thing" for women of darker complexion, it's odd that I have relatively few African American women on my list. Angela Bassett, however, is a bit too angular and severe-looking for my tastes; Tyra Banks and Iman look too much like they came from another planet; and after her blubbering Oscar speech, I lost all respect for Halle Berry, who I once regarded as perhaps the most beautiful woman in the world. Josephine Baker, on the other hand, was a figure as admirable for her courage as for her beauty. Not only did she build a career for herself in France at a time when black women in America faced extremely limited opportunies, but she was a heroine of the Resistance.

Dorothy Dandridge, who paved the way for the modern African American actresses mentioned above.

Katharine Hepburn--every smart guy's dream girl from the 1930s. She was smokin' in The Philadelphia Story, and you always got a sense that her offscreen persona wasn't so different from the acerbic characters she played in her youth.

Marilyn Monroe. Okay, she's on everybody's list, but for a good reason: what the Beatles were to music, she was to loveliness.

Elizabeth Montgomery. Though Bewitched and I Dream of Jeannie were both relentlessly stupid shows built around similar themes, Samantha Stevens was a far more appealing character than the always-idiotic Jeannie. Further, the creators of Jeannie tried much too hard, laughing into the backs of their hands just a bit too much over the obvious fantasy appeal of the show's setup. Sam, on the other hand, was a practical woman, or at least she tried to be one, and the fact that she went around dressed like everybody else--while being both extraordinary and level-headed--made her altogether superior to Barbara Eden's character in the other show.

Jessica Savitch. As an adolescent, she was my favorite part of NBC Nightly News, and her troubled story only makes her all the more a romantic figure.



Favorite Women for Whom I Had to Supply All the Visual Images In other words, the hotties of great literature. If you're not a reader and just want pictures, skip this one.

Any number of women from the Old Testament, especially Delilah (the story of her and Samson was my favorite as a child) and Esther.

Athena. It shows what a fool Paris was that he chose Aphrodite (whose charms, of course, I can only imagine were all but irresistible) over the goddess of wisdom. Then again, Athena is usually depicted as a virgin--Parthenos, the maiden--but that isn't a bad thing, considering the bad fate that awaited those suckers lucky/unlucky enough to wind up in a goddess's bed.

Guinevere. Naturally. And of course, in thinking of any figure prior to the twentieth century, you just have to mentally airbrush out the bad teeth, bad skin, etc. that would have been the reality.

Beatrice of Dante's Divine Comedy and La vita nuova. Though based on a real person, Dante's version was so removed from any possible reality that she might as well have been purely fictional. Fittingly, given the fact that she was more idea than person, I find the idea of beatific love she represented far more appealing than Dante's extremely static, quite-literally-too-perfect-for-this-world version of her.

The woman addressed in Shakespeare's sonnets. Okay, okay, I know some people with a lot of time on their hands have a lot of theories--e.g., she wasn't really a woman, he wasn't really Shakespeare, blah blah blah. To which I say, forget all that nonsense and just read the ones that begin "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?" or "Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments."

Elizabeth Bennett in Pride and Prejudice. Note the inclusion of Jennifer Ehle above, and I certainly could have included Keira Knightley, both of whom have played this most appealing of literary figures.

Mathilde de la Mole in Stendhal's The Red and the Black. A real firecracker, this one. Julien Sorel more than met his match in her.

Estella in Dickens's Pride and Prejudice. I find that in a literary context, at least, I'm more drawn to the bad girls, or at least the ones who were major pains in the you-know-what. When Dickens ended the book with the equivalent of choirs of angels singing around Pip and Estella, I wondered who he thought he was kidding: this chick would have been nothing but trouble--and yet oh so difficult to forget.

Natasha Rostov in War and Peace. Let's just say that in an American film version of the story, I would pick Natalie Portman--who, by the way, certainly could have made the cheesecake gallery above--to play her. I also fondly remember Princess Bolkonskaya, though she was a ditz (I just loved that name, though) and the ultra-bad girl Helene.

Liza Tischin in Dostoyevsky's The Devils. I wrote my undergraduate honors thesis on this book, also known as The Possessed, and wished that Liza had possessed the good sense to see through a cad like Stavrogin.

Emma Bovary in Madame Bovary. To have become entangled in her world would have been like jumping headlong in front of a train, but I can see how a young man would have been drawn to her.

Jo in Little Women. I still think she should have wound up with Laurie and not that dirty old man professor guy.

Scarlett O'Hara. What she needed, as Rhett fully understood, was not flattery and coddling, but a swift kick in the rear end. She would have been a royal pain to have in your life, and yet it's not difficult to understand why he put up with her as he did.

Several women in One Hundred Years of Solitude. Especially Remedios the Beauty and the last woman, whose name I believe was Amarantha Ursula.

Ada in Cold Mountain. Can you believe I never even saw the movie? Nicole Kidman is way hot, but I wouldn't have really picked her for this role. Don't know who I would have cast, but it would have had to be someone who looked like she could better survive the hardships Ada endured.






...And Last But Most of All: My personal dream girl, who has borne my name, my children, and all of my peculiarities over the years. A talented writer, an exceptional agent, a superb mommy, and the best friend I've ever had.