winner winner sushi dinner!

Been a while, my name is Ryan in case you’ve forgotten.  I hope you are doing well!  While I was away I won!  Yes, I completed a goal (my mom goes wild!).  I knocked out 50,005 words in the month of November, or as I have renamed it, MO-vember.  It has been a blast.  I’ve done so many things, I cannot wait to share them with you.  I’ve read some good books.  Seen some terrific movies.  Listened to some sad music.  Became a Lutheran (mom undoes her going wild thing).  My wife became a vegan and I lost 6 pounds.  I miss steak, and  I plan on eating one very soon.

This week is the first week of Advent.  I hope you are living in tense anticipation.  I’ll see you later in the week with more spiritually minded thoughts, but until then…

Get a good dietary laugh from eatingtheroad.wordpress.com.  The flow chart is hilarious.  You can buy one as a stocking stuffer for the health-impaired eater in your family.  Yes, I found this while protesting my wife’s food choices!

With Jesus scheduled to make his perennial infantile appearance in just over a month, it is time to get the boycotted shopping list together.  The Gap has been very naughty according to the AFA, and should expect to discover flaming sulfur in their Inclusive Winter Celebration stockings.  And if they should dare to bring the Lord a one-sy from the Baby Gap, Mother Mary should have the foresight to take it back or to burn it on a public street. 

The narrator in my November Project is real arrogant guy.  I hate him so much I am tempted to rip him from my story altogether.  He pops in to deliver commentary that I have yet to expel from the pages.  Here’s what he said a couple of days ago.  Bear in mind this is his first-draft also…

“I walked the woods where Hosea Ames gathered his wood.  It was filled with vines that extended to high treetops and wove branches together.  The fabric of limbs and branches made of two otherwise unrelated trees,

Thank God Day 10 is over.  It was my neediest day on record; everything I did needed to be praised.  Every sentence and phrase was a junior varsity marching band on my desktop, so self-aware and full of pimples they almost forgot they were playing a fight song.  Even using the bathroom required reassurance, “You really hit the bowl that time, big guy!” I’d tell myself.

To top that off, yesterday I noticed that my friends in the fake world of social media are all masters of bumper sticker productivity and success; with the vulnerability of a horseshoe. 

I think the day after God made the sun, the third day, he woke up to it’s wooing the following morning and began forming the fish and the birds, resigning, “Back to the ol’ grind.”  It must have been a rough day, the fourth.  Fish, for all of their intricacies, look mostly like fish; and birds resemble other birds with slight variations.  I have this vivid onomatopoeia relationship with God, where I make him speak,

I went to hear Donald Miller speak on Monday.  I arrived a few minutes late, but really just in time.  As I was approaching the doors of the gargantuan church someone was moving toward the same destination from an opposite parking lot.  He beat me to the door by a second or two, so he held it open for me.  Donald Miller was a few minutes late too, and playing the role of my personal doorman, though when he entered the building they did not ask him for $15.  I said, “Hey, nice to see ya,” as if we were estranged and uncomfortable friends.  Don didn’t say, “You too, I read your crumby blog all the time.  How ya been?”  He looked at me in silence, the way the credit guy at a car lot looks at a loan applicant.

Dear Ream Readers and Friends,

During the month of November I have accepted the challenge issued by www.NaNoWriMo.org. I have decided that it is high-time that I complete the first draft of a novel I have been screwing around with for the better part of a year.  If I complete 50,000 words in the month of November; I am a winner. So I must try…  I have made this promise to myself and my ultra-supportive wife, Molly, who seems once again gifted with endless belief in her quixotic husband.

The book won’t sell even if I manage to complete it.  The concept is too racy for a Christian market and too Christian-y for the standard market.  Add to that my inexperience in blending story lines, and you have a recipe for NOT SELLING.  But I guess that is not the point.

You probably won’t like the book-that-doesn’t-yet-exist either.  It’s not tidy.  It doesn’t end neatly or even well.  I’ve managed to tear off my language filter.  Hopefully it will develop into the dark mirror of culture I am planning for it to become, a small portrait of a great culture war.  Hint: the story line is rooted in the first few chapters of Hosea.

All that to say: I will not be blogging regularly in the month of November.  When I do, I am contemplating posting excerpts of the rough draft.  The reason I am posting this as “news” is because I fear that if I don’t tell someone, I’ll quit.  The remedy is of course to tell everyone!

I won’t talk about the story much.  I’ve found that only derails me.  So if you ask how it’s going, I’m going to tell you – “Very Good.  Thanks.”  And that’s it.  I’ll tell you “Very Good” even if the truth is otherwise.  Molly has hidden the razor blades, the scotch, and has locked up all the ammunition to my guns.  There is no escaping!

I am thankful that you continue to read all of my nonsense at reamofpaper.  I look forward to writing for you again very soon.  I’m off…

Ryan