College football

I still like to watch college football, and there are some great games scheduled today, my favorite being UCLA at BYU now that the Bruins are reinvigorated with a new coach and young QB. (I gave up on pro football some years ago, reacting negatively to the takeover of the sport by arrogant millionaires. College football gets less "old school" every year but I'm still a fan. Probably not forever, though I may pass before the transition.) The nice thing about sports is that we have conflict with results that actually don't matter. It's conflict for conflict's sake. Oh, we win bragging rights and trophies, but come on, who cares? It's not like politics, where conflicts matter, where an election can put unqualified dangerous people in positions of great power. Football doesn't matter, and this is precisely why it's so attractive.

So I'll watch some games today, and continue rewriting the novel and bring it up to speed and maybe take some notes about where to go with it. I see a three part structure: setting up the female spy in book one; flashing back to the death of a linguist in book two, murder replacing an assumed defection; and I'm at a loss about book three, how to bring these strands together. But I'll figure it out.

Meanwhile, I'm really glad Kerouac's Scroll is getting some movement. It has a few fans out there, which is always nice, though of course in the bigger picture it hardly exists at all. But a few readers stumble upon it and like it, and that's cool. The Cold War novel comes from the same cloth -- in fact, one character has the same name! (guess who he is ha ha). I'm really glad I checked it out after being away from it and am reinvigorated and energized about it again. When so few actually give a hoot what you're up to, you have to be your own cheering section. More writers know this, or should, than don't! More writers are marginal than highly visible. More writers get no press than any press at all.

(Which reminds me: I was digitizing the contents of two fat scrapbooks I have about my career, am about 3/4 done, but haven't done the grunt work in months. This would be a good project to get out of the way, sooner rather than later. If you have a library archive, you might as well try and make it complete.)