Howdy,

What is tumblehair, you ask?

It’s not a reference to any particular president, and it’s not a particular hairstyle. No, it’s more the product of a plethora of hairstyles. The search of style. The trimmings discarded, escaped but gathered together.

I’m making all this up to get to my point, my story. I hadn’t thought of the word tumblehair until I went to title this one.

What I have are notes on a moment.

Typed into my phone for a later time, for now: “Tumbleweed of hair. Not an exaggeration. A small version, but that’s what it was. What did my three year old go to do?”

Here was scene.

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Howdy,

I have written 195,000 words (rounding down, which is nice)—only 5,000 (or so, but not quite) to go!

That’s crazy to me.

Maybe a post near or at the end of 200,000 will now be titled “Crazy to me, 2.0.”

I know many people have written many more and maybe someday I will write more in a year as well, but as the most I’ve ever recorded in a year this is crazy to me.

Almost made me crazy.

Not really. It was good.

But it wasn’t easy, and as I’ve talked about before I had to cheat a little or at least make up for the gaps of not writing every day as I had set out to do. It wasn’t 550 words each and every day to get to this point, but the average is in place and I’m back on pace (approximately) with less than 10 days to go.

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Howdy,

At this rate, the way it’s lining up, it seems I’ll be jumping back into the world of working on my next Baseball Boys novel right about as baseball season is coming to an ending, the World Series typically won at the end of October.

It probably doesn’t matter, just kind of ironic. It’d be more important to have a baseball book ready for the spring, when a season starts, then to put much stock into when the writing gets going.

But, anyway, I don’t really bring it up here to talk about Major League Baseball’s World Season or (terrible) 2017 season. (Terrible if you’re a Giants fan that is. Strike that, TERRIBLE. That’s more like it. I good place for a Charles Barkley: Turrible, Turrible, Turrible.) No, I mention it more as an early notice that I’m seeking to switch gears toward a novel when I wrap the 200,000 word projected that I’ve blogged repeatedly about over the last year.

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Howdy,

Yesterday I threw in the line “standing in a library watching your kids play with Legos and thumb through books” while discussing the drafting of my blog post on a dying iPhone. (Not the battery that day, but threatening to go kaput for real, long-term.)

Would you believe we—they—were in the library for nearly two and a half hours? My three young boys, roaming around and terrorizing the place for two-plus hours.

Really, it was Riah roaming around and terrorizing. He’s mobile and he’s on the move—sort of the same thing, but not really if you think about it: he’s using his mobility. Sixteen months old today, Riah Surf makes his move whenever there’s a sliver of a chance, his walk turning into a run—more like a speed-walker. You know that funny “run.” He’s there.

While Jasper and Titus played quite contentedly with the Legos offered (along with the new Legos table now offered in the remodeled Denair branch), Riah went for the lower shelves throughout the building, pulling novels from young adult and adult sections and blitzing circles through the aisles, especially away from me. He even found a way to reach through an empty shelf and push the tucked in, open ends of books to make them stick out into the other aisle, like he was sending an Interstellar inter-dimensional message. Maybe he was. These boys are brilliant, just ask their mother or me—and if you don’t believe us, you can even ask a grandmother.

After offering one of the dis-shelved novels to an innocent older man standing in the middle of the room just waiting for his wife being helped at the desk, Riah flirted for attention at that same desk. Just smiling. Smiling at the two librarians until they smiled and chuckled back. What else can you do with a small child tearing apart your dominion who is as cute as Baby Riah?

While chasing Riah, I didn’t have to worry about watching Ti. I always knew where he was because of his Legos role-play shouting. I shushed him loudly multiple times. You know the type—when the parent is just as loud, and probably, definitely, as annoying: “TI, PLAY QUIETLY WE’RE IN A LIBRARY YOU HAVE TO USE YOUR LIBRARY VOICE TITUS QUIET TALK MORE QUIETLY TITUS TIMEOUT.”

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Howdy,

What can I write if I just start tapping with my thumbs?

Not a nervous, writer’s block toe tapping. Typing tapping, which doesn’t feel like writing but creates words, sentences, paragraphs, even a blog post and published pieces in a book.

Is the source of the start significant in a composition? Or is a draft a draft? A thought a thought, an idea an idea, a rambling a rambling, compiled on paper, er, or wherever—and if thumbed together that’s going to be on a screen. A small screen. Not even a computer monitor or a laptop. On a phone’s face.

Can anything of value possibly be written on a little mobile phone, “typed” on a touchscreen?

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Howdy,

In the book Wonder by R.J. Palacio there’s a line that reads: “The sky is still bright cyan but the sun is low …”

It’s the only line I noted in Scrivener to later consideration and possible deconstruction and reconstruction (stealing—though not all stealing is bad, see Austin Kleon’s Steal Like an Artist).

It grabbed my attention for the very simple fact of containing the phrase bright cyan in attempt to put a word or set of words on the color that the brilliantly blue sky parades when the sun sets and streaks the sky with new, additional colors, changing a blue sky to bright cyan.

How do you describe a sunset, really?

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Howdy,

Let’s do the 10-minute-thing, because I’m feeling a little frozen and stuck by the fact that we’re only seven thousand words away from being done with this year-of-blogging challenge to 200,000 words—and I’m currently five thousand words behind.

Which I have to make up.

I just have to. No other way to go, right? Got to finish.

So 12,000 more words for me to finish this year (my birthday to my birthday, in the middle of October) of writing 200K.

I do also feel a little spent. Ready to be done, and not sure about the ol’ idea-generator for finishing. They’ll come, but I am blinded by the finish line. Ready to be done.

Finished will serve as a starting line for something else, but this project of sometimes scratching for words (in word count form) has run its course. That’s how I feel today.

Of course, it hasn’t actually run its course. Not yet. Not all the way.

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Howdy,

Happy Birthday, Jasper!

Seven years  old already … wow!

—Billy

Reading. Writing. Living.

Howdy,

Recently driving up toward Pinecrest Lake in the mountains and saw a sign that said:

DISC GOLF
Open to the Public

And I chuckled and thought, yeah, because disc golf is so proper and prestigious. The things we find to be exclusive about.

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Howdy,

Right as I finished reading the chart-topping Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance and was looking at the author’s picture on the back jacket, my three-year-old son Titus climbed up on the chair and into my lap and said, “That’s you, Dad. That’s you.”

“Me?”

“Is that you, Dad?”

I told Ti no.

But that’s what I was wondering. I’m not sure … maybe, was what I was thinking.

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