Okay, so this blog has been semi-comatose for a while, but I do have an excuse...for the month of November, anyway. See graphic above. YES, I actually won NaNoWriMo this year! I wrote a 50,000 word novel between Nov. 1 - Nov. 30. Hallelujah!

This was my fourth attempt at NaNoWriMo. I entered in 2010 and made it to around 10,000 words before running out of inspiration for that particular project. I still have what remains of the manuscript, so it's something I may go back to at some point. I tried NaNo again in 2012 (working title: Wreckage), but didn't get past the third day. This time it was a case of having a very vague idea of a story, one not fully formed in my head enough to keep up my momentum. Then last year, 2013, I had an awesome idea for TWO sequels to Thanks, That Was Fun. My 2013 NaNoWriMo plan was to start on In Spite of Me, the second installment of my would-be trilogy. (The Morphine album Cure For Pain was the inspiration, hence the book title.). But that fell apart about 16,000 words in. I don't quite know what happened there, but I still have all my outlines and I will definitely return to ISoM in the future.

And then, this year. This year! Fourth time was the charm. I wrote my ass off for 30 days and ended up with 50,107 words. The novel is nowhere near finished. In fact, it's only 3/4 of the way there, and much editing needs to be done. But still, I DID IT!

My 2014 NaNoWriMo novel is, incidentally, titled Harleighwood. I'm giving myself a week off before I go back and start editing and adding to fully complete it.

But for now, YES! It is finished. Temporarily.

Oddly appropriate excerpt from the Geoff Dyer book I am reading:

This is a ripped, by no means reliable map of some of the landscapes that make up a particular phase of my life. It's about places where things happened or didn't happen, places where I stayed and things that have stayed with me, places I'd wanted to see or places I passed through or just ended up. In a way they're all the same place--the same landscape--because the person these things happened to was the same person who in turn is the sum of all the things that happened or didn't happen in these and other places.

Yeah. What he said.

Dan Kennedy's book, Loser Goes First: My Thirty-something Years of Dumb Luck and Minor Humiliation is tied with Paul Feig's Superstud as the funniest book I've ever read. I first came across a copy of Loser Goes First in 2005, read it three times in a row, and recommended it to everyone who didn't run away screaming. Kennedy's second book, Rock On: An Office Power Ballad is a hilarious account of his brief stint as the Director of Creative Development for Atlantic Records; a scathing report from the trenches of the dying record industry. Now he writes for GQ and McSweeney's and is a regular performer at Stories at the Moth.

Another awesome thing about Dan Kennedy? He let me interview him for Praxis.

AR: Can you give us little background on Stories at the Moth, and how you came to be involved with the project?

DK: George Dawes Green started The Moth in 1997, in his living room here in New York , and it grew from there to what it is today. I got involved with them in 2000. I called the office, I think I was just that sort of simple or naïve – I had heard about it and just thought: “Hmm…I guess…I'll just dial them up and tell them I want to try it?” Basically, I was just some guy who was unemployed, I had stopped partying, I was trying to figure out what the hell I could do with my time, I needed to make new friends, I was just…probably a little mental. So like some giant child I just called them up and left a message with someone: “Hi, yeah, um, I'd like to do the story thing, please?”And then weeks went by and it became painfully apparent that this is not the way to go about it. But then, still weeks and weeks later, oddly enough, I got a call back from Joey Xanders. She was the Creative Director back then. Anyway, I had this story about my days spent learning by trial and error on the 90's music scene that I'm really not good at trying to be a musician. They put me on the bill for this mainstage show and I told that story. The Moth didn't feel like a scene to me. It was just this overwhelming feeling of finding a place where you finally felt like you fit in; like you could actually kind of do the thing that everyone there was doing – it might have been the first time in my life to have felt like that. Joey told me much later on that the reason she had returned my call back then was completely random; she had been talking to her therapist about how guilty she felt for not having the time to return all of the calls from the phone messages that were piling up -- and her therapist told her to just take baby steps and return one phone call; just close your eyes, pick one message off the stack, dial the number. So my phone rang in this little tiny apartment I was living in without any furniture, I picked it up, and ten years raced by.

AR: In your memoir you talk about being a kid and getting a journal for Christmas (instead of the coveted black Gibson Les Paul guitar). What was the first thing you remember writing?

DK: The first thing I ever remember writing was when I was twelve. It was a punishment for talking in class or something and I…it's a long story, but basically I wasn't talking in class, I made a look, just to myself, at something the teacher said. But everyone started laughing, and this teacher, Mr. Kisner, totally had it in for me, and so he punished me for something I didn't do – and he said I had to write a one thousand word essay about why I shouldn't talk in class. So I wrote this satire of him and his broad, simple rules, handed it in to him the next day. He read the first few sentences and threw his stapler across the room at the wall and it opened and all the staples went flying everywhere. I just kind of thought: Jesus, writing is pretty powerful -- he read, like, three sentences, turned bright red, and starting throwing shit. I didn't write anything humorous again until I was twenty-six...To read the rest of the interview, go here.