Or at least a Marlins - Red Sox Series? Damn, damn, damn. I was completely disgusted by the pity party Chicago threw for themselves after blowing a 3-1 series lead, though. You wouldn't catch any other team's fans (including the Red Sox) moping around in and on every media outlet the day after. Your Cubbies choked, guys and gals, get over it.

Moving on, I seem to have become relatively nocturnal. We're talking absolutely-can't-fall asleep-before-3AM kind of nocturnal. Which has made the few days I do have to be up and out of bed before 10 AM rather awful. Having what is basically a five day weekend (Monday and Tuesday are SLC "Study Days", i.e. Fall Break, and I always have Fridays free) is not helping the situation. However, I spent almost 4 hours writing like mad, resulting in almost an entire new novel section and that happened from 11 PM Friday to 3 AM Saturday, so I can't say my nocturnal life has been unproductive.

Book recommendations for my fellow bibliophiles out there:
Ghost of the Hardy Boys by Leslie McFarlane
The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold

Two very different books, but both quite excellent. If you keep even the slightest eye on contemporary literature you've heard about the Sebold book which is definitely as good as advertised, surprisingly enough, though I thought the ending was maybe a tad simplistic. For those of you who don't know, the narrator is a fourteen year old girl who is murdered by a pedophile and spends the book watching her family, friends, and the guy who murdered her from heaven. Sebold's conception of heaven is quite intriguing, too, and actually serves to move the plot along, which is a nice touch. But I hate those reviews which give away the entire plot of the book so I'll stop there.

The McFarlane book may be tougher to track down. It was published in 1976 and I just happened across it while browsing through the SLC library Wednesday evening in a spare 15 minutes. Leslie McFarlane happens to be the original Franklin W. Dixon, author of the Hardy Boys mystery series for kids, and the book is his autobiography of how he came to write the Hardy Boys, which were only one series of many produced by a "fiction factory" that still operates today. (Plot outlines were sent to ghost authors who fleshed them out for a minimal cash payment per book; all rights and royalties from the titles remained property of the company providing the outlines.) Naturally this conflicted with McFarlane's desire to be a serious writer, and the fact that all this happened in the only half-civilized environment of Canada and New England in the first half of the twentieth century make it even more entertaining. Some of the most enjoyable parts are chapters where McFarlane describes his hometown and its inhabitants. But my writer geek self was most impressed by the wit and style of McFarlane's story, which read as easily as one of those Hardy Boys with a lot more substance, and especially the book's final chapter where the reason for the creation of the entire book is revealed. No, I am not telling you what it is. Check and see if your local library or used bookstore has it first.

And one more random note: my friend, Leor, is a poetic genuis. No kidding. I went to a reading of some SLC student poets Thursday night and she absolutely blew me away. Leor is on the border of language poets, meaning her poetry often concentrates on playing with language and the sound of it rather than lofty metaphors and allusions and all that. (Most of you, myself included, have probably not read a language poet unless you've taken a college poetry class, and maybe not even then.) The problem I have with language poetry is that sometimes it's just nonsense, sometimes it's even supposed to be nonsense, and I don't really see the point of writing intentional nonsense. But Leor's stuff has just enough structure to it that you can sense a purpose behind all the word play. A favorite from Thursday was "Confederate Flag Mud Flap" which was simply those four words repeated in various order, but it WORKED, because the whole idea of the object of the poem brings up certain associations that just resonate. Leor does write less gimmicky poems, and they are good too, it's just I can't describe them quite as well without the text in front of me. So anyway, if you are in to poetry at all, remember the name Leor Jukabowicz (as if you could forget ). You'll be hearing more about her.