Fall (?) Sunday Stats #2: Training Matters, and Did I Mention I Finished the First Draft of My Novel?

Posted on October 12, 2008 | 6 comments

It’s 80 degrees at 4pm.  How is it fall?  In a few minutes, I’m going to go out and mow our front lawn, which is still green and growing in October for the first time in the six years we’ve lived in this house.  Thank the rain we had in August and September, I guess, because it sure wasn’t anything I did to keep the grass growing.

The lawn appears to be the only damn thing that is growing, of course.  I managed to stay fairly calm about the economy until Monday, when the excrement really started to hit the artificial wind machine, and when I listened to This American Life’s Another Frightening Show About the Economy.  This podcast provides a really good explanation of credit default swaps and the freezing of the debt markets.  The explanation is a little too clear, if you ask me; it left me in a state of near-paralytic dread.  I’ve managed to remain rational, at least so far.  I haven’t been able to convince myself to rebalance our retirement accounts to buy into the declining markets, however, even though I think that’s what we ought to be doing.

Miles run today:  13.1, for the third annual World Wide Half Marathon, part of the World Wide Festival of Races.  It was a beautiful day, sunny but too hot for a long run (and if I thought it was bad, pity the poor folks running the Chicago Marathon).  Still, I’m not going to complain about the weather on what could be the last really nice weekend until spring.

The World Wide Festival of Races is a virtual race series — the third running of the World Wide Half Marathon, the second running of the Kick the Couch 5K, and the first Zen Run 10K.  It’s led by Steve Runner of the Phedippidations podcast, and his co-race directors (whose names are impossible to find on the website).  It’s the easiest race you’ll ever run, logistically.  You sign up in advance.  You commit to run one of the distances on or about the assigned weekend.  Maybe you join a virtual race team.  You decide on your own route — maybe as part of an organized race, maybe not — and then you run it, and upload your results.

My race route itself was nothing special — my ordinary out-and-back to the lake front path, plus a couple of miles on the path itself.  There was a little extra poignancy to the run because yesterday was the 10th anniversary of my first marathon, and the marathon itself was in progress just a few blocks south of my own route.

As a race, my World Wide Half was, to put it mildly, a disaster.  I haven’t been for a run since my close encounter with a car wheel more than two weeks ago, and I’ve been even more sedentary than that would ordinarily mean because of the 1630-mile road trip to the Catskills we took last weekend to go to a wedding, and the push to finish Meet the Larssons.

Oh, by the way, in case you missed it, I finished the first draft of MTL.  More on that in a bit.

Back to the race.  Two weeks off, eating more junk than usual, sitting on my tucus for hours on end, left my legs and back muscles flabby and my tendons and ligaments tight.  I ached all the way through the run, and developed a massive blister on my right foot.  My finishing time was 2:09:48, which is 24 minutes slower than my time for the tempest-tossed Chicago Half Marathon.  I still hurt, six hours (and two Aleve) after I finished.  By comparison, I was well-trained for the Chicago Half and in pretty good shape, so the downpour barely affected my time.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m glad I didn’t skip the race today.  I run alone all year, and one of the things I like best about the World Wide Festival of Races is knowing that there are hundreds of other people running alone, and we’re all running together.

What I listened to during the run:  Phedippidations #156 (“Cheers from a Little Blue Bubble,” the annual episode of cheers and shouts of encouragement to World Wide Half participants); I Should Be Writing #102, and Adventures in SciFi Publishing #53.

Writing this week since my last Sunday Stats:  6,531 words (net) of Meet the Larssons, including “THE END” on Wednesday night.  I actually wrote 8,737 words, but I cut a 2,206 word scene as I went.   To finish the draft, I did my usual writing on the train to and from work, plus several binges at home and even in the car on the drive back from the wedding.  Despite my intent to leave the draft alone for at least a month, I’ve been reading Hooked, by Les Edgerton, which has given me a good idea for a new opening scene for the second draft, and a couple of other ideas as well.  I have made notes, but so far have refrained from going back to it.  A commenter here recommended this book to me several months ago; I’m too lazy to search out that post so I can give you proper credit, but thanks.

I took Unfocused Girl to a birthday party out in the ‘burbs yesterday afternoon, and spent the time up the street at Starbucks working on “Secretary-General,” the short story I started a little over a month ago then put aside to finish MTL.  I cut 500 words out of it as I re-read what I’d done, then wrote around 350 words.  I want to finish this story, polish it up, and submit it before I get back to MTL.

I’d also like to hash out one or two-page treatments of three different ideas I have for my next novel.  They’re very different, and I’m not sure what I want to work on next.  I figure that writing them out in a more extended form than the one-sentence summaries I have now will help me decide.

Right before we left for the wedding, TTB was rejected by the most recent outlet I’d submitted it to.  The night I finished MTL, I submitted TTB to another e-zine, one I had only recently come across and which seems to be looking for this kind of fiction.  We’ll see.

In other writing news, Unfocused Girl would like to announce that she has also just finished her book, The Adventure Friends and the Sword of Destiny.  It’s contemporary urban fantasy about four friends who go on a quest, find a magical object, meet a guiding spirit, discover special powers within themselves, rescue a friend, and fight their evil nemesis, all with the goal of bringing peace to their elementary school.  Yay, Unfocused us!

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Political Rant: Ayers Is a Phony Issue.

Posted on October 12, 2008 | 2 comments

It’s been difficult to concentrate on anything this week, with both the presidential campaign and the global economy teetering on the edge of the abyss.  I had been pretty successful until a few weeks ago in keeping some distance from political and financial news, with the exception of watching the conventions and debates.  In the last couple of weeks, though, McCain and Palin — Palin especially — and their surrogates have been whipping up their supporters into a strange frenzy.  I was glad to see McCain back away from it on Friday, telling his audience that Obama is a decent man with whom McCain has many fundamental disagreements.

McCain and Palin continue to bang away at the “Obama pals around with domestic terrorists” meme, however, arguing that Obama’s associations with University of Illinois professor and former leader of the Weather Underground William Ayers demonstrate something important about Obama’s patriotism or judgment.  Obama denies any meaningful connection with Ayers, and The New York Times ran a long piece recently, concluding that there isn’t, and never was, much of a relationship between Obama and Ayers, but McCain and Palin keep coming back to it.

There isn’t any more support for the allegations now than there was when the Times wrote its story, but it’s still out there.  The Daily Beast, former Vanity Fair editor Tina Brown’s latest project and my new favorite news and commentary aggregator, has unfortunately had it as its lead story the entire weekend, giving the claims far more credibility than they’re worth, with blurbs that are mostly skeptical of the Obama’s explanations and the Times story.  The pundits quoted don’t actually have any facts to share, they just try to poke holes in Obama’s version as backed up by the Times.

The Daily Beast would do well to add a link to today’s Chicago Sun-Times.  There’s a good story, based on work done by FactCheck.org, showing that the alleged relationship between Obama and Ayers consists of a couple of common board memberships, a small fund raiser in 1995, and a $200 donation in 2001.  Ayers was never convicted of anything, and doesn’t appear to have ever actually hurt anyone.  Sure, he could have hurt someone, and I’m not condoning what he admits to having done, but let’s be serious about this:  compare Obama’s tenuous association with a guy who is now generally considered non-toxic (he’s a state employee, for Pete’s sake) with Palin’s support of a group that advocates Alaska’s secession from the Union:

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This Is The End.

Posted on October 8, 2008 | 7 comments

No, not a post about the Incredible Shrinking Global Economy (please, I just had dinner!).  I just finished the first draft of Meet the Larssons.  Here’s how it ends:

THE END

Sorry, I should have posted a spoiler alert.  It’s been 10 months, 104,258 words, and a whole lot of unattractive whining, but I made it.  Now all I have to do is restructure the plot, rewrite most of it, and edit out the stupid parts.  Can o’ corn.

I finished a novel.  Heh.

According to Scrivener, it will be 462 pages when I print it out; it would be 277 pages if printed as a paperback.

Hey, I said if.

Sorry, I’m a little giddy, and mind-boggingly tired.  In a few weeks, I’ll come back to it, and realize that of the 104,258 words, about 85,000 of them will be full of suck, but for now, I’m going to pretend that it’s all brilliant.  Brilliant!

Now I’m going to have a glass of wine with Mrs. Unfocused in celebration of, well, me.

In case you’re interested, here’s what I was listening to when I wrote the final chapter:  Up From the Ground Below, by M Shanghai String Band, the best original bluegrass music being performed today (as far as I know, anyway), and excellent music to finish a novel by.

It has been a busy week and a half, which is why I haven’t posted in a while, but I’m sure you’ve all enjoyed the break.  I’ll try to catch up over the weekend.  Meanwhile, have you been keeping up with the Absolute Write October Blog Chain?

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October Blog Chain: Novelus Interruptus

Posted on October 2, 2008 | 13 comments

It’s time for another Absolute Write blog chain, and this time our fearless leader is Ralph at Neither Here Nor There.  He started us off with his post about the agony of working on the second draft of his novel in Of Anxieties, Frustrations and Self-Imposed Deadlines; if you haven’t read it, you should.  I’ll wait.

Tonight, I can only aspire to know Ralph’s pain.  I am thisclose to finishing the first draft of Meet the Larssons, the novel I’ve been working on since January 2.  I wrote something over 3,000 words yesterday alone; I finally called it a night out of sheer exhaustion sometime after 1am.  The draft is currently over 102,000 words long.

But I didn’t finish it.  I have at least two scenes left to go:  the final scene I’ve had in mind since I first hashed out a couple of pages of notes on January 2, and one scene to get me there. If I hadn’t spent all evening working on a brief, I might have finished it this evening.  As it is, I may not get any concentrated time to work on it until Monday, because the whole family is trekking out to New York for a wedding.  We leave tomorrow, and because we’ve got a box full of crazy with our names on it, we’re driving to the Catskills in one day.  Road trip!  So I probably won’t finish until next week, which is a little frustrating.

Not as frustrating as it’s going to be restructuring MTL after I type “The End,” though.  Those few pages of notes are the only outline I’ve ever done for this book, and it shows.  If I’d spent more time outlining, I might not have had to do as much reworking in the second draft; I might even have bee able to skip the second draft altogether and go straight to the third draft, editing words one at a time instead of moving around entire chapters.  On the other hand, I might never have started writing the novel at all, and just figuratively tossed those notes into the same cluttered drawer with all of my other unfinished (or unstarted) ideas for novels or stories over the past 15 years.

Once I have this novel under my belt, though, when I start my next one — and there will be a next one — I expect to spend a lot more time outlining it, maybe chapter by chapter.  I have always thought of myself as an organic writer as opposed to an outliner, but I think I’ll try it the other way to see if it works better.

So what about you, Sassee?  Do you outline, or do you just start throwing words onto the page?

Neither Here Nor There
Unfocused Me
A Blog, I Has One
Headdesk
Spittin’ Out Words Like a Llama
Life in Scribbletown
Organized Chaos
South Asia Fair
Spynotes
Corvette — An American Dream
Christian Woman

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Fall Sunday Stats #1: How To Get Run Over By a Car and Walk Away.

Posted on September 28, 2008 | 7 comments

Yes, I was run over by a car this week, but it was the good kind of getting run over by a car.  Yes, I walked away.  I still don’t recommend it.

It’s autumn in Chicago, and we’re going apple-picking today if the weather holds.  We usually go in October, but as we looked at the calendar we realized that our weekends are pretty well booked until November; we’ll probably end up with a different variety of apples, which will be a nice change.  We’ll try to keep the haul down to about 50 pounds of apples this year.

Miles run today:  None.  Because, you know, I got run over by a car.  Here’s the story:  on Thursday, I was in California for a hearing, and the Senior Partner, our clients, the husband of one client, and I went out to lunch before the afternoon court appearance.  After lunch, the client’s husband (a very nice guy) pulled their car around to drive most of us to court (a couple of members of the group got into another client’s car).  The curb was too high to allow the passenger-side doors to open, so the client’s husband was asked to pull up a little, to where the curb was lower.  Unfortunately, at just that moment, I was on the driver’s side, with the back door open; my right foot was in the car and my left foot was on the street.  As he pulled up, the tire started riding up my heel and the back of my leg.  I let out a yell, he stopped the car, and after a moment’s confusion, backed it up and I hopped onto the sidewalk.

If he had gone another couple of inches, my achilles tendon probably would have snapped.  As it is, my ankle and heel hurt a LOT, but after a few minutes of icing the foot and a handful of Advil, I was queasy and shaken, but decided I would live and off we went to court.  When the hearing started, I was nauseated and light-headed, and I think I was in a little bit of shock, but by the end of it (three hours later), I was mostly back to normal, except that my foot hurt.  A lot.  The poor guy who had been driving the car felt so bad about it that he was in worse shape than I was.

Back in Chicago on Friday, I did see a doctor.  I don’t have the results of the x-rays yet, but based on how I’m feeling, I think it’s just bruised.  So no run today, but maybe as soon as Wednesday.

So, to sum up how to get run over and walk away:  as the car starts to roll over you, scream like Agnes Moorehead.  The person driving will probably stop.  Hope that helps.

Weather:  cool and overcast.  It’s supposed to be a sunny day, but it doesn’t look good.  We’ll have to give it a little more time before we decide whether to go to the orchard.

Words of Meet the Larssons written this week:  1,633, to a total of 97,727.  A definite decline in productivity, generally because of the travel.  I was gone from Tuesday to late Thursday night, the only time I wasn’t actively working was the flight home, and my foot hurt enough that I didn’t really feel as though I could concentrate.  No travel this week and no overwhelming deadlines, so I hope to get more done.  Instead, on the plane back to Chicago I read Tim Ferriss’s The Four-Hour Work Week, which has gotten a lot of press, good and bad.  Much of it is completely useless to me (as long as I’m working as a lawyer, I essentially get paid by the hour; a four-hour work week doesn’t really cut it), but I thought he had an interesting perspective.  The book made me think about some of the ways in which I do spend my time that is neither productive nor interesting, and reminded me that one of the benefits of my job is that the office schedule is somewhat flexible; I should take more advantage of that.  I blew off the chapters on internet-based reselling as creating an effortless income stream; what I did read of that section had the faint odor of the “easy money from real estate” books that were so popular not very long ago.  Maybe that works for some people, and don’t let me discourage you from giving it a try if you’re so inclined — the up front investment is certainly less than for buying homes out of foreclosure and rehabbing them; it’s just not for me.

Speaking of unproductive uses of my time, and of feeling queasy and light-headed, I made the mistake of checking the balance of my retirement account yesterday.  Good God.  It looks like Congress is going to work out the bailout, which I suppose is necessary.  Peter Bernstein has a good piece in today’s Times about the moral hazard inherent in any broad bailout scheme; rescuing an entire industry from its bad decisions about risk doesn’t exactly discourage people from taking similar risks in the future.  I’m afraid It’s going to take more than a little Advil and ice to recover from the truck that’s hit us this past year.

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Arrr! Darn!

Posted on September 23, 2008 | 5 comments

Once again, I missed International Talk Like a Pirate Day!

(Brief interlude while I explain to Mrs. Unfocused what I’m talking about.  Mrs. Unfocused is not quite as much of a geek as I am, although she is our household sysadmin, so maybe she just has better things to do.)

As I was saying, for the fifth consecutive year, I have missed International Talk Like a Pirate Day, and utterly failed, failed, failed I tell you, to talk like a pirate at ALL.

(It was last Friday, in case you missed it too.)

If I hadn’t been catching up on Mike’s blog, at which he discusses, well, everything under the sun, including International Talk Like a Pirate Day, and Freshhell’s Life in Scribbletown, where apparently even the Scribbletowners talk like pirates once a year, I might have gone weeks without knowing it.  Thanks, Mike.  Thanks, Freshhell.  Thanks a LOT.

I need some kind of countdown clock, like the one I have on the sidebar for Pi Day (scroll down; it’s on the right).  Anybody have one I could borrow?

Arrr!

I know, I know, it’s too late.  Darn.

By the way, I’m doing a little traveling, so I have pre-written this post and time-shifted it by a day, so it will magically appear on the blog even while I’m doing something else entirely!  Yes, I just figured out how to do that.  Yes, that’s kind of sad.  But still!

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TMI.

Posted on September 22, 2008 | 4 comments

I have two stories out on submission right now, to two different markets.  I sent “Dear Mr. President” out at the end of July to an online magazine; its submission guidelines say that writers should not expect a response for at least three months.  I hardly think about this story at all; I’ll start wondering about it if I don’t have a response in another month or so.

I sent TTB to a different market.  This outlet does not provide any guideline for response time; instead, it provides detailed statistics, like Duotrope, but counting every single submission and response.  I can check the numbers, and see that for short story submissions, they sent their most recent response on Sunday of last week, and the earliest story submitted that has not yet been rejected or accepted was submitted back in June; the average time for a rejection is just over a week, but the average time for acceptance is four months.

If I hit REFRESH, maybe the statistics will update.  Not this time, at least, not for responses, but four more short stories have been submitted since the last time I checked!  More competition!  Arg!

This is ridiculous.  When the editor has reviewed my story, and has made a decision about my story, I’ll get an email.  Finding out when the last response was sent out to someone doesn’t tell me anything, because if I don’t have an email, then it wasn’t sent to me.

REFRESH.  Nothing.  Crap.

Thanks for the detailed statistics.  In addition to getting me to push that damn button like a lab rat trying for cheese, those numbers have given me something worse than a jammed right index finger (REFRESH – ow!):  hope.  See, the average rejection time is just over a week.  The editor has had TTB for 24 days.  So is TTB an outlier?  So damn long that it takes a while to turn it down?  Or is it possible that it’s been shortlisted, and weighed against the other stories coming in?

REFRESH.  Ow.  Nothing.  Crap.

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Summer Sunday Stats #7: The Real Last Summer Sunday.

Posted on September 21, 2008 | 1 comment

No wonder it’s such a nice day:  it’s still summer.  The autumnal equinox is tomorrow.  D’oh.  (If you didn’t see Summer Sunday Stats #6A or Summer Sunday Stats #6B, then this probably doesn’t mean anything to you; carry on, then.)

Miles run:  8.46 miles in 1:22:48.  Nice and slooooow.  I took the entire week off after the Chicago Half Marathon — I didn’t run a step between last Sunday and today, except to catch the train.  While I never got full out sick after my last post, but I’ve definitely been fighting off a cold, so I took it easy this morning.  I’m glad I went out, though; it’s a beautiful day, warm and sunny but not too hot.

What was playing on my iPod during my run:  absolutely nothing.  I couldn’t find my arm band case for the iPod, so I went without it.  Just as well, as it turns out.

Words of Meet the Larssons written this week:  3,146, for a total of 96,094, which sounds pretty good to me considering the week I had.  Not included in that total is the 600 words of notes I typed out last night and this morning with ideas for revisions when I’m ready for the second draft.  I hit a point this week where I can see the end of the story, and my vague feelings of dissatisfaction with the story arc began to really coalesce.  Last night, I finally realized what was wrong with it, and by this morning, I started to figure out how I needed to change the story to save it.  By the time I left for my run, I had a pretty good idea as to what the revised structure of the novel would be, but I was a little overwhelmed by the amount of rewriting I thought it would require.  I thought I might have to throw out as much as half of what I’ve written — not just edit or revise or even rewrite, but throw 50,000 words completely out the window.

When I couldn’t find my iPod case, I just grabbed my keys and left.  I thought I could use the time to think through the changes I’d need to make.  Instead, in the course of an 80-minute run, I figured out that most of what I thought I’d have to pitch could actually be salvaged, that the biggest problem with the story so far isn’t what I’ve written, but the order in which I’ve written it.  The same events — hell, even the same dialogue in several scenes — which are just vignettes the way I’ve written them in the first draft, which add nothing to the plot or just serve to make the characters jump through particular hoops on their way to a predetermined end, would make perfect sense and build the dramatic tension if only they appeared in a different order.  Instead of shitcanning 50,000 words, I would need to cut maybe 10,000 words completely, and revise or rewrite another 10,000 while changing the order in which those scenes appear.  Then I’ve got ideas for probably another 10,000 to 20,000 words of new scenes on top of that, to tie the new structure together. None of this excuses me from finishing the first draft, but I feel a lot better knowing where the revisions are going to go.

It does, however, tell me that NaNoWriMo is not an option this year.  I’m going to finish the first draft of MTL in the next three weeks or so, certainly by Halloween, but I think probably before then.  Then I’m going to take a few weeks away from it and work on getting one or two more short stories finished, cleaned up, and submitted.  By mid-November or so, I’d like to get cracking on making these revisions.  If at all possible, I’d like to have the revised draft done by the end of January (I’d really like to have it done by the end of the year, but I can’t see how that’s realistic).  That’s not the submission draft, but by the end of it I should have fixed any big problems with the book.

What about the marathon?  The jury’s still out on that, but I’m skeptical about my ability to take that much time off of work.

Gotta go – it’s official homework time for the kids, and the weekend is the only time I get to help.

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Sick and Tired. Literally.

Posted on September 17, 2008 | 2 comments

I’m coming down with a cold.  I hardly ever get sick, so I can’t understand it.  It’s not as if I was out in the rain for hours recently, doing something physically taxing enough to suppress my immune system.

I am, in the words of those who know and love me, an idiot.

Unfortunately, I’m an idiot with a brief due on Thursday, and while I’d love to have gone to bed at 9pm this evening, instead it’s almost 2 in the morning and I’m just heading upstairs.

I am seriously getting too old for this shit.

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A Meme About Food. Because That’s Something I Can Deal With.

Posted on September 15, 2008 | 5 comments

I’m completely blown away by what’s been happening on Wall Street since Friday, but I don’t have anything particularly intelligent to add.  There are good articles about it here and here, but the situation keeps changing.

Instead of rambling on about moral hazards, financial contagion, and the potential meltdown of the U.S. financial system, I’m going to post about food.  I caught this meme about food from Freshhell at Life in Scribbletown.  I’m not going to mention chocolate because I’m afraid of sounding like Cathy.

1. How do you like your eggs?

Depends.  Most days I have an egg white omelet with one whole egg mixed in as part of my breakfast (along with the oatmeal I’ve mentioned previously).  If I’m being a little decadent, I’ll have three eggs over easy on toast.  If I’m being a lot decadent, I’ll have eggs benedict.  I also like my eggs scrambled, soft boiled, hard boiled, or poached.  I kind of like eggs.

2. How do you take your coffee/tea?

To paraphrase Montgomery Burns, I take it black, like my lawyer’s heart.

3. Favorite breakfast food:

Oatmeal.  And Mrs. Unfocused’s cinnamon rolls, but I don’t eat those very often.

4. Peanut butter:

Not in our house — Junior is allergic to peanuts.  We eat soynut butter.  I like the crunchy, but am perfectly happy with the smooth.

5. What kind of dressing on your salad?

Vinagrette or honey mustard.

6. Coke or Pepsi?

I hardly ever drink pop, but will always choose a Diet Coke over a Diet Pepsi, and prefer Coke Zero to either.

7. You’re feeling lazy. What do you make?

Soynut butter and jam sandwich.  Toasted bread.  Blueberry, strawberry, or apricot jam.

8. You’re feeling really lazy. What kind of pizza do you order?

Half cheese (for the kids), half veggie (for the Mrs. and me).  Thin crust.

9. You feel like cooking. What do you make?

One of my many failures as a human being is that I hardly ever cook at all (except for eggs and oatmeal).  I’d probably make breakfast for dinner:  scrambled eggs for the Mrs. and me (and Unfocused Girl if she’s in the mood), eggless pancakes for the whole family (Junior’s cursed allergies again), toast, and bacon, if we have any.

10. Do any foods bring back good memories?

Soon after the Mrs. and I got married, we came up with our own tradition for breakfast on Christmas morning, which we have continued since we had children.  There is a very good bagel place in Skokie; it’s a little bit of a hassle to get to, but the bagels are worth it.  On Christmas Eve, I go there and buy bagels, cream cheese, and smoked salmon, and that’s what we eat for breakfast on Christmas.

11. Do any foods bring back bad memories?

Yogurt.  I always hated yogurt, and once, when I was a kid — around 6 or 7 — when I felt nauseous, my father badgered me into eating a bowl of yogurt in the belief that it would make me feel better.  I’m not sure how many bites I took before I had to run to the bathroom to throw up, but every heave tasted like yogurt (sorry for the mental image there).  I don’t eat yogurt, and I still can’t stand the smell more than 30 years later.  Yes, I know it’s good for you.  You can have mine.

12. Do any foods remind you of someone?

Fruity bagels (blueberry, apple, etc.) remind me of Satan, because fruity bagels are the official breakfast food of Hell.

13. Is there a food you refuse to eat?

Yogurt and fruity bagels.

14. What was your favorite food as a child?

For candy, it was Whoppers, until I was 10 or so.  I somehow got my hands on a quart container of Whoppers, and ate all of them.  I did not eat Whoppers again until college.

For real food, it was lobster.  My father and I used to go camping in Maine with the Sierra Club, and at the end of the trip we’d have a steak and lobster cook-out (ah, roughing it!), and I always liked throwing the lobsters into the pots.  I was, apparently, utterly without empathy for our crustacean brethren.

15. Is there a food that you hated as a child but now like?

Peanut butter and hot dogs.  When I was a kid, I was so picky about what I would eat that my mother was reduced to feeding me Campbell’s tomato soup for breakfast and jelly sandwiches (grape jelly and white bread) for lunch.

16. Is there a food that you liked as a child but now hate?

Not that I can think of.  I still have a little trouble with Whoppers.

17. Favorite fruits and vegetables:

Apples, grapes, bananas, blueberries, strawberries, tomatoes, spinach, leeks, carrots.

18. Favorite junk food:

Barbecue-flavored potato chips.

19. Favorite between meal snack:

Ideal:  Fruit smoothie with whey protein.

Between meal snack I actually eat most days:  bag of pretzels.

20. Do you have any weird food habits?

No.  What?  Why are you looking at me like that.  I don’t, okay?  That isn’t weird.  Lots of people do it.

21. You’re on a diet. What food(s) do you fill up on?

The harshest diet I ever went on was the beginning of my senior year of college; I was very overweight, but I was in a play opening in two months in which I was playing a homeless man.  I dropped 30-40 pounds (it didn’t last) by smoking two packs a day and eating pickles as my only snack between meals.

22. You’re off your diet. Now what would you like?

Barbecue-flavored potato chips, fried potato skins, and Giordano’s deep-dish pizza.  And beer.

23. How spicy do you order Indian/Thai?

Medium spicy.

24. Can I get you a drink?

Yes, please.  Dewar’s and soda, no twist.

25. Red or White Wine?

Red.

26. Favorite dessert?

A bowl of fresh berries, with just a sprinkle of brown sugar on top.

HAHAHAHAHAHA — No, I’m kidding.  Let’s see, in no particular order:

— freshly baked chocolate chip cookies;

— the chocolate mousse at Brasserie Jo;

— chocolate cake made from the egg-free, nut-free mix we use for Junior, with Mrs. Unfocused’s frosting; and

— the blueberry pie we get from the farm store at the beach.

27. The perfect nightcap?

The drunken apricot:  a piece of frozen apricot, a shot of Southern Comfort, in a glass of champagne.

Consider yourself tagged.

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