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Today is November 1, time for National Novel Writing Month (www.nanowrimo.org). I, along with about a million other writers, will be hunched over laptops, strung out on various coffee drinks working to make 50,000 words in one month a reality. Last year was my frist year to do it and it was so rewarding to see that I could actually write a novel -- albeit a very bad novel -- in only one month.

But all novels begin badly, that is, they begin as first drafts and as Ann Lemott says in "Bird by Bird", very bad first drafts (and I'm quoting her loosely here).
The tough part about writing is not the writing. It's the rewriting. That's where you have to go deep, sacrfice precious ideas and concepts and find out that the novel really writes itself through your pen (or computer)and this thing you think is "yours" is really something else entirely. Scary stuff.

I plan to rewrite the very bad novel I wrote last year. Nanowrimo helps make writing a little more like a group effort because you know others are working on it too.

Here are snippets of what else is going on...

1 - Spent a day with my alma mater, advisory board meeting which was a thinly veiled disguise to spend time with Nathan, who, after eating the biggest sirloin steak in Payne County decided that college life is OK, after all. We went to Wal-Mart where we actually witnessed (and I'm not making this up) two OSU football players in the health and beauty aisle selecting body care. The irony of this scene is just too much and of course, I could not keep my mouth shut. These guys are big enough to make up at least two of me and I'm razzing them about their hygiene? I must be stupid. They were so very nice, so great to meet and so very tall and big. They looked like those inflatable floats in the Macy's parade coming down the shampoo aisle. When I shook their hands I had to reach up and I'm almost six feet tall.

After Wal- Mart, where I actually found a Jim Gaffigan CD (the absolute funniest comic working today) and a Natasha Bendingfield CD. Is it too trendy to say I have listened to that great song, "Unwritten" about a squillion times? Great lyrics, great energy, just a great talent. She tops my current playlist. Well, to be honest she IS my playlist. I just like to use the word "playlist" because my kids do and I like to think that I'm as cool as they are.

Best part about the day - just getting to hang out with Nathan and see how great he's doing. Sometimes you stand back and see your kids and think, "what God smiled on me to give me such a great kid?" and then I think, "and how haven't I messed it up yet?"

2 - Volunteer work - I will blog on this more later. Last year I made two big decisions: to get involved in meaningful volunteer work and to write. Both decisions have altered my life in big ways.

I saw the news yesterday about a mother in a local town whose trial is ongoing. Seems this mother thought her four year old should stand with 5 pound weights above his head for oh, about an hour. She failed to feed him and when DHS picked him up he was dehydrated, malnourished as well as covered in bruises (over 50 on his small, hungry body).

I cannot fathom what has gone so wrong that we are abusing our children in such deeply damaging ways. So each week I teach a class to parents at a local agency where every brain cell in my head gets a work out in trying to communicate to others the importance of doing the job of parenting better. I say this with every ounce of compassion I can muster -- parenting is the hardest job in the world and doing it well is something none of us are really any good at. We are all, it seems, selfish pricks who want to either make small little idols to ourselves to run around on sports fields where we can tell our friends "there goes my kid...and therefore ME." OR we are so horribly abusive that we do shameful things to our children as in the case above.

There just has to be more that a civilized society can do to teach teach people how to love their children in ways that don't perpetuate the cycle of abuse that continues to be the #1 way children in America die -- at the hands of their own caretakers.

It is difficult to imagine that we have more pet adoption centers than we do shelters for children.

I don't know what that answer is. I do know what it is like to be so exhausted as a parent as to know it is better to walk out of the room than to pick my own child up. I do know what it is like to look into the eyes of a teenager and think, "who are YOU and what have you done with that cute little middle school kid that use to inhabit your body?" I do know that being a parent is 100 times harder than any job I've ever tried to do, any test I've ever had to take, any project I've ever tried to finish.

I'm grateful for the work of the Tulsa Parent Child Center (www.parentchildcenter.org). whose sole purpose is to stop child abuse. We have a long way to go.