I’m now up to 23,159 words, with one day left ’til the halfway point in my 50,000-words-in-30-days exercise. I like what I’m doing enough to post excerpts on this site, and will when I get the time and/or inclination to polish up the prose enough to make it presentable.

Boeing’s steady decline as a world-class manufacturing enterprise (let alone as a Wash. state employer) continues with the announcement that the new 7E7 jet’s wing assemblies will be subcontracted to Japanese companies.

Michael Chrichton’s otherwise pathetic mid-’90s thriller novel Airframe, set at a fictionalized Lockheed, has a big subplot predicting this, and denouncing the export of the US aerospace biz’s most important proprietary technology.

I’d denounce it too, if I thought denouncing it’d accomplish anything. Today’s Boeing, though, seems to care about nothing but its own short-term stock price.

My novel’s up to 19,515 words. I’m now only one day behind the pace I need to finish 50,000 in 30 days.

Made significant progress today, getting up to 15,460 words. By tomorrow, I’d need a total of 20,000 to meet the average pace required to get to 50,000 by the 30th. Hey, I might make the short-term goal, and I stand an excellent chance of making the final goal. As of this posting I’m #34 among 134 Seattle National Novel Writing Month participants in to-date verbiage production.

Some people are apparently irate about a Pioneer Square restaurant offering something called “Naked Sushi,” an evening in which little sushi tidbits are served from the Saran-wrapped torso of a reposing woman (wearing just enough, besides the Saran, to appease the Liquor Board).

This is essentially a commercialization of an old Yoko Ono performance-art piece; or, if you will, a fusion-cuisine adaptation of an old entertainment shtick done in Hellfire Club-era London drinking parlors (as fantasized about in Geoff Nicholson’s novel The Food Chain.)

It’s not a statement of hatred against women or against sushi. If the restaurant in question presents it in the proper way, it could be a statement of sensuality, of adoration, and of honor for the circle of life.

Or, if the restaurant in quesiton presents it in the improper way, it could just be a silly little lark.

…the sold-out Rendezvous Reading Series last night, at which I showed off my travelogue pix from my August jury-duty assignment in Kent. One reading-goer even suggested it should become a book. I’ll consider it.

Now, I’m back to my National Novel Writing Month self-imposed chores. It’s going slower, at 13,117 words. But I did go back to the outlining of scenes, which is much further along. So the prose-ification of these scenes should go much more smoothly from here on.

Have written 8850 words. (I don’t warranty them to be good words.) About 80 percent of my projected remaining scenes are now in breakdown/outline form.

The self-imposed deadline exercise has shown me just how much unproductive routine has accumulated in my current life of long-term underemployment. To make more writing time, I’ve cut my TV viewing to three shows (Black and White Overnight, Coronation Street, and Zed). I’ve cut my news reading to one paper a day. I’ve cut my email reading down to messages real individuals have written specifically to me. Next to be cut: The fourteen web sites I try to look at at least every other day.

My novel writing is almost up to the speed required to finish 50,000 words in 30 days. Ten percent of the alloted time into the task, I’m at 4,500 words (90 percent of the pace I need).

Will I post it here? Yeah, but not just yet.

…is off to a slow start. As of now (7:12 p.m. Sunday), I’ve completed exactly half of the word quota I need in order to make 50,000 words in 30 days.

I’m trying to write my novel the way they write soap operas: Start with a broad overview of the storyline, then elaborate that into a scene-by-scene breakdown, then fill in the actual dialogue and descriptions. I roughly have breakdowns for the first week’s worth of chapters, and am trudging through turning the second chapter into pristine prose.

If I’d been truly on the proverbial bean, I’d have had all the chapter breakdowns, and a couple thousand words o’ text, done by now. With luck and gumption, I may be able to catch up.

In addition to promising y’all a brand spankin’ new print MISC by the end o’ the year, I’ve also just signed up for National Novel Writing Month. That’s a North America-wide group of hundreds of humans who all vow to complete a first-draft novel (minimum 50,000 words) from Nov. 1 to Nov. 30. Why they had to pick one of the short months is beyond me; but at least they give you more time than the Vancouver-based three-day novel writers get.) I’ll post my progress regularly here, and perhaps even (I’m not guaranteeing anything) show some excerpts.

The tale I’m gonna weave is The Myrtle of Venus, an expansion of an unfinished screenplay project I attempted three or four years ago. It involves the destruction of artist-studio space, the tiresomeness of “edgy” corporate youth culture, the tech-industry bubble, Greek mythology, American history, social satire, hot sex, dorky old TV cartoons, and the world’s blandest woman. (The final version of it, as you might surmise, might be a lot longer than the draft I’m about to start writing.)

‘TWAS A GRAND NITE at the Crocodile on Thursday, when my ol’ pal and fellow scene-documentator Charles Peterson debuted his latest and ultimate book collection of rock n’ roll imagery, Touch Me I’m Sick.

It’s truly a splendid hardcover coffee-table tome, and a vast improvement over the editing and production job done on his now-out-of-print 1995 collection Screaming Life. You should all rush out and get a copy promptly, so you can drool and marvel at all the up-close moments of pure rockin’ Hi-NRG, in glorious monochrome.

The book release party was a spectacular gala, a flashy party, and a reunion of the pre-Nevermind Seattle music community (at least of those members of that community who are still alive but aren’t homebound with kids). Among them: Sub Pop founder Bruce Pavitt, who played DJ and spun some truly rare vinyl by Devo, Mudhoney, and others of the era.

Of course, yr. web editor couldn’t resist an opportunity to photograph the evening’s live bands, Girl Trouble (above) and the Briefs, in imitation of Peterson’s inimitable style.

TURNS OUT I MIGHT’VE been a trife optimistic about attendance figures at this year’s Northwest Bookfest. Unofficial reports have it at 9,000 over the two days, down at least half from last year’s event (when admission fees were only voluntary). There were also fewer exhibitors (the rare/antiquarian book people didn’t care for the old airplane hangar’s leak-prone roof).

Still, the event should be considered a success, given the dire fiscal straits the Bookfest organization’s gone through in the past two years or so.

Now, it’s time to start planning for Ought-Four. And this time the Bookfest gals-n’-guys really oughta start listening to the suggestions I’ve given just about every year:

Give it the ol’ razzle-dazzle. More authors, more games, more fun. Imagine the possibilities:

• Literary-character costume contests (kid and adult divisions).
• An adults-only corner where readers recite the “good parts” from favorite novels.
• A two-day, on-site novel writing contest.
• A literary-trivia-based treasure hunt across the Magnuson Park grounds.
• A local-celebrity poetry slam.

Why, the possibilities are endless…

ANOTHER OCTOBER, another Northwest Bookfest. (Or, as I like to call it, the World of Words Lit-O-Rama.)

With corporate donations drying up, organizers laid off most of their paid staff this year and enforced a cover price for the first time. But it seemed to go off more or less smoothly and with almost as many attendees to the ex-naval air station at Sand Point.

Of course, it helps if you have an extra added attraction to bring the punters in, such as a live pony…

…or a stuffed bird…

…or a guy in a lion suit acting toward the ladies like, well, like a predator.

It also helps if you’ve got many of the Northwest’s brightest literary lights. Sure Jonathan Raban, Sherman Alexie, and Fred Moody all had neato things to say, but the crowd gave the true superstar treatment to Book Lust author and “Librarian Action Figure” model Nancy Pearl. (Who deserves every bit of her adoration.)

The books, of course, are the real stars of Bookfest. There were thousands of ’em, from the sublime to the ridiculous and back again.

And there were readers, too. Besides the big names mentioned above, print MISC contributors Stacey Levine and Matt Briggs appeared on a panel organized by Clear-Cut Press. (They’re separated here by Corrina Wyckoff.)

Bookfest has essentially replaced one role of Bumbershoot, the role of Seattle’s big start-of-bad-weather public fete. We gather together one more time to proclaim our readiness to shut ourselves in for the winter with printed entertainment for company.

And we get to feed the seagulls while we’re at it.

The NYU professor and longtime showbiz-basher passed away last Sunday, but (perhaps appropriately, given his contempt for all things media-esque) the papers didn’t mention it until Thursday.

The following is not intended as a “flame” message, but I always felt frustrated at Neil Postman’s writings. He said he wanted people to avoid deceptively simple ideas, but his books were full of those.

In the past, I’d publicly belittled Postman as a grumpy ol’ baby-boomer elistist of a character type I used to know in college, whose examples were always stringy-bearded, always disdainful of anything in culture or entertainment that didn’t remind them of The Late Sixties, and always contemptuous of anyone who dared commit the mortal sin of being younger than them.

This past February, some of you might recall, I was asked to join a panel discussion at the Tacoma Public Library entitled, “Are We Amusing Ourselves To Death?” (from the title of Postman’s best-known book). I found myself essentially arguing against the premise, vs. a stringy-bearded baby-boomer film critic who essentially argued that anyone whose lifestyle or demographics were different from his was automatically a dumb mainstream dupe.

I argued, and would still argue, that popular culture is not intrinsically evil (and neither are heterosexuality, meat, or non-co-op grocery stores). I would also argue that the world situation is not nearly as one-dimensionally simplistic as Postman claimed it to be (even while he denounced the masses’ excess simplicity). The books of his that I’d read were full of a priori arguments, gross overgeneralizations, ageisms, sexisms, and us-vs.-them dichotomies (although, like all my stringy-bearded professors, Postman often said “us” when he really meant to say “them”; when he wrote “we,” you could tell he meant “all those ignorami out there in dorky mainstream America who don’t know what we know and wouldn’t understand it if they heard it”).

Some of you reading this might imagine that I must be a right-winger who disliked Postman as a left-winger. NO, NO, NO. I believe Postman wasn’t too radical, he was too conservative. He was too comfortable in his hermetically-sealed ideology. As far as I’ve been able to determine, he never acknowledged that life, politics, et al. are complex, and that our schoolchildren need to learn to deal with these complexities; that there are more than two sides to most issues, and that there are a lot more than just two kinds of people in this country.

If I can now say something positive on Postman’s behalf, it’s that, at times, he did proclaim the need for critical thinking, even if he insufficiently practiced his own prescription.

…put online by the best US news source (Britain’s Guardian), tells distraught Americans: “Face it, you’ll never be rich.”