The House of Funk

Two topics tonight, on completely opposite ends of the spectrum. At some point my life will be more cohesive and I’ll be able to write complete thoughts in the blog. Hell, I’d be happy if I could get through a post without using a parenthesis. I am the only person who has asides in his inner monologue.

Apparently there is a mayoral election coming up. I say apparently because I’m basing this on a number of lawn signs that I see while I drive to work. I know I should be better informed but the local news tends to vacillate between missing child stories and Death Storm 2007 coverage. And the Kansas City Star makes the South Bend Tribune look like the friggin New York Times (and has a really crappy comics section.) So my knowledge of local politics is based solely on yard signs.

With that, I would like to publicly announce my support for Mark Funkhouser based on his name alone. Because I feel strong in saying that we need to bring the funk back to KC. In fact, I think the signs should read “Four years of Funk” and “One nation under Funk.” I envision Bootsy Collins as the Chief of Staff, the Mothership replacing City Hall, and the state of the city address replaced with a three hour jam session. We need the Funk. Gotta have that Funk.

My other note is a bit of a self serving one but it’s one I’ve been wanting to discuss. I have received a lot of great feedback from people over the past few weeks on my writing and really encouraging me to go forward with a big project. (I appreciate all the notes, it really makes this all worthwhile.) Also, I’ve been reading a book about the National Novel Writing Month, which is where a group of people promise to write a novel in 30 days. So I am getting psyched to do something mammoth but I have two problems.

The first is that due to things like word counts I don’t think that I could write a novel in thirty days and keep the blog going without having to go without something important, like play trivia or showering. But I’m pretty sure that a forty-five day deadline would be feasible, though still an insane challenge. The second one is that while a novel is in the cards I have also thought about writing a collection of primarily non-fiction essays (still about 50K words) or putting together a TV pilot and maybe another episode or two (though I’ve never even attempted to write something in that style.)

So here is my thinking. I’m going to start this on March 1 with the deadline being April 15. It’s a pretty memorable date and it’s also the deadline for the Bulwer-Lytton short fiction contest, which marked my first entry into print. What I’d like to hear from whoever reads this is what do you think I should attempt first? My novel (which has a plot and characters and is my dream to write but scares me to death), a collection of essays (a little easier to write and probably a lot easier to read) or a television pilot? Send your ideas my way and I’ll take them under consideration. I hope to have a decision by the start of February, spend that month taking care of all of the ground work and then locking myself away for six weeks and pounding out the story. It’s a challenge to myself, really, and those are the kind that I like most.