I'm back. For today anyway.

Ack.

Is that the right onomatopoeia for disgust?

I'm terrible at blogging. I've been thinking of lots of excuses, like ... who cares? Which led me to my next thought: Who cares? I mean really - do I have enough important things to say about anything that would lead people back here every day? Or week? Or month? I hardly think the evening news has enough relevant information, let alone me.

I started this one, today's blog, out of competitive spite. My wife has a blog (lukeandsarahhawley.blogger.com) and she's stinkin' funny. I asked her how her blog was going and she said she hadn't written in a while and then asked me how mine was going and so here I am, trying to explain away my absence. I'm sure I've missed the point. Or I can't remember it. I suppose I started to keep my writing sharp but I've been doing too much of it on my own time to remember to do it here.

I'm almost done with my first draft of my first novel. I would say I'm within 10,000 words, which, now that I'm looking at it, looks like a lot. But I write somewhere around 1,500 words a day, with none on my worst days and near 5,000 when I'm really cranking. Of course, a good portion of it gets scrapped, but it makes me feel human just to it. Advocation. Jay Garrison, who was my supervisory teacher during my student teaching, used to tell his classes, "Everyone needs an advocation to go with their vocation." I have a great vocation, working in a resource room with middle school kids that need extra help and make me laugh all day long. And I'm blessed with an advocation I love. Where was I? 10,000 words. So probably by the end of the week. And that will be crazy. To be done with something! Even if it's just the first draft ...

So, that's where I've been. Writing. Just not here. Also, you may never read my novel, because the first novel is something that never gets out really, unless you're one lucky son of gun, and if you did read it you might hate it, for all I know, you might not even make it through the first section (it's in three sections). But somewhere in the last four months I've realized that it doesn't matter. I write because I love to write. And, oh faithful followers, whoever you are, I wish the same for you: An advocation. And if it lines up with your vocation and you're one of the lucky few that do what you love and love what you do, then ... I'm not sure but there's probably some fancy French phrase that you can translate to say, Here, Here. Is it salut? Probably. All I know is that ete is summer and I only know that from crossword puzzles.

I know, I know ... It's been a while.

We've been trying to move into this house. Or we've been trying to buy this house so we can move in. Anyway, our original closing date was October 1st and it's now October 25th and we're still not in the house. All in good time, right? It should happen Tuesday or Wednesday ... or Thursday. I offer this as my excuse; I haven't really had my head on straight lately, so blogging has been far from my top priority.

Today my daughter Eden is six months old. One half of one year. Unbelievable. I feel inordinately blessed. This weekend a man I know, a husband, a father of four, died from throat cancer. It's a strange world where one person can feel so inordinately blessed and someone else so ... it's not cursed, but it's something beyond sadness, I think. I've been thinking about death a lot lately; it happens every fall for me with the changing of the seasons. But this fall I've been thinking a lot about life too. And I guess I just wanted to put it out in the universe (that is, after all, the point of blogging right?) that I know I'm inordinately blessed. I'd like to say we all are, just by inhaling and exhaling, but that sure does simplify things too much, doesn't it?

Sarah and Eden and I went to the Minneapolis Institute of Art on Saturday. We had never been; if you live in the Twin Cities, you should go, they have tons of great art and 90% of the museum is free. We, haplessly, went in order to see the other 10%. Sarah lived in Germany for four years as a kid and loves Europe. I love the English language, so the idea of us moving there someday is a difficult one for me, but I'm pretty sure she would do it in a heartbeat. Anyway, I figure any opportunity for her to get a chance to see a piece of Europe is one we should jump at. So the MIA has an exhibit right now full of work from The Louvre in Paris and I saw it in the paper and we thought we'd go check it out. So we got there and found out it was $16 per person to get in. Now, I would have paid it for Sarah. But not for me. I'm just not a visual person - I'd rather spend $16 on books or music. Not that I do really. Anyway, we told the girl at the front desk we were gonna walk around the museum for a while before we decided about going in. Meanwhile, Eden was happy as a clam, making faces and smiling at the girl, who was exclaiming that she was the cutest baby ever, and in a nice, high pitched voice, perfectly fit for more infant smiles, and she pipes up that she tries to let two people in for free everyday and today we could be those people because we had the cutest baby in the whole world. We agreed (I know, we're biased) and thanked her over and over and set out to find the Louvre exhibit. We got there, paid some money (we'd gotten in free after all) for a guided tour mechanism with headphones attached to what looked like a fancy walkman and waited for the doors to open for our entrance. First let me point out: if you have a cute baby, use them to your advantage. I don't mean that you should sell them or something crazy like that, but cute babies can get you awesome stuff like museum entrance fees completely waived. Sarah has yet to decide whether being pregnant or having a cute baby gets you more good stuff, but, being that I was not the pregnant one, I'm going with the latter of the two. Second let me say: Until this point, Eden had been great all day. Happy and smiling and strangers and ... completely quiet. So the doors open up and we walk into the four (maybe five) room exhibit, where everyone is walking quietly, most of them listening to their schnazzy walkman things, enjoying the art, which is themed around the definition of a masterpiece. (Apparently there used to be measurements for this and now - well, now the Earth is flat and there is no absolute truth, so all beauty is only in the eye of the beholder. Actually, I'm not sure about any of those things. Or maybe I'm sure about some of it, but I was being facetious. Or maybe we can never be sure because the absolute truth thing was the true thing. But wait...) ANYWAY, from the moment we set foot inside the exhibit room, Eden decides she will test her voice on the high ceilings and wooden floors. We're trying all kinds of things, from a bottle to giving her a blanket to chew on to the always-tried-never-worked hand over the mouth thing, but she's not having any of it. She's not sad or angry or crying or anything, she just wants to holler. And she apparently got my volume. I finally know what it's like to be one of those parents in church when your kid won't stop - except I'm in a room with people who paid $16 dollars to look at art that the world considers masterful (I think you could read that as a sly knock on church, but I didn't really mean it.) Finally, in a moment of self-sacrifice and because I know I'll never enjoy all of it as much as her, I offer to take Eden out into the rest of the museum, or maybe outside, or maybe out of Minneapolis altogether (because she is LOUD.) So we leave and Eden continues to talk at a ridiculous volume as we walk from room to room trying to find someplace where we won't bother people but when your building is founded on the idea of open space and under the direction of some guy who loves high ceilings and you have an almost sixth month old that is hollering nonsense - anyway, you can't find a place where you won't bother people. But as I'm walking and Eden is shouting, all these kind people are smiling and some of them are stopping to tell me how cute she is or to translate her yelling into comments about the art or to let me know that baby's hate when people wear black (that was an elderly woman who apparently thought Eden was yelling at her). And one kind woman stops me and says, "Well, you have your own little masterpiece there."

(I'm getting to the point, I swear I am. If you've stopped reading because you think this is just one of those "wow, my kid is cute" stories, I don't blame you, but you're gonna miss when I bring it on home here.)

I guess what I would like to say is most things are a matter of perspective. How cute a baby is, how loud a baby is, world renowned masterpiece art, absolute truth, kindness, faith, happiness, blessedness, sadness. I've found myself so happy this weekend that I've found it hard to take moments to grieve for this man I know and for his family and for all his loved ones. And I feel excruciatingly selfish about it. And maybe I am being selfish. Can you take two perspectives at once? Can I feel pain for him and his family and joy for me and mine? I think so. I think I do. And if anything, I sure am a lot less angry about waiting 25 extra days to move into a house. Those are 25 DAYS. And we're lucky for that right? Or blessed. Or whatever. But I hope it's a positive word, I hope the idea of breathing in and out has a positive light attached to it. That's a matter of perspective too. I read this quote somewhere that said, "The path to happiness is happiness." Or maybe it was the road and not the path. Either way, it's a matter of perspective, I guess. Anyway, I carry that with me, which isn't to say I'm superb at remembering it, but I do think there is a lot of truth to it.

So this guy, the one who has passed on now (death is easy to write about when it's fiction; when it's reality even the word "died" is difficult), he had cancer for a while and was trying all these different things for it, experimental treatments and stuff, and I can't imagine how crappy he must have felt most of the time but I can imagine how much I would have whined if it had been me in that situation. Anyway, for a while, he was a facebook addict, always updating. And I was always struck by the happiness in his words. He would drop little hints that he was sick, but mostly it was about spending time with his family and seeing people he hadn't seen in a long time and being glad about being alive. He took a trip to the Boundary Waters a few weeks ago and his comment said something about a couple of days of rain, but some really beautiful weather and good fishing and if you've ever been to the Boundary Waters and it's rained or if you've ever been camping and it's rained or if you've ever been outside and it's rained or sometimes even inside, you know how hard it is to keep a positive perspective about it. But I read write over the rain and through to the parts about how much he enjoyed it. I hope there's some way I can keep that happiness inside me. He was a testament to how perspective or attitude or whatever you want to call it could lead to a full, fulfilling life.

So I've been thinking about death. And about life. And, in that, about legacy. These guys and gals, these people that created this art that landed in the Louvre because it attained masterpiece status, they worked hard, sometimes for their whole lives to create something new and unique and astounding. They pushed the boundaries of art and tradition and creation and function and form and all sort of things to make what they did, to cement for themselves a legacy that would live on long past their death. This guy I know - Scott - he did that too. And I'm not sure anyone will ever attach a walkman thing to a lanyard and wear it around their neck to hear about his masterpiece, but that doesn't cheapen it at all. I love the idea of creation taking on many forms. We tend to box it in to visual art, written word, music, acting - but I think people make masterpieces everyday. This suddenly feels super cheesy, but really I don't care. If you think it's cheesy, then I think you need to change your perspective. Sometimes I wonder if we can't divide everyone up into two categories: Creators and Critics. But I suppose that a matter of perspective too.

David Bazan, Agnosticism, and Naming Blogs After Yourself

I should have just named this blog after myself. One: It's easier to market that way. Two: I never would have mentioned routine.

I just listened to the new David Bazan record. It's super good. You should get it. And enjoy. And listen. He used to front (and basically be, I guess) Pedro the Lion, which began as a sweetly indie Christian band that actually got as much attention from secular press and audiences than Christian. (Side note: Pedro was the first of many 'indie Christian' bands that I was introduced to by my completely non-Christian buddy Rob) (Side Note #2: I don't believe in Christian art. I believe in art. And I believe in people. And people have all kinds of different ideas. And the minute we start sectioning off art based on people's believe systems we have a problem. I mean, if you'd like to live in an imaginary bubble, that's your prerogative and you don't have a problem with this set up. I just think you're wrong. I think God lives in good things and lots of people make good art. For me, it's like saying, I don't like suicide, so I'm not going to read Hemingway or listen to Elliot Smith. You will miss out on amazing and beautiful things.) ANYWAY, Bazan has recently come out on the agnostic side of the argument (if, in fact, there is an argument and agnosticism can be considered a side). I love him and always have and he probably bleeds through my music more than anyone else I listen to. I used to liken him to Jeremiah; I thought he was the prophet weeping in the wilderness. He wrote these sad, heartbreakingly sad songs about infidelity and murder and alcoholism and he sang terrifically stark melodies and I thought the songs were amazing. I still think they are. And I think the new songs are great too. They're brief - and if brevity IS the soul of wit, then I suppose they're witty. They are less stark and it could be argued that they're overproduced, but they're still brilliant. I actually think he and Hemingway would get along really well, what with their minimalism and drinking and sadness. Bazan has always been sad, for me anyway, but he has never made me sad. And this record does; somebody described it as his breakup record for God, which I suppose is as sad as it gets, if you are a believer. The thing is - and I'm not sure if this makes me an eternal optimist or not - I don't think it's a breakup record. Sure, he's angry and terse and sad and a little melodramatic - but I don't think he's done. I'm not saying that he'll be back, in fact, I'm fairly certain he will not be. But it doesn't FEEL like a breakup record. It feels angrier than that. Like God broke up with him and he's stomping mad about it. And I understand that I think; I mean that would be the deepest rejection ever, wouldn't it be? I may listen to the record a thousand more times and in the future have an entirely different idea about it. But that's what I have now. He's not snuffed God out like a candle - the record is devoted to God in it's entirety.

I'm not sure any of that made sense. This is the innate problem with blogs - to keep them fresh and real it's best not to edit them. My whole idea I guess was that I appreciate agnostics. I mean I like to think I appreciate everyone, but I used to think agnostics were more or less cowards. At least atheists have the gall (and the faith) to say that God does not exist. It always pissed me off a little that agnostics got to say, "You know, maybe He does or maybe he doesn't (capital/noncapital on purpose) and who am I to say anyway? Anybody want to just hang out and take it easy?" As if agnosticism was the easy way out. And I suppose it can be - in the same way that Atheism and Christianity and Hinduism and Islam and a whole host of other belief systems can be the easy way out. But good Agnostics (you get a capital A this time) are not slackers. They throw history and tradition and a lot of other things to the wind and say, "You know what? I can't say either way." Which is not cowardice. It's not necessarily even a lack of faith. It's a love of questions; it's straddling the fear of the unknown and the safety of the known (or believed). And I don't think it's easy. Listen to David Bazan and tell me if it sounds like he's having a nice, relaxed, good ol' time. I don't believe he is. He is shouting at God and himself and hearing no good answer back. And I love him for it. And tonight (and this may not be always) I think he's braver than me for doing it. And I'm inspired to ask harder questions. And live with fewer answers.

Songs vs. Novels

I started a novel a few years ago. Actually, I've been telling people for a few years that I started a novel a few years ago, so in all actuality I started a novel sometime when I was in college. Approximately 2002. If you've been reading this blog, then you know I have little experience with discipline and routine, so writing a novel was an interesting undertaking for me. It's not at all like writing songs. That is a process that somehow comes fairly naturally to me. I usually only spend about an hour on a song. The previous sentence is not entirely true. I usually spend about an hour actually writing the song, like putting the words on paper and setting it to music. I like songwriting because I can sit on an idea or a line or a chorus for a long time. And the same with the music. I can (what's the musical approximate for doodle?) play around on the guitar or piano or banjo or whatever for a long time and work up different riffs and chord progressions, without ever having to commit to a song. So in all reality, it takes me longer to write songs. I sat on this line - "He rode out of town on the most convincing horse around" - for like three or four years before I ever used it in a song (aptly titled "The Most Convincing Horse").

But herein lies the problem of novel writing. Even if songwriting involves keeping a few things in your head - a line, a chorus, a riff - those things should never add up to more than four minutes. Once you've hit four minutes, you should be able to put the song down. And in fact, if you have pieces of multiple songs in your head, you can mix and match - maybe riff A actually fits in song B better than in song A. Does this make songwriting sound easy? I might be exaggerating some - and I will agree that setting up the skeleton and fleshing out the body are two different processes - but the skeletal process is a pretty easy one. And if you're like me and long-range vision is not your forte than songwriting is the way to go. But writing a novel is entirely different. First off, for the most part you lose your interchangeable parts. You can change scenes around in within the novel or rearrange the timeline, but it would be strange to take a scene from one novel and place it in a different novel. Secondly, you have to keep the entire skeleton in your head - which runs a little longer than 4 minutes. Songs usually don't run more than 200 words, while novels (according to the perfect resource of Wikipedia) are classically any work over 40,000 words (although if you're working on one, it's apparently impossible to get your first one published if it's longer than 100,000 and you're best working under 80k. One hundred thousand words in typeset is 480 pages. Long.) And you're not working with music. This may seem like it would make a novel easier - and if you're tone deaf you can skip this part - but working within the confines of the rules of music should automatically give the writer rhythm - something that is vital to writing in any structure.

Am I boring you? I'm sure I'll bring this up again, so we can call this Part I or something. In the meantime, I will leave you with a dialogue between a writer and a neurosurgeon.

Surgeon: What do you do for a living?

Writer: I'm a writer.

Surgeon: What do you write?

Writer: Novels.

Surgeon: Oh! I've been thinking about writing a novel when I get some spare time!

Writer: That's so funny! I've been thinking about doing a little brain surgery in my spare time!

Obviously exaggerated. But I gotta give it to real writers. They work hard.

I must have dreamt that I blogged last night. Or is it dreamed? Because I thought I was going to have a three day streak going here ... But, alas, it is not to be.

The reason I don't do most things in life is fear of failure. I would bet that's a pretty common sentiment for most people. I had this buddy in middle/high school who was a phenomenal skateboarder (at least I thought he was, though I'm not an X-game connoisseur or anything). And I know what made him so good: No Fear. (Which, now that I'm thinking about it, his adept skate skills would have intersected perfectly with the No Fear brand hay day. Or is it hey day?) It's also why I was terrible at baseball. Baseball I love; it is one of the few things that I have always loved and I'm sure I always will and I would gander that it is tied somewhat up in the fact that it has always been a common area of interest between me and my dad. But I was TERRIBLE. Now, I could field and throw and run the bases and actually did all of those things at an above average clip. But batting. The last summer I played baseball (Babe Ruth league, 14 yr. olds, Fargo, ND) I went hitless the entire year. I played three innings a game because that was the league minimum and I can't blame my coach because whenever I played there was a gaping hole at the bottom of the lineup. I struck out mostly and I sometimes tell people I just couldn't hit a 70 mph fastball (were they really moving that fast?). But really it was about fear: I was terrified of being hit by a 70 mph fastball. Here's the thing: I have a pretty high pain tolerance when I know something is coming, at least I think I do. I have a couple tattoos that didn't really bother me, I'm diabetic and take 4 or so injections a day and have done so for almost 15 years, I never feared talking to pretty girls in high school because I knew rejection was inevitable. You get the point - pain has never been a big bother for me as long as I know it's coming. And with baseball the chances are really good that you're not going to get hit but ... there are guys that get paid millions of dollars to throw baseballs and they still accidently hit guys from time to time. It's the same reason I hate downhill skiing - I'm not in control of the pain that might attack me. If I end up at the bottom of a snowy hill and my legs are not pointing in the right direction - terrifying. And it may never happen. But there is a chance.

I'm way off subject. I failed at baseball mostly because I was scared to get hit by a pitch, so I would only swing in a real half-ass kind of way. I think I carried that over to the rest of my life - if I just do things half-ass and no one really expects me to hit and they still let me play the league minimum three innings than at least I still get to play a little, right? Setting people up for the mediocre is a gift of mine: underpromise, overdeliver.

It's not working anymore. And I didn't set it up correctly here at the blog - I told you I would write everyday and you are witnessing my colossal failure. But I feel alright about it now. I don't know if we just get to a certain point in our life where we realize that everyone is a failure on some level or what. It goes back to baseball (as most things do). Had I just pulled a Happy Gilmore and gone to the batting cages and stood over home plate and let the machine fired baseballs pelt my chest, I think I would have been a decent ballplayer. Maybe not great and certainly not a minor-league contract kind of guy, but I would have at least held my own at 14 and wouldn't have been a chasm in the lineup every game. I have a decent swing, I surprise myself in slow pitch softball where there is no fear of being hit by a pitch. But if I could have gotten it out of the way, all the pain of being hit, and just gotten used to it, I think I would have been a different scrawny, scrappy ballplayer. The same goes for me now. I'm pretty used to failure. I'm super accustomed to mediocrity. And frankly, I'm a little tired of it. I'm interested in taking some chances. Because I've had failure bounce of my chest plenty of times and I'm still living to talk about it. So where is the fear in try now?

Oh Routine! Wretched Routine!

Geez.

As my wonderful wife pointed out in the comment section of the last blog, it has been five days since I last blogged. So. Two days after the first blog, five days after the second blog ... at this rate, I think you'll wait approximately one year between blog Nine and Ten. Whoever "you" are ...

The great thing about blogging, I suppose is that you just get to put your thoughts out into the universe and if they come back or if they ever reach another human being then that's all well and good, but the important part is the putting your thoughts out there.

(This reminds me of a super creepy Ray Bradbury short story. It's in the Illustrated Man book of shorts, which is a book based on this guy who's tattoos all tell stories. It's excellent, as should be expected from Bradbury. Anyway, in this particular story this spaceship or something explodes and these astronauts are floating out into space, all in separate directions, and they know that they'll never be saved, but they'll float on forever, but they can still communicate through their headsets in their spacesuit helmets. A horrifying idea - I think maybe a hell that terrifies me more than fire and brimstone, the idea of communicating sheer isolation. I shiver just thinking about it.)

That was a super long side note.

Onto the big news for today: We bought a house. Or rather our offer has been accepted. It's a little two bedroom, two bathroom, two porch house in St. Paul, just east of downtown, across the street to the south from Interstate 94. (This makes the front porch an interesting bit of construction, since it is a bit noisy there.) It's super exciting. We've been looking for quite a while and we've had two other offers on other houses and for the third to be the charm is glorious for us. We'd love to have you over once we get all moved in come October. And I don't even know who "you" is ...

I've been booking shows and reading Chris Offut's The Good Brother (which is brilliant) and hanging out with Eden and Sarah and enjoying my last two weeks of unemployment. I'll try to be better about this whole routine thing, I really will. We'll get in a groove here and you'll be amazed at the hyper-interesting blog posts that I have for you.

Tomorrow. Tomorrow. I'll write you tomorrow...

Micro v Macro

So. I've hammered home my point about how terrible I am with routine by not blogging on day number TWO. That's right, I lasted one day. However, I'm back on the horse or the wagon (speaking of, we just bought a Subaru Forester which I LOVE) or whatever it is that you say.

Today's quick topic:

I hate Twitter.

Here's the thing. I'm a mildly interesting person. I don't promise to be as interesting as some people but I am probably more interesting than a handful too. Thus mildly interesting. But for Twitter to work, if you are going to update it six or seven times a day or whatever, you better be UNBELIEVABLY interesting. Thus Twitter works well for organizations like the Onion, which can always drop hilarious headlines, really as often as they want and I would always love to read them. In fact, if you do Tweet (which I highly discourage) you'll want to follow the Onion. But this is where the next problem comes in: Even if you are interesting or if you're following interesting people who are updating their Twitters a thousand times a day, the chances are that you are following a hundred people who are not interesting but still insist on updating their Twitters a thousand times a day and if you obsessively check your Twitter (is it so important that I must capitalize it?) six times an hour, your chances of reading one tweet that is hilarious or relevant or at all important is ... well, I'm not fantastic at math, but the chances are not good.

Maybe it would help if I had ADHD. Seriously. Maybe tweeting is for hyperactive brains. And that's fine. In fact, if people start prescribing twitter instead of Ritalin, I will be overjoyed. But for me - it just doesn't work.

They call it MicroBlogging. I guess I would have to fully understand the definition of blogging to be in any place to argue with that sentiment, but I just don't get it. If tweeting is MicroBlogging, I choose MacroBlogging. It seems like blogging should be a place to present ideas and talk about them and I don't know, expand on something. 140 characters does not allow that. It's shorter than a text message. Which is really what tweeting comes down to: Mass text messaging. And I hate mass emails. Seriously. Even when someone picks them specifically for me to read, like it's a forward that they get, but then they think of me and they decide to send it to me - as kind as that is, I rarely read them, because of my rule that mass emails equal dumb.

So mark it down here. First: Luke skipped days two and still by day three didn't really have anything important to say. Second: Twittering takes an EXTREMELY interesting person, for constant updates to be relevant, and I am neither interesting enough or disciplined enough. Three: Out of mostly sheer ignorance, I decide to hate what I do not understand, thus I am a Twitter hater.

If you'd like to follow me, I tweet as AMERICANNOVEL.

And I never update it.

Luke

The Naming of Things

This is mostly my wife's idea. Although, I've always thought it would be interesting to have a blog. I just didn't think I'd be interesting enough. But if a gazillion other people can be interesting enough for blogs, I don't know why I can't at least try my hand at it.

First and foremost. They make you name a blog before you even start it, which I hardly think is fair. I've written a couple of songs in my life and in the naming of things one of two things happens:

1. The song names itself. My good friend Jacob Champlin does this well. I play lead guitar (which means I play a different guitar than him really) in his band cathy Crescendo. Small c followed by big C. ANYWAY. He often writes songs and then just names them about their main theme. For instance, on his first record, Giant Killers (available with all the rest at cdbaby.com) he has the following songs: The Soldier Song, The Divorce Song, and The Swallow Song. These songs include references to: a soldier, a divorce, and a swallow, or rather, multiple swallows. Now, Jacob and I are good friends and happen to agree on lots of things, but this is one area where we completely disagree. I think it's a lot like poetry: The title of a song can completely enhance the content. I don't always go for this, but I like to use it as a rule of thumb. And of course it will be inevitable, as any musician will tell you, that when people are asking about songs they will not remember whatever well thought out title you have and they will ask for "that little bird song! Can you play that song about the little bird?" So though you have been planning to name that song something like How to Run a Marathon on Tiny Legs or The Art of Winging It Out and though you may really put it down as that on your beautiful record, the fact of the matter is NO ONE WILL CALL IT THAT.

2. I used to play in this sweet rock band called Sequel to Adam and we had a song that I thought was aptly titled As It Stands We're All Murderers. Sweet name, right? Completely. I had written the lyrics and thought long and hard about how to properly name it (this is the second way of naming: thinking long and hard about how to properly name it) and I came up with something that enhanced the original song and sounded bad ass. Except that before it ever got printed onto a record it was titled Come Clean because we needed something to call it in the meantime. So everyone called it Come Clean even though it was not titled that (though we may have announced it as that from the stage).

Point: I've been forced to title this blog before 1) I know what it's about enough to give it a title like The Writing Blog or The Blog as Discipline Blog or 2) it's been around long enough for me to really think long and hard about how to properly name it. And regardless, you'll (if there is a you'll reading this) probably decide what to call it on your own - say, The Luke Hawley Blog or The Stupid Blog.

I suppose I should take a quick moment to explain where I was coming from on this pre-approved title. I just started a graduate program to get a Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing. It requires me to do a lot of reading (22 novels before Thanksgiving - 6 down, 16 to go!) and a lot of writing (30-45 pages of prose every month). And I have due dates. My normal tendency is to read and write whenever it feels right. For those of you who are strangers to me and are simply stumbling on this blog accidently looking for information on Reading, Writing, and 'Rithmetic, I would call myself first and foremost a songwriter. And the great thing about writing songs is that you're writing something that is going to be approximately three and a half minutes long. I can do that whenever I want, whenever it suits me. Writing for school and, more specifically, writing a novel require far more discipline. So the routine is new to me. I sometimes tell people that I never really committed to anything in my life before I married Sarah three years ago (although my mom says I committed to college, I think that might be a stretch) and it took so much time getting used to that I didn't commit again until we had a baby in April (Eden. I'm sure you will hear more about her.) But I'm 27, I've never had more than an entry level job, always taken the slacker way out, so as to stay cool and relaxed and not care about anything. And I'm kind of tired of that gig, you know? I'm interested in caring a lot about things and treating the things I care about with respect. SO - all this to say - I'm probably going to ramble a lot about Reading, Writing, and Routine. Among other tangential topics.

If you liked the way this blog read, please keep coming back. If you didn't, know that it was my first attempt, but they'll probably all ramble on like this. But I hope you come back to - I have a habit of growing on people. And who knows, maybe I win the lottery and give people $20 for every blog comment they've written. Or maybe not.