Entry 1: Call Me Lucky

My entire adult life has been defined by a single failure. I lead a happy enough life in most ways. I have a career, almost despite myself. I'm married with three children. The youngest one starts college next year and she even knows where and what she wants to do there (at least for now). Deep into middle age, I still play basketball. In the big picture, my failure is not all that tragic, yet at age 51 I know that I need to take this one failure off the ledger of my existence.

When I was twenty two and the middle of my first year of law school, I decided to write a novel. My father's side of the family was made to be written about. My Grandfather had been one of those individuals who had big dreams in his life and tragically enough had managed to achieve too many of them. My father had the misfortune of being both his oldest son and being nothing like his father, though in a good way. The rest of his family spent much of its emotional energy arguing over some combination of attention and money. It's happened to a few Chinese families in California.

Being an idiot, I announced my intentions before I had even completed ten handwritten pages. It wasn't horrible. The first line was something like "My Grandfather's house is made from whispers."

I could put words together, but articulating feelings was another matter. I was just clever enough to fool myself about my possibilities as a writer.

That summer, both my father and my grandfather died. That may have sealed my fate. I felt that I now had to complete what I had told my family and some others that I had meant to do. I simply didn't understand that I wasn't emotionally up to the task of chronicling a family and a world that I literally didn't understand. Clue one, my Grandparents mostly spoke Cantonese. I spent my entire childhood avoiding learning to speak their language. Looking back at that original first line, I think "Whoa? I knew the problem even then."

So what happened? I've spent thirty years writing off and on. In that time, I've completed many projects, but....That's right, I've never finished that "First Novel."
In fact and this is deeply embarrassing, I've never managed to complete a draft of the thing start to finish. Is it any wonder that this makes me feel like a loser?

In those three decades, I've discovered that I'm a deeply stubborn person. When it comes to this one project, I've been both unable to move on and I've refused to give up. It's not that I haven't tried hard. I have hundreds of pages. I'm very proud of much of it. The sad truth though is that they don't exactly cohere into a single narrative. Some of the parts may be self-contained short stories (not unusual). It's been more that I've wanted to get it just right, which is, of course, the path to lunacy.

Through my forties, I was largely silent as a writer. Looking back, I realize that much of that was due to raising a family and the need to have a career that pays my bills and theirs. After several odd turns, I wound up being a lawyer. A couple years ago, I started a blog. Chancelucky.blogspot.com For whatever reason, having the outlet set me free to write again and I became fanatical about the blog. In two years and four months, I wrote 500 posts, many of which were very long.

These included:
1) political articles
2) book and movie reviews
3) a series of reviews of reality tv that got extremely popular
4) fiction
5) daily musings
6) reviews of electronic gadgets

I had something like 138,000 unique visitors. It was the biggest audience I'd ever reached. Yesterday, quite by accident, I deleted my blog. No, I didn't have backups for everything. I probably lost hundreds of posts and thousands of hours of writing.
Still, the bottom line was that I wasn't finishing "the book." Maybe I did it for a reason? Anyway, I'm still hoping that blogger/google ressurects the thing for me.

Believe it or not, I have a talent for being able to write surprisingly coherently in a very short span of time. How's that for irony? My blog persuaded me that I could write, write a lot, and keep a reader's attention.

So, this is the deal. I'm starting this new blog and focusing it on a single challenge. Can I complete that stupid novel by September 23, 2008? This blog is the record of my progress.