The weekend

It was slightly disheartening to see the White Sox drop the final two games of the Orioles series. You mean we don't get to win every series? The streak of 37 games in a row with a lead ended on Sunday. The 'experts' haven't said much more than the pitching's been incredible and the offense has been mediocre. The experts are right. Frank Thomas needs to come back strong. The team could use a guy who knows how to draw a walk.

In exciting local Atlanta news our flag-football game was rained out for the second time in three weeks. I think our fearless ringleader gave up too early this week. Two weeks ago we had thunder and lightening. This week it was just some pesky water falling out of the sky.

I went to a workshop sponsored by the Georgia Writer's Association this weekend. It's weird to sit in a room full of people (OK, there were eight total) and describe my projects. I'm spending a lot of my free time working on a novel I wrote when I was in college. It's a project eleven years in the making. Susan Larson, who ran the workshop, earned a columnist's job at a local paper at age 50 (I'm estimating) with almost no experience, so it appears that anyone can break through if they have talent.

Writing is easy. It's reading your own stuff that's hard. It's hard to read something you've written that might as well be in a foreign language, and it's doubly hard to delete something deemed 'good' that doesn't fit in context with the whole. I spent most of my weekend working on adding a new character to my book. 24 hours later I think that was a mistake and it's all going in the delete bin. There's a reason why they call it suffering for your art.