142,712 November 8, 2005 – Posted in: Aberrant Normalcy

I now have to edit this?This is the word count of the first draft of my novel, completed yesterday at around 1pm. I’m taking after Lauren McLaughlin here, who posted her word count to her blog after completing her novel. Finishing it was a bit anticlimactic at first. After all, I knew what the ending was going to be. I knew that I would finish the novel before I wrote the last section. It wasn’t until later in the day, when riding a bus back from Jersey City that it hit me. I’ve finished it.

Okay, so it’s not really done. But a first draft is a huge first step, like Neil Armstrong’s bold (but grammatically incorrect) phrase. But he and the other astronauts had just arrived on the Moon. There was a lot more exploring to do once they got there. And just the same, I have a lot more editing to do. But, with minor exceptions, I’m very happy with the way the first draft turned out. And even though I knew the ending beforehand, I still surprised myself by the outcome.

Here’s some heartening news:

The Pope?The Vatican quietly released a statement defending Charles Darwin and his work. In other words, they believe that God and Evolution can co-exist. As anyone with half a brain will realize, the creation story at the beginning of Genesis is a metaphor. Cardinal Paul Poupard said, “The fundamentalists want to give a scientific meaning to words that had no scientific aim,” and he said the real message in Genesis was, “the universe didn’t make itself and had a creator”. I suppose they learned their lesson the hard way with Galileo. Even Pope John Paul II (cautiously) defended evolution. Defenders of Evolution everywhere take note! You should proclaim this news high and wide: the Church and Evolution are not mutually exclusive.

(And, as an aside, all this talk about Creationism and Evolution may not be so bad after all. People all over the world are talking and asking questions about God and science and landing somewhere on decent middle ground.)

Here’s a “web 2.0” app (boy do I hate that term) that seems pretty cool called YubNub. Mostly for geeks but potentially used by all, it attempts to bring all applications like google, wikipedia, news, stocks, Flickr, etc., under one search engine. I’m fairly certain that’s where things are going: kind of like the reverse of the Tower of Babel. Now we have a thousand applications and a thousand different interfaces. Eventually, tools like YubNub will become our front ends, able to speak those thousand tongues and present them simply to us.

This reminds me of, dare I say it, Blade Runner, where old technology was retro-fitted with the new. Instead of building from scratch, we conglomerate the tools we already have with newer tech.

Finally, why is every national debacle in this country suffixed with “gate” ? Okay, I know all about the Watergate Hotel. But then we have Whitewatergate and Monicagate, and now, Plamegate. There h a v e b e e n o t h e r s. Are we that devoid of imagination? I’ve got a really (bad) (and probably not original) one: the PlameGame.

Duh. I’ve duhhed myself, so you don’t have to do it for me.