BACK TO THE RACE

Especially after the decimation of the TV season by the Writers Strike last year, it's nice to see shows coming back... I'm happy to see Heroes after so long (a little dark this season!), the new season of Dancing with the Stars looks pleasant. There are one or two new shows that look worth checking out...

But I'm so glad that The Amazing Race is back!

I realized how much I love this show when I found myself turning off the heat under my shrimp-and-Spanish-rice concoction last night (who cares if we eat late?!) to plant myself in hearing distance of Amazing Race last night. I didn't want to miss meeting the pairs of contestants (not a gay couple in sight, for a change), didn't want to miss the race to the airport.


I was especially pleased that they started off in Brazil this time, as a good chuck of the script we're writing for DreamWorks is set in Brazil (watching the less-than-genius frat boys climbing those stairs on their knees even gave me an idea for a couple of shots).

Most reality shows boil down to one primary element. Survivor is about political and physical survival. Dancing with the Stars, American Idol, Project Runway, So You Think You Can Dance are about mastering a set of skills across a limited variety of genres. And all of these are heavily dependent on personality.

Not so with The Amazing Race. No one's voting on the winners -- they have to get there themselves, and having a winning personality has a marginal effect. Yes, the physical aspects are important (last night's hippie beekeepers who were eliminated didn't seem to run a single step in the whole show). But if you're physically strong yet stupid, you're in trouble. Specific skills (say, reading a map) are important. Specific knowledge (say, of a given city or language or culture) is important. Improvisation is important, keeping an even keel is important, flexibility is important, perseverance is important.

I just love this show. It's deserved every Emmy it's won (six now, a total sweep since the Emmys began giving awards for reality show). I know exactly where I (or my Tivo) will be every Sunday night for the next few months.

So herewith is the first of this year's unofficial Lessons from The Amazing Race, courtesy of the beekeepers whose names I don't even remember: Sometimes you have to run to get where you're going.

It looks to be a great season. If you've never watched it, here's your chance to join the Race. On your mark, get set, go!

101 DOWN... 900 TO GO?

I can tell that Cory is truly my son because, like me, he is a sucker for lists. I think he spends entire evenings typing "top ten" or "top 100" into Google and seeing where it takes him. As for me, I am always happy to be able to codify anything -- anything -- into list form.

So this list of 1001 great novels was almost irresistible when it was forwarded to me (not too many top thousand lists out there!).


I'm not going to reproduce the whole thing, but it was fun going through and making (ahem) a list of the books I have read... and a few I tried but couldn't finish. (The list, by the way, is in reverse chronological order, which is interesting.)

Not surprisingly, I'm much better read a century or so back than I am a decade or so back... And I was quite surprised, by the way, not to find Pulitzer prize-winning The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon on the list. And surprised to see, for instance, so many Douglas Adams books listed... But pleased to see so many sci-fi classics listed, not to mention the appearance of Agatha Christie and Edgar Rice Burroughs on the list.

How 'bout you? How many of the great novels have you read? (And what books do you think are missing?)

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time - Mark Haddon
Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency - Douglas Adams
The Bonfire of the Vanities - Tom Wolfe
Watchmen - Alan Moore and David Gibbons
Less Than Zero - Bret Easton Ellis
The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
The Color Purple - Alice Walker
The Name of the Rose - Umberto Eco
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
The World According to Garp - John Irving
.....Ragtime - E.L. Doctorow -- (tried to read it, couldn't finish it)
Fear of Flying - Erica Jong
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings - Maya Angelou
The Godfather - Mario Puzo
2001: A Space Odyssey - Arthur C. Clarke
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? - Philip K. Dick
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test - Tom Wolfe
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich - Alexander Solzhenitsyn
Stranger in a Strange Land - Robert Heinlein
Franny and Zooey - J.D. Salinger
Catch-22 - Joseph Heller
To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
Mrs. 'Arris Goes to Paris - Paul Gallico
The Once and Future King - T.H. White
The Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien
Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
Lord of the Flies - William Golding
Lucky Jim - Kingsley Amis
The Old Man and the Sea - Ernest Hemingway
Foundation - Isaac Asimov
The Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger
I, Robot - Isaac Asimov
Nighteen Eighty-Four - George Orwell
The Plague - Albert Camus
Animal Farm - George Orwell
The Little Prince - Antoine de Saint-Exupery
The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
The Hobbit - J.R.R. Tolkien
Gone with the Wind - Margaret Mitchell
Murder Must Advertise - Dorothy Sayers
Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
The Sun Also Rises - Ernest Hemingway
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd - Agatha Christie
The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man - James Joyce
Tarzan of the Apes - Edgar Rice Burroughs
Ethan Frome - Edith Wharton
The Jungle - Upton Sinclair
Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
The Hound of the Baskervilles - Arthur Conan Doyle
.....Kim - Rudyard Kipling (tried to read it, couldn't finish it)
The Invisible Man - H.G. Wells
Dracula - Bram Stoker
The Time Machine - H.G. Wells
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain
Treasure Island - Robert Louis Stevenson
The Portrait of a Lady - Henry James
.....Ben-Hur - Lew Wallace (tried to read it, couldn't finish it)
The Brothers Karamazov - Fyodor Doestoevsky
Around the World in Eighty Days - Jules Verne
Middlemarch - George Eliot
Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There - Lewis Carroll
.....War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy (tried to read it, couldn't finish it)
Little Women - Louisa May Alcott
Journey to the Centre of the Earth - Jules Verne
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
The Water-Babies - Charles Kingsley
Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
A Tale of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
Walden - Henry David Thoreau
Uncle Tom's Cabin - Harriet Beecher Stowe
Moby-Dick - Herman Melville
The Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne
David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
The Pit and the Pendulum - Edgar Allen Poe
A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
The Fall of the House of Usher - Edgar Allen Poe
The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby - Charles Dickens
Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
The Hunchback of Notre Dame - Victor Hugo
The Last of the Mohicans - James Fenimore Cooper
Ivanhoe - Sir Walter Scott
Frankenstein - Mary Shelley
Persuasion - Jane Austen
Emma - Jane Austen
Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
The Sorrows of Young Werther - Johann von Goethe
Candide - Voltaire
Fanny Hill - John Cleland
Joseph Andrews - Henry Fielding
A Modest Proposal - Jonathan Swift
Gulliver's Travels - Jonathan Swift
Robinsin Crusoe - Daniel Defoe
Pilgrim's Progress - John Bunyan
Don Quixote - Miguel de Cervantes
Gargantua and Pantagruel - Francoise Rabelais
Aesop's Fables - Aesop

TIME FOR TWILIGHT?

A lot of the girls in Sabrina's class are reading Twilight by Stephenie Meyer. Quite the publishing phenom, Twilight is now part of a hot series of books, the basis for an upcoming movie, and all the rage among adolescent girls.


It's about a girl who falls in love with a vampire (a "good" vampire, a, shall we say, "chaste" vampire).

Sabrina really wants to read this book. I'm hesitant. Quite hesitant. I'm on a wait list to get it from the library, but that could take a while.

So I'm just wondering if anyone out there has read it? Anyone have thoughts on its suitability for an 11- (almost 12-) year-old girl?

Thanks!

FIXING THE LINKS

Oops. If you logged on here in the last day or so and saw my post about the Harry Potter Lexicon, I'm happy to say that the Lexicon is not offline... It has simply moved, and the internal link to get to it from the old address is apparently not working.


Thanks to Elizabeth for the new link!

And I'm taking this opportunity to go into the infrastructure of this blog and fix several links that need updating.... A little maintenance, don't you know.

More posting soon!

TV THOUGHTS: THE EMMYS

What were they thinking?!

That was our thought as we sat watching the opening of the Emmys last night. Five reality show hosts -- the nominees for the first award in that category -- standing around a stage and talking about how they had "nothing" to say for what seemed like 10 minutes. They looked like idiots, they demeaned the show (and insulted its viewers), and they probably precipitated millions of people reaching for the remote.

I heard a comment today from someone in the audience who said the people around him thought they were being pranked, that the show hadn't really started yet. That's how bad it was.


All it proved was.... Reality shows need WRITERS! These guys are next to useless if someone doesn't give them words to say! Jeff Probst at least had the good sense to look embarrassed, Ryan Seacrest looked like a deer in the headlights... it was just a mess.

(The irony, of course, is that most of the nominated reality shows are written, but can't admit it because they don't want to pay their writers a realistic salary or provide benefits.)

And all that rambling and babbling and idiocy apparently took so much time that for the rest of the three hours, all we heard was how far behind they were, how all the presenters were having their bits cut as a result of it.

A few bright moments, virtually all provided by performers who actually have a history of performing live (and who therefore know what to do when in front of an audience, who even -- gasp! -- know how to read a teleprompter smoothly, something Oprah didn't even manage).

I've never been a Don Rickles fan. He's always been too mean-spirited for me (though, set against the mean-spiritedness of our current era, he seems positively tame). However, last night he earned every laugh, showing an ability to read a room, come up with a good spontaneous line, recognize when the written line wasn't working, and move smoothly around it. Good for him. And good for Kathy Griffin (again, a live performer, again someone who could handle something even marginally spontaneous) for screaming "Get - Up!" at the somnambulent audience when Rickles appeared and only about 20% of the room rose to their feet.

I also enjoyed Steve Martin's deadpan intro of Tommy Smothers' special Emmy (replacing the one he didn't win back in the 60's, having taken his name off the nomination list because he thought he would be too controversial) -- beautifully done and very funny. And Tommy (who spoke with odd timing -- has he had a stroke or something?) handled making a political comment with a good deal of subtlety and class.

I thought the set-recreation tributes to old shows was weak -- we don't remember the shows because of the sets, for goodness' sake. The Laugh-In number particularly failed. Cory walked back into the room while it was on and just stared, muttering, "What is this supposed to be?" And I thought it very inappropriate that the first clip they showed was the Seinfeld "Master of his domain" clip -- masturbation at 8:17 p.m.? We had to mute it because our kids were in the room. Bad call, TV academy.

I did enjoy Josh Groban's rendition of 30 or 20 theme songs -- I didn't know he had such range, frankly.


I was glad John Adams won -- though wondered why no one, not one person accepting an award, thanked Paul Giamatti. We were glad but not surprised that Amazing Race won. I was sorry that only one person mentioned the Writers Strike, which of course is the reason there was so much emphasis on reality this season -- though plenty of people gave shoutouts to their writers (many many more than on the Oscars), so props to them.

And boy, Tina Fey certainly had a great night! I bet she's single-handedly keeping the florist industry alive in New York today.

Next year, they should just get Don Rickles to host. And they should learn their lesson: Don't send "reality" folks on stage without those writers that they can't admit they actually have.

BIRTHDAY PARTY IDEAS....

Sabrina's birthday is coming up -- 12 years old! -- and I am at a loss for ideas.

12-years-old is a tough age. Too old for most traditional party ideas or locations, but too young for other obvious choices. One of the big problems is that we are really not in a position to have a party at home for her. That alone wipes out a whole host of ideas. And we really can't spend a fortune on this...


Another problem is that most of the good ideas are taken (or will be taken). For instance, we could take her and a few friends to the improv club where we did Cory's 13-year-old party. But that club is probably going to be Sabrina's class "mystery night" at the end of the school year, and the other room moms would kill me if I gave the surprise away.

In the same vein is a big kids' fun place down the freeway -- go-karts, arcade, mini golf, etc. But again, it looks like that will be the 6th graders "ditch day" destination.

With her love of singing, she wouldn't mind a karaoke party. But we tried one before, and it fizzled. And her Girl Scout troop did a big karaoke splurge just this May.

I suggested Knott's Berry Farm, a theme park she's never been to, and where we could get local-resident discount tickets to keep the whole thing in scale. But she was lukewarm to the idea.

A spa day would be nice (manicures, etc.) -- but one of her best friends did that last year (and it feels pricey). Same with a cooking class -- some of those turn out to be *very* pricey.

I have my fingers crossed for an upcoming event tied to the musical Wicked -- "Wicked Day" in L.A. Apparently this year there will be a "Wicked"-themed scavenger hunt in Hollywood. Still waiting for details -- it's on a Sunday, so the Sunday morning (church) vs. afternoon issue will be key. Also, I don't know if there's a cost. Also, I can imagine some parents being loathe to bring their kids to Hollywood, for any of several reasons. So I can't count on that one.

Any ideas out there?

OF EXPECTATIONS AND DINOSAURS

I had a copy of Jurassic Park sitting on my desk the other day. I was planning to show a couple of scenes to one of my classes at USC.

Sabrina wandered in and spotted it. "Oh, Jurassic Park. I like that movie," she said, as she picked up the DVD case and started to read the back cover.


All was well till she got to the phrase-- "'Incredible' special effects?" she said. "They're not that incredible. They're just normal."

I tried to explain to her how very ground-breaking Jurassic Park was. How nobody had believably created a computer-generated living being before. How the T. Rex's pupil shrinking when a light shines on it was absolutely phenomenal. How the velociraptor attack in the kitchen is a work of art, with all those reflective surfaces and no velociraptors physically there to reflect into them--

She interrupted me. "Yeah, but that was a long time ago," she said. "It's just dinosaurs. Everyone has dinosaurs now." And she wandered off.

Ok, from a certain point of view, she's right.

But boy, do I feel like a dinosaur!

COMING BACK TO HEALTH

Here I thought I was just exhausted. Too tired to sleep, even. Plowing through my to-do list every day without a shred of extra energy, and dragging myself from one appointment. Overbooked (beginning of the school year, don't you know), and feeling the results.

But it turns out I was sick. As I discovered when I came home from a lunch yesterday, exhausted, needing a nap to get the energy to go out to dinner -- and realized I was shivering like naked mole rat in the Arctic.

I had a temp of 102.4 -- and apparently had had it for a while. So that is why I haven't been blogging.

I seem to have turned the corner, so I will be back. But today is all about just getting caught up, trying to feel less fragile, and getting ready for my class tonight. But check back -- I am on the road to recovery, and will blog again soon...

EVERY BITE I TAKE

A couple of years ago, as part of a New Year's Resolution, I started a mini-blog on which I wrote down everything I ate, partly for my own edification and humbling, and partly so anyone reading could crack a whip and chew me out and keep me in line.

And it sort of didn't work the way I thought it might (mostly due to my own negligence), and I dropped the whole thing.

And last year, I was doing pretty well -- I lost 13 lbs. during the year, felt okay with that... and then the strike came, and all the attendant stress that followed us in every area of our lives... and I gained back that 13 and a few more. Ouch.


I've been feeling the need to track my intake more closely... and I suddenly remembered my old blog. So I am starting it up again. If you want to visit it, you can find it here. Feel free to crack the whip and chew me out and the whole bit.

I'll start tomorrow. I don't want anyone to know that all I had for lunch today was black-pepper potato chips.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled blog.

"IT WAS A DARK AND STORMY NIGHT..."

One would think that I get to read enough bad writing on a regular basis... but apparently not. (And no, students, I am not talking about you!)

The 2008 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest is, of course, a contest to write the worst opening line one can. Because Bulwer-Lytton wrote The Last Days of Pompeii (which I tried to read when we started our "Pompeii" script, and which I found unreadable), I feel a special draw toward his contest this year.

As always, some of the sentences I enjoyed the most weren't necessarily the ones that won. Go figure.

Here are some of my favorites. Enjoy!... And denote your own favorites in the comments boxes...

"Hmm . . ." thought Abigail as she gazed languidly from the veranda past the bright white patio to the cerulean sea beyond, where dolphins played and seagulls sang, where splashing surf sounded like the tintinnabulation of a thousand tiny bells, where great gray whales bellowed and the sunlight sparkled off the myriad of sequins on the flyfish's bow ties, "time to get my meds checked."

"Die, commie pigs!" grunted Sergeant "Rocky" Steele through his cigar stub as he machine-gunned the North Korean farm animals.

Joanne watched her fellow passengers - a wizened man reading about alchemy; an oversized bearded man-child; a haunted, bespectacled young man with a scar; and a gaggle of private school children who chatted ceaselessly about Latin and flying around the hockey pitch and the two-faced teacher who they thought was a witch - there was a story here, she decided.

The pancake batter looked almost perfect, like the morning sun shining on the cream-colored bare shoulder of a gorgeous young blonde driving 30 miles over the speed limit down a rural Nebraska highway with the rental car's sunroof open, except it had a few lumps.

Bill swore the affair had ended, but Louise knew he was lying, after discovering Tupperware containers under the seat of his car, which were not the off-brand containers that she bought to save money, but authentic, burpable, lidded Tupperware; and she knew he would see that woman again, because unlike the flimsy, fake containers that should always be recycled responsibly, real Tupperware must be returned to its rightful owner.

Timothy Hanson, Commander of the 43rd Space Regiment in the 52nd Battalion on board the USAOPAC (United Space Alliance Of Planets Attack Carrier) and second in command to Admiral L. R. Morris of the USAOP Space Command, awoke early for breakfast.

The dual-headed Zhiltoids from Beta Quadrant in the Crab Nebula, who lived entirely on a diet of steaming hot asphalt, thought they had died and gone to heaven upon landing in the Midtown Mall of Fresno, California on the planet Earth during the month they called 'July'.

The KGB agent known only as the Spider, milk solids oozing from his mouth and nose, surveyed the spreading wound in his abdomen caused by the crushing blow of the low but deadly hassock and begged of his attacker to explain why she gone to the trouble of feeding him tainted milk products before effecting his assassination with such an inferior object as this ottoman, only to hear in his dying moments an escaping Miss Muffet of the MI-5 whisper, "it is my whey."

Vowing revenge on his English teacher for making him memorize Wordsworth's "Intimations of Immortality," Warren decided to pour sugar in her gas tank, but he inadvertently grabbed a sugar substitute so it was actually Splenda in the gas.

Upon discovering that Miles Black, the famous phrenologist from Yorkshire was going to take up yodeling to lonely goats in Bali, James White decided to balance four planks of wood on a beer keg and call it an abstract work of art in the style of a famous fourteenth-century architect, just going to prove that people will read any old garbage if they think there will be a good pun at the end of it.

There are certain people in the world who emanate an aura of well being -- they radiate sunshine, light up a room, bring out the best in others, and fill your half empty glass to overflowing - yes it was these very people thought Karl, as he sharpened his mirror-finished guthook knife, who were top of his list.

Creeping slowly over the hill, the sun seemed to catch the small village nestled in the valley by surprise, which is a bit unusual really, as you'd think that something with a diameter of 865,000 miles and a surface temperature of 5780 degrees Kelvin, and which is more normally seen from 93,000,000 miles away, wouldn't be able to creep anywhere, let alone catch anything by surprise.

I hadn't fallen in love with Monique because of her intellectual level--she referred to the 6th grade as her "senior" year--or her habit of eating popcorn off the floor of theaters during movies--okay, so maybe love is a bad archer with a low IQ--but you couldn't carve a finer or shapelier figure out of a hedge.

The day started out as uneventfully as any other, and continued thus to midday and from there it was nothing at all to ease into an evening of numbing, undiluted monotony that survived unmarred by even the least act of momentary peculiarity-in fact, let's skip that day altogether and start with the day after.

She had the kind of body that made a man want to have sex with her.

Earthy ochre and russet hues in the lifeless leaves which rustle under his feet, and spiral down from the majestic trees above, signal that October has now arrived, but of course he knew this already because he has a calendar above his breakfast bar in the kitchen.

Like almost every other post-Hegelian neo-hipster angst monkey at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Rene flatly rejected the labels society placed upon him.

BOOK THOUGHTS: VARIABLE STAR

So I was wandering the aisles of a bookstore with Cory a couple of weeks ago, looking for some airplane reading for him, and we headed into the sci fi section. He liked Robert A. Heinlein's Starship Troopers, so I thought I'd see if I could find Citizen of the Galaxy or Moon is a Harsh Mistress or the like.

They only had large-format $15 version of most Heinlein books, so I stepped to the next shelf, handed Cory a copy of Dune (which he loved) -- then stopped in my tracks.

There was a new Heinlein book on the shelves.

Excuse me? A new book? He's been dead for what, 20 years?

But yes, it was a new Heinlein -- or half of one at least, co-written by Spider Robinson. Variable Star.

Now I realize for the dedicated SF fan, this comes as no surprise, given that the book's a couple of years old. But it was new to me. And, being a huge Heinlein fan and a moderate Robinson fan, I grabbed it.

Variable Star is based on some outlines Heinlein left behind, outlines for a never-written book. The Heinlein estate asked Spider Robinson to write the story (which, in outline form, had no ending). I opened it to read with some trepidation. I tend to distrust those "written in the voice of" stories, having been especially burned by some of the pathetic pseudo-novels out there purportedly written by Agatha Christie (and with her name in huge letters on the cover), but actually mere adaptations of her plays. Within a few pages, I can always tell I am not reading the actual writing of the master (mistress?), and toss them aside in disgust.

No tossing aside, however, with Variable Star. It was almost eerie how well Robinson caught the master's style here. From the first page on, I felt as if I was reading a long-lost Heinlein story. The links to Heinlein's Future History are abundant and usually well-handled (a bit too much in the way of slightly snarky Nehemiah Scudder references for my taste).

Variable Star is the story of a young man who, fleeing a marriage he has desperately wanted but which he suddenly feels, with some justification, will be a trap, rashly signs on to an outside-the-Solar-System colonization starship which will never see Earth again. Part coming-of-age story (a la the Heinlein "juveniles"), it takes an unexpected twist when events back in our Solar System start to, um, catch up to the starship.

Well-plotted (yes, a deus ex machina ending, but one which has as much set-up as could be reasonably given, and one which is in the spirit of several Heinlein novels), with prose that mostly feels like the real thing. I really enjoyed the book start to finish.

A few moments that felt off, particularly the overt references to 9/11 (which, of course, takes Future History into a new track). Some of the mysticism/"spirituality" felt too Spider-Robinsony (though one could point to Stranger in a Strange Land for some justification). I didn't mind the Robinson focus on music, though, or the abundant punning (which seemed restrained for Robinson in this case) -- somehow he worked them in so I believed and accepted them.

Variable Star was an unexpected pleasure for me. I expect it will be for most casual Heinlein fans as well. The perfect book to wrap up the summer...

Now what would really be fun would be if they would publish the original Heinlein outline!

BOOKSTORE PEOPLE

One of my tiny delights about Family Camp this year came when I wanted to pick up a copy of "The Tipping Point" to give someone, and needed to find a bookstore in Santa Cruz. We headed off for a Borders or B&N, but on the way, spotted Bookshop Santa Cruz, a huge independent bookstore, the kind where the shelves are loaded with handwritten recommendations from the staff. And there was a vacant parking spot right out front. It was meant to be.


Of course I walked out with more than the one book I meant to buy. A good bookstore will do that.

All this to point you in the direction of a delightful new blog from my friend Kim (and her friend Clare), Bookstore People, a tribute to independent bookstores all over.

Check it out!

BACK TO SCHOOL

The start of a new school year is always a bit hectic and a bit hopeful.

This year, both are especially true for us.

Hectic. Oh my, yes. I've already gotten started at USC, last week (reaffirming my belief that it is just plain wrong for any school to start before Labor Day). Two classes, smart students, lots of reading to do, lots of story energy needed.

Cory and Sabrina both start tomorrow. The alarm clock will start going off at 6:30 (sometimes 6:00), rather than not going off at all. Four drives a day, in different directions. Keeping up with homework. Trying to juggle the competing parental schedules of two different schools (and they do compete -- Again this year, "back to school" night is the same night for both schools... and we have the ultimate dilemma in June, because graduation is the same day and the same time). Room parent meetings. Orientation meetings. Volunteer "opportunities."

This year, school is more complicated, because both kids are "applying out." That is, they have to start the application process for high school/junior high, respectively. It is a complicated, time-consuming, stress-wrought process involving essays and tours and interviews and forms, and it creates a really inappropriate level of pressure on the kids involved. (But if you lived in L.A., with our school system here, you'd be thinking about private school too, I guarantee.) Oh well, at least college will be a breeze in comparison.

Hectic, too, because we have a script due on October 27. A due date so close we could practically hold our breath till it arrives. A script demanding to be written in the middle of all the volunteering and driving and applying.

Oh, and in the middle of all this, we'll be moving.

But hopeful. Somehow the new school year is always a mini-New Year, a chance to start over. Do a little not-spring-anymore cleaning. Incorporate some new disciplines and habits. Rev up the engines.

And we see hope in our writing -- Not only our project for DreamWorks that we are buckling down to now, but in the script that goes out to directors and actors tomorrow (if any of you praying folks want to keep that in mind, we'd be grateful). Hope in the fresh start that a move always brings. Hope even in the nasty application process, because we're so much better positioned to handle it this time around.

So here we go. Time to take a deep breath...

And plunge!