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A Nice Little Walk In The Woods


                It's Halloween. Tonight we turn the clocks back. Tonight is also the deadline I gave myself to get my first article done. It's about alcohol abuse. It's 4400 words long, with 51 endnotes and an two page appendix, which probably means that it's closer to 4600 words (10 pages.) I haven't read it in a couple days but I'm saying it's done. I made a list of a few magazine publishers who might consider it, but I'm beginning to think it's a chapter of a book. The problem with that is that I was hoping this was a quick project so that I could move on to the next.

        I did move on to the next, and finished a rough draft about hope. It's only 1131 words long at the moment. It needs lots of work, but at that length, there are more magazines that might accept it. While I'm getting enough distance to be objective about it, I've also been spending time over the past couple days casting about for something that could work for a second chapter of the book what was supposed to be an article. This is one of those reasons why writers don't like to have people know what they're reading. I have a book out of the library about violence, and I spent last night searching websites dealing with Halloween and horror stories, their monsters, and our fascination with the undead. It would be really nice if some sociologists would bother to do the research that I want to use, or, if it has been done, if I could find it.

                Tonight, however, thanks to the book on violence, I think I may be narrowing in on something. I've collected three titles to ask the library to find for me: Lust for Blood  by Jeffrey Kottler, Less than Human by David L. Smith, and The Lucifer Effect by Philip Zimbardo. Plus, I have copied and pasted a number of articles from the Web. A little light reading on a couple cheery topics, just to get me started. I'm beginning to feel as though this little wood that I wandered into is getting a little deep, a little dark, and a little scary. Just the thing for the 31st of October.

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