Welcome to "Who is Virginia?"

I'm not Virginia. I'm James. Sometime soon I'll tell you about Virginia.

Kind of like Walter in the excellent movie, "The Visitor," who fairly late in life learns to play an African drum, I'm learning to blog.

Here's my plan. I'm shooting to rewrite my novel by October 12, 2010, about a year from now. Until then, I'll blog about the obstacles in my way.

This reminds me of an old kitchen stove someone threw over a cliff along a path in the woods I frequent. It's way down there. I usually don't think about it until the leaves fall, then once in a while I consider climbing down, or borrowing a truck with a winch and a long cable. On the other hand, I'm sort of fond of that stove. When our son was seven, we hiked beside a creek that didn't go where we thought it did. After a couple hours, we had almost decided to retrace our steps when we saw that stove. It carried a message -- that a road ran above us. We climbed straight up and within 30 minutes were snacking in our cabin.

I have no illusion that I can rewrite my novel in 30 minutes or simply drag it out of the woods, or that it will lead me to pleasant pastures. So here's the deal. I'm turning on the burners and on October 12, 2010 I'll either have a finished novel or I'm going to carry that old stove to the nearest dumpster.