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Two things you’re going to notice right off: I don’t even have time to spell out Diary of a Whiny Writer anymore. From now on, it’s all acronyms, ATT (All the Time). Second: I don’t even KNOW what day it is. They all blur together now. But enough whining, even though that is what I do best. Let’s look at the bright spots — or are those just floaters in my eyeballs? Anyway, I’m beginning to benefit from getting to that point when, for better or worse, a lot of the material is down and sent to David and Barry* for their terrible swift judgment.Which means every time I start a new chapter, the bag o’ stuff that’s left is beginning to feel noticeably lighter. It’s a lot easier to focus. So much of the agony in writing is trying to somehow deliver the context necessary so that people can see why the Good Stuff is in fact so good. You waste your best material if people can’t fully appreciate the best-ness of it. Yet . . . all the context can threaten to be excruciatingly slow and boring. Can you see where I’m going with this? It’s an explanation for why the writing process is inevitably front-loaded with pain. In the beginning, you are struggling to make inherently less interesting material interesting, so that later on, the inherently most interesting stuff can just flow out, raising its arms for a triumphant victory lap, trotting on the back of all that went before it and taking all the credit. To formulate: beginning = more work, less yield; end = less work, more yield. I’m somewhere in the middle, but I can feel the turn coming.

*My editors are David and Barry. What are the odds? Every time I send them a new chapter, my email tries to automatically fill in the address for “Dave Barry.” At first, I wasn’t catching it, and I kept getting messages back from Dave Barry saying, “Looks good to me, but where’s the sex scene?”

Less than two months left. Why am I not panicking? I know why. I’m waiting to hear back from New York, where I sent the first 20,000 words. Two days ago. It takes that long to get the company lawyers to obtain a restraining order.

But seriously, and here’s the dangerous part, I’m secretly hoping they’ll gush all over it. Because who knows? Maybe it doesn’t reek like the rotted rutabaga in my vegetable bin. Maybe I’m not a total failure. Maybe this wasn’t the most insane idea in, like, forever.

As Glenn Beck can attest, miracles do happen.

What a beautiful morning!

Yes, I’ve come in off the ledge this morning. Give me until, oh, about 4 pm before I become suicidal again. Meanwhile, after butting my head against a section all day yesterday that I couldn’t make interesting no matter what I threw at it, I just said, well to hell with it, I’ll just jump cut to another subject!

It’s the equivalent of the parable about the novelist who could never make headway with his novel because he could never manage to get his characters out the front door.

The answer is: SCREW THE FRONT DOOR! One minute Dirk Dirkson is sipping cognac in his opulent Santa Monica beach house, the next, he’s swooshing down a glacier in the alps, an evil paramilitary militia armed with anti-tank guns on his tail. We’ll catch up with how he got there at a later date. Or maybe not.

Move on people. Nothing to see here.

I’m at that nauseatingly familiar point where I hate everything I’ve written. I hate the sentences as they form in my head. I hate WORDS in general.

I ALWAYS reach this point. And I’m always sure that although in the past I’ve gotten past it, THIS IS THE TIME I WON”T.

By the way: This is the time I won’t.

Watched 60 Minutes last night. They devoted most of the hour to the explosion on the Deepwater Horizon. They got Mike Williams to repeat on camera, almost word for word, his testimony before the Coast Guard hearings about his ordeal after the explosions, and some of his concerns about safety on the rig. Then they interviewed an engineering professor who didn’t really seem to know much about oil drilling. They leapt wildly to some wrong conclusions about what was significant, and missed the most significant issues entirely. I’d been cursing the ungodly danged complexity of the blowout all day, but watching 60 Minutes, I was grateful for it.

Ok, it’s just Day Two of this Self-Pity Blog and it’s already getting scary. I’m still trying to assemble all my notes and I discover there’s already an Amazon page! And a Facebook page! Guess I better get to work.

SO here’s the situation: My wonderful agents, Gail Ross and Howard Yoon, hooked me up with a bright, literate, absurdly knowledgeable former oil rig captain named John Konrad. John was personally connected to a lot of the people who were on the Deepwater Horizon on April 20 when a well 18,000 feet below the surface blew out, killing 11 of the rig’s crew and eventually destroying and sinking the rig, resulting in the worst oil spill, by far, in U.S. history. John and I spent a couple of weeks on Skype together cooking up a 15,000-word proposal for a book that would be a non-fiction suspense narrative that placed the disaster in the full context of the essential, little understood culture of offshore oil exploration. We ended up with HarperCollins editor David Hirshey, a writer himself and the man behind the great Esquire Dubious Achievement Awards in the 1980s. The book’s working title is “Fire on the Horizon” and it’s already got a mention in a New York Times roundup of upcoming blowout books. That’s the good news. Bad news: the book needs to be written — and edited — by Nov. 1. That’s why I’d hung a “Gone Writin'” sign on this blog. But Weingarten persuaded me that I ought blog about the process of reporting and writing such a big project on such a small deadline. “Just write a snippet a day.” he said. The first snippet begins now.

71 Days Until They Rip This Book Out of My Virtual Typewriter

When I close out this blog item, I am going to begin to address the 50,000 words of notes that I’ve strung together  for what amounts to the middle sections of the book. I’ve been looking into all the stuff I’ve amassed, and when anything related to a specific point in time — from the moment the Deepwater Horizon began its life in the shipyards of South Korea to the moment the well was finally capped after spewing millions of gallons of crude oil into the Gulf for three months — I’ve put it into the appropriate spot on a timeline. Now I’m going to begin to go through that material and try to shape it into narrative.

I’m not really sure how that will go, or if it will end up retaining the shape I’ll give it. But when you have so much to work through on such a tight schedule, you don’t have the luxury of waiting until you know exactly what you’re doing before you begin doing it. In other words, Nike was right.

I feel guilty in advance that I will not be posting many (or any) blog items in the next few months. I’ve signed a book contract with an insane deadline. So if you can spare a thought for me between now and Christmas, imagine me hunkered down over my laptop, my wife approaching from time to time to wipe the sweat from my brow with a limp rag and whisper words of encouragement. Wish me luck.

I’ve been getting a lot of rave comments on my blog posts recently. Consider this one I got today: “Congratulations for that marvelous blog post! I found your post very interesting, I think you are a great author. I will make sure to bookmark your blog and will come back quite soon to your blog. Keep up your brilliant work, I hope you will have a great day!”

But that wasn’t all. There were dozens very similar in theme. They all just loved my blog posts. Loved them! They definitely were going to return to my site and/or bookmark the page! They hoped I would continue the excellent work!

Odd, I thought, that none of them actually mentioned the subject of the blog they were raving about. And then there were some that, though they really were trying to be complimentary, got a little tongue-tied. Maybe they found my rare gift for expression a little intimidating, and who can blame them? Consider the sweet intent of this poster, who was clearly overcome with awe: “thanks to your ideas , i¡¯d adore to adhere to your weblog as usually as i can.possess a good day.”

Just reading that put me in possession of a very good day indeed!

Until, I noticed something odd. All these comments were posted by people with screen names such as “moviesforfree” or “Viagranoquestionsasked” or “healthandskinnyfast!”

Ok. Now I get it. Really quite clever: To a spammer, everything is just another opportunity to throw trash on someone’s lawn, to scatter their message like a maple tree scatters its annoying tons of helicopter seeds. Comments on websites were just another free billboard.

Here’s the clever part: To avoid spam, most bloggers have to approve comments before they go up on the site. So instead of sending a comment that says, “Get Viagra through the internet at discount rates!” — obvious spam, wouldn’t be approved — they imbed their true message in their return address, send some automated rave about the blog, then sit back and let the ego of the blogger do the rest.

(Of course in some cases, being from, say, Nigeria, they first must run their generic compliment through an online translator, which accounts for my possession of a good day.)

From now on, I think I’ll check my spam filter as usually as I can.

The third Post Hunt was unleashed on the unsuspecting (and in some cases, very suspect) masses Sunday. It was the biggest crowd for any Hunt ever — we guess around 12,000.  Gene Weingarten, Dave Barry and I have done some uncountable number of these, originally in Miami, and now both in Washington and Miami. You can go here to get the full explainer and here for our recent chat about it, but basically we invent a series of absurdo-comic puzzles and interweave them with the landscape of downtown (in this case) DC. Each time we meet to begin planning, months in advance of the eventual event (eventual event!), we initially are overwhelmed by the feeling that we’ve already come up with every possible puzzle scheme and can’t possibly think of anything new. It is a sad true fact that once Dave and I spent at least an hour coming up with a puzzle idea in great detail before we suddenly had an uncomfortable feeling. We googled our own idea and yikes!, we had come up with the exact thing years earlier.

But eventually, after blank hours in which the height of our creativity involves finding new ways to make fun of each other, we begin to hit on some concepts — ” ‘cepts” as they’re known in the trade. These are far from completed puzzle ideas; rather they are pieces of mechanism, a spring or trigger or lever around which an eventual puzzle can be created. The trigger idea could be anything. For instance, it could begin with this from one of us: “We should think of a puzzle where the key to the solution was the way something tasted.”

So that would be the beginning — just a thread we could pull on until the fabric of the universe would begin to unravel a bit. The beauty of it is once we have some very simple core idea, however undeveloped, each bit of progression toward a complete puzzle is a straightforward exercise in problem solving. The issues are largely practical and technical, as opposed to anything requiring creative genius.

The taste example is a real puzzle from the 2008 Hunt in DC’s Penn Quarter, which included Chinatown. Looking at its formulation  demonstrates how what in the aggregate might appear to be a great leap of imagination is in fact something which grows step by pragmatic step. In this, it has been a powerful lesson to me that applies to all sorts of creative thinking, and in particular, to plotting in fiction or screenplays.

Going back to the beginning: Because of where we were standing when we came up with the idea of a “taste” puzzle, in plain view of the Chinatown arch, we naturally went to . . . fortune cookies. Right away, we knew they’d be perfect because of the usual nondescript taste. Any distinct flavor would stand out clearly.

Just as quickly, the technical problems emerged: could we actually find someone who could affordably mass-produce, say, blueberry-flavored fortune cookies? And if they could, could it be done so the cookie itself would look identical to the usual? Blue fortune cookies wouldn’t do.

And then, a strategic rather than tactical issue: Once we had odd-tasting cookies that looked like normal ones, we had to determine how we could cleverly relate that to a number — necessary because all solutions to Hunt puzzles are numbers.

The obvious solution: Fortune cookies have fortunes. We could insert fortunes that had a list of words, each with an associated number. One of the words could be blueberry.

But that would be too easy, too obvious. It would destroy what we liked about the taste element: people would not be looking for a normal appearing fortune cookie to have a novel taste. They’d have to get that, contrary to their expectation. Anything ham-handedly drew attention to the idea of flavor — ie: blueberry on a list of words — would destroy the stealth aspect of the puzzle that initially appealed to us.

So how could we use the idea of flavor for a puzzle without ever drawing attention to it in any direct way?

Well, we still had the mechanism of a fortune inside the cookie. But we had to use the fortune to focus the Hunters’ attention AWAY from the cookie, and away from the issue of flavor.

So, the next step in our pragmatic chain: The fortune could refer to some element completely unrelated to the fortune cookie, something in the Hunt magazine.

One of us came up with the idea of: Movie Titles. There were movies that subtly incorporated flavor words. Clockwork Orange, for instance. Woody Allen’s Bananas. The Marx Brothers in Coconuts.

But how does that get a number?

The movie times listed in movie listings are, very conveniently, numbers.

Somehow the fortune could direct you to a listing of movie times in the magazine, and the flavor of the cookie would tell you WHICH movie time was the answer.

Still, we needed it to be subtle. The fortune couldn’t just be: See page 23.  That would be lame and again, destroy the appeal of the puzzle.  So we thought about fortunes, and the way so many of them had a fortune on the front, and something else on the back of the little slip of paper.

“Learn Chinese!” many of them say, then present a Chinese character with a translation.  What if the Chinese character was simply the Mandarin word for “cinema”? Hunters studying the fortune slip minutely, who had been warned to look at everything in the magazine as a potential clue, would eventually make the connection between the Learn Chinese! vocab word, and an ad for a fictional downtown art cinema with a list of flavor-word related movies.

Our puzzle was nearly complete, but then we got a sample box of our altered cookies. Coconut was colorless and available, but the taste was fairly subtle. Which was good, and bad. Good because people would have to really pay attention to recognize it, and then the force of revelation would be all that much more satisfying. Bad because maybe it wouldn’t be fair to expect people to notice the taste out of the blue.

We still had the fortune itself — we hadn’t used the actual little homily familiar to all. If it could sound like a typical fortune, but somehow reference flavor, we’d be in business .

Then it just appeared, as if by magic: “He who has discerning taste will know success.”

Easy as coconut pie.

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