Snail and Puppy Dog Tails (and porn)

The things boys are made of.  

I'm totally psyched about rescuing a dog this weekend.  I hope it works out.  I've been skirting the idea of a dog for a while; crazy, fat writer guys need dogs.  Anyway, I was on some rescue sites when I found Maxx.  He's a cute as crap little Shih Tzu.  What really broke my heart is that he's been blind since birth.  I'm going to meet him tomorrow and see what his personality's like.  Sure, I'm a little nervous about adopting a special needs dog, but I have the perfect life for taking care of a little dog like that that no one else seems to want.  Plus, he's got the same name as a major character in my WIP.  

It's been a quiet week with both my agent and editor on vacations.  I've had lots of time to go crazy over my WIP.  The good thing about it is that I have a clear picture of where I want the story to go.  The bad is that the closer I get to the end, the more I realize the beginning isn't working.  That's okay, that's what second drafts are for, and I have plenty of time.

One thing I've discovered is that I have a theme.  I mean, each of my books has had a theme of its own.  Deathday Letter has a Carpe Diem theme, my current WIP has a friendship theme, my next story has themes of xenophobism and competition and other stuff I don't even know about, but they all have one theme in common:  becoming the you you want to be.  

That's something I struggled with, that I still struggle with.  In HS, I didn't know who I was or who I wanted to be.  In college I became who I thought I had to be to survive coming out.  In life, we all have to struggle with what we want versus what others want versus what we know is right.  That's what my characters all face.  They're all struggling to become the men they want to be.  Sometimes they fail, sometimes they succeed.  Being that we're all human, I think being the man you want to be is more about moments than anything else.  In each moment, are you who you want to be?  It doesn't matter what you did twenty years ago or twenty minutes ago.  Are you who you want to be right this very second.  I think maybe if we live our lives like that, then the gains will outweigh the failures and the moments will equal a greater whole.

I promised I was going to be funnier didn't I?  Right.  Here, if this doesn't make you laugh, you're dead inside.