It’s the beginning of Week Two of National Novel Writing Month.    Of course, I am behind where I want to be.  It turns out that writing a “mere 1,667 words a day” is not the simple task I envisioned it would be.  My goal failed to take into account the following obstacles:   (1) I have  a (more than) full-time job (2) writing on a laptop on a crowded bus can be inconvenient at times.   I am usually cramped up against the left-hand wall of the bus which seriously impacts my utilization of the left-hand keys on the keyboard, including the letters “a” and “e” which I apparently use frequently and (3) writing a novel is more than just putting 50,000 words down on paper (or, in my case, on a USB drive).     I sailed through the Prologue and wasted time on the Reviewers’ Quotes for the Back Cover, which even I knew couldn’t be included in my word  count.  And then it became  time to write the novel itself, when the real work began.   That was when I encountered the fourth obstacle.   As Stephen King describes it  “The most important things are the hardest things to say. They are the things you get ashamed of because words diminish your feelings – words shrink things that seem timeless when they are in your head to no more than living size when they are brought out.”

At the end of Week One I have written 6,846 words, and some of them I really like.   I am still determined to finish the novel in November, but realize now that it will only be a very rough draft.  But I will have have written a first-draft of a novel, something I have been planning to do for years, ever since my Creative Writing class in high school almost 40 years ago.

In a week that included both Election Day and the World Series finale, many experienced,  in the words of the opening lines of ABC’s Wide World of Sports, “the thrill of victory” while others experienced “the agony of defeat.”   (I put my Phillies cap away next to my Red Sox shirt and wondered if New Jersey’s newly elected governor would really bring all the changes proclaimed in all the commercials and debates.)  This week for me was filled with more personal defeats than victories.   It has been my experience that the agony of defeat is felt more deeply and and lasts much longer than the thrill of victory, that life’s contests are not a zero-sum game with the thrill of the victor equal and opposite to the agony of the defeated.

One of my favorite classes at the University of Texas McCombs School of Business was a course on decision theory taught by Professor Jay Koehler.   In that class I researched “Regret Theory” first proposed by Graham Loomes and Robert Sugden; they  analyzed whether people make decisions based on which decision will cause them to feel the  least regret if their decision turns out to be wrong.  (Of course the paper discusses this in far more scholarly and mathematical elegance than I have supplied here).   At times, I have tried to base my decisions on regret theory, but although the agony of defeat can be crushing at times, I prefer to remember the words of Theodore Roosevelt  “Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the grey twilight that knows not victory nor defeat.”

It’s far easier to quote words in a blog than it is to live by them, but somehow if they are released into cyberspace,  they become more powerful reminders of the way I want to view my life and its defeats and regrets.