LittleWyvern.com

I remembered the other day that November is National Novel Writing Month and it made me a little bit sad. For old time’s sake I went over to nanowrimo.org just to check things out, and now I wish I were doing it again. After digging through their site I then looked into various ways to self-publish; you can get books printed and sold on amazon for pretty cheap these days. It is all terribly exciting – if I only manage to overlook the tiny, little, almost insignificant issue of not being that great of a writer.

I have been putting in a lot more time doing actual work for actual money lately (just sent a consulting invoice, baby), but have spent just as much time doing work for friends for no money. ( Check out www.molehillmusic.com and www.amylynnross.com ) Even so, it was fun writing every day back when I tried it. The end result was pretty crappy, but that’s probably only because I had no idea what I was doing. Maybe I should give it another go? I actually have a decently good half-thought-out story this time…

In fantasy football news, really the only news worth discussing, my two 2-4 teams are now both 3-5. Ugh…

It is super depressing that I actually sit here and wish that I were 4-4 instead. “Man,” I think to myself, “if I were 4-4 right now I bet I’d win the championship.” One of my leagues is a dynasty league, meaning that teams can keep up to 5 players between seasons. There is a salary cap hit for doing so, and so the losing teams have incentive to trade their good, expensive players from this year in order to acquire cheap, good players for next year. Basically you surrender your team this season in the hopes of having a stronger team in 2010. Somewhat bizarrely, at 3-5 I have been by far the most active in acquiring better players FOR THIS YEAR. It’s counter-intuitive and Lukas seems a bit dumbfounded.

It’s simple, though: I don’t like quitting. I might try and fail – and do… a lot – but I don’t like quitting. It makes me a bit sick to surrender to the idea that I won’t win another game until September 2010. Where’s the fun in that?! I would much rather win every game for the rest of the season. I will deal with next season when it comes around… in 9 months. We can let Future Jason deal with that problem.

It’s a stretch, but maybe I can still pull this year out anyways. Four teams (from a league of twelve) make the playoffs. 8 wins should be good enough to make the playoffs, and there are two teams that should make that easily. At 3-5 I can win out the rest of the regular season and finish at 7-5. The third and fourth place teams play each other before the end of the year so they can’t both go undefeated. If at least one of them loses two of the next four (I play one of them too) then that leaves one more open spot. So long as none of the 4-4 teams wins out then there would be three teams at 8-4 (or better) and a giant tie at 7-5. The tie breaker is high points on the season, and even before my trades I was looking good to win that.

It may all be a bit optimistic but these things are crazy unpredictable. One of the first place teams, currently at 6-2, could very well finish the season at 6-6. I figure that my team has a decent shot at winning the next four games and posting high point totals, and after that… who knows? Either way, I hate quitting. I will create the opportunity to win, and feel happy about it, even if things don’t end up going my way.

After trading away all of my depth and good value keepers here is my auction team to close out the year.

QB: Tom Brady
RB: Steven Jackson
RB: Frank Gore
RB/WR: Ronnie Brown
WR: Wes Welker
WR: Chad Ochocinco
TE: Kellen Winslow
OP: Donovan McNabb / Steve Smith (CAR)
DST: Bengals
K: Lawrence Tynes

If I can’t win with this team… it just wasn’t meant to be.