When I joined the Glorious Leisure Class in April, I promised myself I would spend every day at my desk in our home office until I wrote one thousand words of fiction. Some days I outdid myself, and others were a struggle. I had some interruptions for travel and family business (including a blazing hot week repainting my grandparents’ house. Tip for you homeowners: if someone tries to talk you into sandblasting the paint off the wood siding on the eastern-facing part of your house and not doing anything to protect that wood afterwards, politely laugh in his face and walk away. Your grandchildren will thank you later), but, more often than not, I sat and wrote.

Yesterday, I finished my first draft.

It’s ugly, and it’s a mess, and, no, you can’t read it. I don’t even want to read it, not until I’ve given my brain time to forget about the world of Santee Anchorage and its politics, weather and delicious rum-and-favor-based economy. I’m going to let this thing sit until Labor Day, the day of the Giro di San Francisco, when I will start my edits and revisions on the drive home (and if the Giro di SF is canceled, then I’ll just pound the hell out of myself on Latigo that morning, then edit). I’d hoped to have something to hand around to friends at Montreal, but it’s way to early for that. The novel I started at that bar is nothing like the one I wrapped up in a blazing hot hotel room in Arkansas, and it would probably be a good idea to make sure the thing swings from beginning to end.

How do I feel? Relieved, honestly. First drafts hurt, especially when they’re for something this big. My promise to myself on the bike course at Taupo to spend more time writing was certainly helped by spending a year focusing on that race. I know I can go the distance; now I just have to get there faster.

So. The first draft of Windswept, started July 27, 2007 at whatever that bar was where we had dinner for Yuki and Ken’s wedding that first night, Waikiki, Oahu, Hawaii; completed July 6, 2009, Gaston’s White River Resort, Lakeview, Arkansas. 84,037 words. Thanks to everyone who had encouraging words along the way. Now it’s time to get better.

Jeff Urban, when he’s not racing with us, takes very cool photos. When he is racing with us, his wife Jen takes very cool photos. One of them took this one of me climbing to the top at Ojai last week.

Please note: by the time this photo was taken, I was about a zillion miles behind the field. I was not working this hard to catch up; I was working this hard just to finish.

Now, if you’re like me and are way the hell behind, it’s easy for the refs to make the call. Someone tweets a whistle and points the side of the road, and you’re done. There’s no question that I’ve been pulled. However, once you get clusters of racers, things get a little tricky, which is what happened at Ventura, and is what will be solved by The Smart Future.

In the Category 4 crit, Jamie was holding his own about two groups behind the race leader. He wasn’t in danger of being lapped, though his bunch was slowly passing other guys who had fallen behind. As he passed the refs, there was a whistle, but no clear indication of who should go, just a blanket “You’re all out.” Jamie kept going, only to get yanked a few laps later.

Now, I can appreciate how tough a judge’s job is. You’ve got all these guys zipping by, and you’ve got to make quick calls to people who a) may not hear you or b) may be too tired to attention to detailed instructions. Bike racing tries to be as budget conscious as possible, and it’s cheaper just to point at a bunch of guys and relegate them than it is to, say, give everyone a timing chip that talks to racers and lets them know, so sorry, but you’re done, either by a piped electronic voice or electric shock.

Or is it?

After reading this post about a 90% drop in the price of RFIDs, I have your Smart Future solution.

Every year, I renew my USCF racing license. When I get my card in the mail, it comes with a bunch of RFID tags that I can stick to my bottom bracket. Every time I go to a race, I sign in, get a race number, and roll my bike over the Magic Cheap-Ass Timing Mat, which reads my RFID tag and ties it to my race number. Now, when we race, one judge can watch the race number while another can watch the screen that’s showing RFID results as we roll over the finish line, which is made of incredibly thin and durable Smart Tape, which is just reading the RFIDs rolling overhead. The screen judge will have a simple display of who’s in the lead, who’s lagging, and who’s about to get lapped. When it comes time to relegate someone, the magical software will spit out a list with race number, rider name and rider team for the announcer to say, before the rider approaches the line so he can actually hear his instructions, “Rider number 445, Adam Rakunas, please pull to the side.” If I’m in a pack with other guys, and I’m the only one getting pulled, the other guys can continue while I drift to the side, filled with equal parts shame and rage, an emotion that I will now call shrage.

I know there are RFID timing systems already available, but these rely on chips you wear on your ankle. They are also pretty expensive to rent and have long setup times and all sorts of other things that won’t work for a cheap-ass cycling race. But if NEC is talking about being able to print ten thousand RFID tags for a hundred bucks, then bracket tags could become an easy option. Hell, a race promoter could hand out his own tags in the race number packet, cutting USCF out of the equation completely. If the reader technology drops in price, then, dude.

Right. Let’s get to it!

This is the biggest thing I’ve ever written, and the end is barreling down on me like a freight train packed with high explosives, saxophone-playing ninjas and intelligence-enhanced dinosaurs (none of which are in this novel, but, dude, wouldn’t that rock?). It’s going to be a bit of a relief to knock this whole thing out and let it mellow, and…oh my God, it’s going to suck.

I know that I’ll be ironing out all the creases and puttying over the cracks in the second (and third, and fourth, and on and on until the nth-until-accepted) draft, but this is still scary, man. I’ve been working on this thing since July of 2007, though, really, I haven’t put my ass in the chair with regularity until April (yay, underemployment!). It’s been good and hard and frustrating and fun getting these words out and driving this train to the end of the exploding, musical, dinosaur-laden line.

But what if what I’ve written sucks? What if I can’t save it? What if I’ve been wasting my time?

The only saving grace is that I’m pretty sure everyone who’s ever written anything has felt the same way. I can’t be the only one who looks at a draft and gets the pants scared off him. I know not to put the cart before the horse. I know, I know, I know.

That doesn’t make it any easier. Fortunately, that’s why God invented pie.

That said, if I ever meet the citrus farmers who decided that this weekend was the right time to hire some beekeepers to come and pollinate their crops, I’m gonna kick ‘em right in the oranges.

Uncle Tren’s Piru time trial series is just the kind of mom-and-pop race operation that I wish we had right in LA. Tren and his family hand out race numbers from the back of their minivan while one of their friends putts 10K down the road to man the lone turn-around cone and hold up a SLOW sign whenever there’s traffic. It’s cheap, it’s a great way to test your fitness and handling, and it’s smack dab in the middle of citrus country.

Raise your hands if you see where this is going. Now, put them back in your pockets before they get stung.

I was first off the line for our group of eight riders, and second on the block for the whole day. I was warmed up, feeling great, ready to rock when the announcer says, “Oh, by the way, there are swarms of bees out there. Watch it.” And before I could say, “Wait, what?” the timer counted me down and I was off.

The first two miles were textbook: I had a high cadence, good pace, with the tailwind pushing me right along. I passed my thirty second man within minutes (granted, he was a kid, but a pass is a pass!), and was settling in when something bounced off my shoulder.

Gravel, I figured.

Then another something, and another and another until I realized I was in the middle of the bee swarm. I also realized that our kits make us look like delicious, pollen-heavy flowers. I was going one way fast, and they were going the opposite way fast, and I was about to become one of those poor dummies in the middle of a physics problem that dealt with velocity, momentum, and barbed, poisonous stingers.

I ducked down, hoping my aero helmet would block most of the bees, but one popped me right between the brim of my helmet and my shades, right in the bridge of my nose. It just sat there, right at the top of my vision, and it was only after I’d squirted it with my water bottle that I realized it was stuck to me via its stinger.

Last year, I would’ve stopped and pulled off my helmet and flicked the bee away and limped back to the start line and taken a DNF as Anne soothed my wounded ego and face. Last year, I didn’t really care about race results because, hey, races were just extended training sessions. But this year, dammit, I’m a bike racer, and a racer sucks it up and gets himself out of a fix and rides. I got through the swarm, pulled off my shades, flicked the bee away, and got back into it.

The rest of the way back was good, old-fashioned hurt. The wind was now doing its best to push me back, and the thought of a second bee strike kept me jittery as I rode past the swarm areas. But then I saw the rest of the TXers riding out, and I pushed. The bees slapped at my helmet, and I pushed. Some guy on a faster rig edged past me, and I pushed (and pushed right past him, too). My calf cramped and my face hurt and the wind kept gusting, and I pushed, up the last hills, tucked in aero and worked through it all across the line and into the best time I’d ever had at Piru, which I have now forgotten but I can assure you was respectable.

At the end of the race, it was Bees: 4, TX: 5. Peter, Jamie, Oscar, Anna and Gricelda all brought home ribbons and hardware, and four of us got stung. I missed fifth place by 8 seconds, probably due to me dealing with the angry passenger on my nose. Today, my face has swollen a bit, turning me into one of the mutant extras from “Total Recall” (and not even a cool one, like Quatto), but it was an excellent time all around.

However, when I get a new aero helmet, I am totally buying one with a face shield.

(Thanks to Jennifer Hochman Urban for the excellent photography.)

…are you fucking kidding me? Honda’s Asmio robot spells our doom? Seriously?

Never mind the nuclear sword of Damocles that hangs above our heads, or that it’s suspended with the Rope of Intolerance from the Incredibly Shaky Beam of Environmental Collapse? If we’re not nice to our thinking machines, then we’re doomed? Man, frak that.

The coda was a let down. A long time ago, Rick Wadholm said in a critique session that he didn’t trust ghosts, and now I know why. Ghosts are cheating. Angels and demons and all that crap: they’re just narrative devices, and they’re a reminder that everything we’re watching is a lie. The emotional endings that Roslin and Adama and everyone earned, all undone by Ghost Baltar and Ghost Six and Our Blessed Savior Starbuck. No dice, man.

Just as well that SciFi is undergoing its metamorphosis, shedding its skin to become the marketing bastard that is SyFy. Like Derek said on Twitter, “In like a lion, out with a meh.”

I’m glad I saw this. I’m glad I saw it through to the end. And now I want nothing more than to get to work on Windswept so I can read an ending that doesn’t piss me off.

P.S. If you’ve come here through Twitter or Facebook, please keep any discussion here. We can hide spoilers behind the cut for everyone who’s still catching up.

This, I’ve found, means meeting interesting people, attending classes, and filling out paperwork. Lots and lots of paperwork. So much that I’m going to go to every red state and pitch Rev. Rakunas’s Sure-Fired Pregnancy Prevention Method, which entails making kids fill out so many forms that they lose all interest in sex. Look for me on Dr. Phil later this year.

We’re going through an agency called Vista del Mar, and the experience has been very educational (have I mentioned the paperwork?). So far, we’ve got one class down, with three more to go (including water safety, which Anne and I find funny as hell seeing how we swim in the ocean for fun). Then a social worker comes to our place and studies us and our apartment (which we’ll likely have to cover in several layers of protective foam), and, if we’re deemed worthy, we wait until VdM matches us with a birth mother. It could take eighteen months. It could take a few days. We get to be expectant parents, though I get the feeling I won’t stop holding my breath until the whole thing is finalized.

(This is the point where my parents pipe up and say, “No, you won’t stop holding your breath *ever*, smart guy.”)

I will be writing a little bit about this, but it will mostly be from a nuts-and-bolts process point-of-view. Somewhere along the line, this will stop being our story and will become our kid’s, and it’s not my place to tell that story here. I trust that you’ll bear with me.

Right. That’s all from me for now. Back to the paperwork.

I want every single parking sign in my neighborhood to have an RFID tag. I want them to ping my car during the hours there are parking restrictions. I want my car to ping me before the street sweepers arrive, so I can move my car and not give the City of Santa Monica my hard-earned money.

Keep your smartphone. I want smart parking.

This morning, the year of the bike got its official start. I took my new rig, Vita (named after that first ride because she has vitesse and vitality), down to Long Beach for the first in a series of criteriums, and I got spanked. Not as badly as in the first two crits I did, but enough to get pulled after sixteen minutes in a thirty minute race.

Still, I improved in a few small ways. First, I actually worked with a group of guys for the first time in a race, which is really the best part of bicycle racing. I dig time trials, yes, but getting into a paceline and hanging on for dear life is fun. I think I did my share up front, too, though I’ll have to look at what my Powertap recorded to confirm that.

Second, I didn’t feel all that freaked out in the mass start. In fact, I should have just got to the front of the line and let the rest of the peloton overtake me rather than spend sixteen minutes trying to catch up. It wasn’t as much a matter of fitness as it was nerves, and I’m working on tamping those down.

Third, and this is going to sound so incredibly stupid to everyone who’s ever raced, but, dammit, it’s not like you get a manual with your USAC license (and, if you do, where the hell did mine go?) that says, “Hey, if you want to corner more efficiently, start on the outside of the lane, cut across the inside, and pop back out on the outside.” After watching the Masters and Cat 4 races and seeing how their peloton lines made these beautiful arcs instead of hugging the curb all the way around and tapping on the brakes, I get it. Stay loose, stay in control, and let physics do its thing.

Dominguez Hills is in two weeks, and Valley of the Sun is right after that. Let’s see if I can get it together before then.

* By triumph, I mean that I finished under seventeen hours, and without throwing up.

Ever since, I’ve tried to get the people I know on the ballot, for both the quality of their work and the novelty of saying, “Hey, I know that name!” It hasn’t worked out as well as I’ve hoped, but no one said World Domination was easy. That’s why I hope this little nugget will spread from my site to Facebook and Twitter and beyond. You gotta start somewhere.

So, if you can nominate stuff for the Hugos, please take a look at these works. If you like them, please tell people about them. And if you really like them, please nominate them.

Best Novel: “Pandemonium,” by Daryl Gregory. Del Rey, August 2008.

Best Novella: “Far Horizon,” by Jason Stoddard. Interzone #214.

Best Novelette: “The Right People,” by Adam Rakunas (hey, I know that name!). Futurismic, October 2008.

Best Novelette: “The Elephant Ironclads,” by Jason Stoddard. The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy. Del Rey, April 2008.

Best Short Story: “Willpower,” by Jason Stoddard. Futurismic, December 2008.

Best Short Story: “Living with Creely,” Andrew Tisbert. Rosebud #41.

Best Short Story: “Tetris Dooms Itself,” by Meghan McCarron. Clarkesworld #23, August 2008.

Best Short Story: “Random Acts of Cosmic Whimsey,” by Jetse de Vries. Flurb #6.