Well, its the weekend and I am officially on vacation...

No big plans, although I am hoping to get down to the Yankee Doodle Tavern down at the Nassau Inn to slobber all over Secretary of State Don Rumsfeld's college pic and knock back a couple of bourbon old fashioneds in honor of our troops. (Maybe I can get into a fracas with some Princeton Libs while there.)

Hubby is contemplating a little jaunt down to the cradle of liberty, Philadelphia, for a little quality Four Seasons time. We hope to visit The National Constitution Center to learn a little bit more about our constitution and to improve our ability to expound on the Iraqi document.

Blogging will be...light and no doubt confused for the next week - 10 days. As no one knows(because hopefully no one's reading)I am just starting out on this odyssey and I'm still struggling a bit with writing type things.

To further complicate matters, I am also coming out of a prolonged writing drought so it's still a little more rough and herky-jerky than normal. I'm feeling like I'm kind of all over the lot with my content and that causes me to lose focus which causes me to lose speed, which causes me to not be current with stuff that's going on, which causes me to have all these rough, researched half assed, yet pertinent and interesting story ideas piled up in my blog editor. Then, the next morning I get up and start checking my blogs with my morning coffee. (I gave up on the MSM and the NY Slimes a long time ago) What do I see? Stories just like the same stories I have sitting in my blog editor, only these are really good and FINISHED! Sheesh.

For example, last night I had this really bad Moqtada Al Sadr jones and I had this really interesting piece tying in the Qawliya massacre with the Mahdi Army and the Badr Brigade clashes. Bingo. The next morning I check out Right Wing Nut House and there those guys are with and excellent piece of the same dang thing.

Then I had this pic all lined up for some "Hijab Kebab" fun. Huh. The next morning I wake up and click on The Corner - and poof! There's the same pic posted by KLo. It's the archive so you have to scroll down to find it, but trust me it was there.

There are at least three other instances of something like this happening in the brief history of my blog and quite frankly it is a tad discouraging.

Mainly because it is also the story of my literary life. I get started on some project and then boom! I go to Barnes & Noble five chapters in and boom! There it is! My idea, great story, different author. I don't know - this has to happen to other people out here slogging it out on the fringes of the blogosphere. I attended a writer's conference once and someone had this list of themes in literature boiling them all down to something ridiculous like nine or something. So all of literature in their essence came down to these nine themes. Man, this is bugging me now. I want to go to look through my notes - which have been no doubt been tossed, but still I want to go see if I can find it.

Which brings us to my other problem...I have a tendency to get distracted and start multi-tasking then getting nothing done. Case in point?

This very post I am working on started yesterday and didn't get finished. And then when I did come back to it - I was already bored with it and wanted to move on.

So here we are. (interrupted by life)

I've done about a hundred things around the casbah since writing that last sentence. With this being a long post that is only getting longer, I guess I should just get to the point of this exercise, what I had originally planned to do.

My plan was to sit down at the keyboard and seriously think about the reasons I've started this to begin with. As I recall, there were several seminal moments. The first event was the brutal murder of reporter Steven Vincent R.I.P. I had discovered his blog and had just discovered this piece which I thought would be helpful for my character development process in one of my many unfinished manuscripts. And then he was dead. It just hit me hard - reading his blog and his work had given me such a personal connection, I really felt bad for him and his family. This kind of sent me spinning off into the blogosphere. Searching, searching, searching. Reading, reading, reading. Thinking, thinking, thinking.

I ran across this from Mark Steyn:

"We have to destroy the ideology, or at least its potency — not Islam per se, but at the very minimum the malign strain of Wahabism, which thanks to Saudi oil money has been transformed from a fetish of isolated desert derelicts into the most influential radicalising force in contemporary Islam, from Indonesia to Leeds. Europeans who aren’t prepared to roll back Wahabism had better be prepared to live with it, or under it."

For some reason the phrase "A fetish of isolated desert derelicts" just stuck with me. I agreed with the sentiment and the sound of it just rang true. I read on...
Running across Snooze Button from that handsome Patrick Al-Kafir at Clarity and Resolve. He concludes this thoughtful piece by saying - Well, he's got a big copyright on the article and since I already got into trouble with him because of my errant trackback, I think I'll just say - hop on over and read the whole thing on his blog.

These three events pushed me out of my languor and back onto the keyboard and A Fetish of Isolated Desert Derelicts was born. I wanted to learn more about the Koran, the Haditha, the Islamic Jihad and the threat facing us. I wanted to add my voice to those raised against the haters who advocate it, the appeasers who excuse it and the apologista that blame western civilization for it. I wanted to inform and enlighten. I wanted to get western women more involved with the plight of their Muslim sisters and I wanted to take those same sisters to task for not speaking out against the homicidal maniacs. I wanted to rip the veil off Islam.

And I wanted to do it with humor, class and some irony. Oh, and I wanted to support our troops.

I had originally thought about coming up with a couple of different features to do this. For example: The Hijab Kabob, The Fetish of Fatuous Fatwas, The Fantasy Flight Interview, Who's Your Bad-daddy?, Virgin Suicides, and as yet to be named love and marriage features. The blog was definitely going to have a feminine slant...and here I am - writing this.

I thought writing all this out was going to help me get me more focused but it's still not happening. I was hoping I would be able to sort out my thoughts. I think part of my problem is a lack of focus - I'm trying to be all things to all blogs in one blog. And it's overwhelming me? Or am I just on the lazy side? Or do I need some of that blog crack that I swear some bloggers must be smoking because they are posting morning, noon and night!

On the other hand, since I'm not likely to I am writing again. That's one good thing. Heck, that's a big thing for me. I can't tell you how long it has been since I've had a chance for some quality writing time. I should just be happy with this - and don't get me wrong I am. But you know my literary issues. If I get an idea I better jump into the creative stream and get wet because if I don't I'll see the damn story somewhere else in five chapters!

So, I guess I'll be happy with this for now. Maybe'I'll blog a little bit later and see how it shakes out. Right now, there's a Champ road race in Montreal on the tube, so I'm going to curl up on the sofa with an afghan and The Seven Pillars Of Wisdom by T.E. Lawrence to watch it.