Still can't sleep.

Of course it's mostly because Peter Kaplan may have changed my life tonight. But I'm also trying to come up with a new name for my magazine idea.

I would've posted the idea down below, but the thing is that I accidently saved over it when I did a subsequent assignment while still in Lawrence; the only copy of it that remains is what Kaplan had in front of him tonight. We will get them back this weekend, upon which I'll promptly retype and save again. But I'll give you the basic gist.

The magazine was to be based upon one that I used to follow avidly for, like, the three issues that it existed. Starting out as Racquet, it was a tennis magazine that rarely did the kind of athlete bios and slam-pow! features like Tennis does today; instead, it was a more relaxed and refined magazine that focused on the leisure and participation side of the game. Indeed, my best memoy is of a piece by a man recalling his summers playing tennis on the Maine coast. It was the kind of literature that one rarely saw in a sports magazine then, and almost never sees now. Racquet then changed after I subscribed and relaunched as TSL, or The Sporting Life, and sought to expand to such activities as flyfishing and driving. I remember one issue coming in the mail, and then no more.

So my idea was to take this magazine and relaunch it with an even broader base, but with the same spirit intact: to be not a sports magazine, but a sporting magazine. To again highlight and enhance the participatory nature of athletics and the outdoors, while also reclaiming sports from the likes of ESPN, SI and the 24-hour media that is trying to desperately to put the same fans they claim to be "watching out for" in the seats to watch the players that are suspected of steroid use or negotiating contracts with built-in trade clauses. As such, my magazine would try to feature athletes from international and alternative sports, but that is not the main draw; neither is the product or style guides that would bring an aspect of Outside and GQ into the fold. No, the draw of the magazine is in making sport–as a pastime, as a pursuit, as an ideal–back into a literary form. Our readers may get SI, but they're also reading Esquire as well as Play and the New York Times Magazine. They want their passion for their particular athletic activity, whether for fun or competition, on the weekend or a vacaction, to be reflected by fine writing. They want to know about new fitness trends, but without the 'Get your six-pack abs while having sex 78 times a week!' attitude of Men's Health. They want reviews of golf resorts, but also want to know about other leisurely or athletic activities in the area. And they could care less about Terrell Owens. Seriously.

Originally I wanted to re-use The Sporting Life, but that's almost too old-school; there's 1950s, and then there's 1950s. On the last possible morning before I sent the assignment in I changed it to Glorious, which undoubtedly sucks but I loved the way it sounded and looked; I could see it in Gotham Ultra all across the top of the cover, with an amazing photo of a tennis player on a rooftop court in Manhattan. But even Kaplan said it was 'feminine', while this magazine would be very much masculine. So I need a new name. I've Googled 'Pursuit' or 'Pursuits', and found no magazines; I also did a Yahoo! directory search and didn't find any by just that name. I'll probably spend the next hour in bed thinking about this, so don't be surprised if I keep posting after waking up my computer with the latest entry, which I'll delete just as soon as I wake up in the morning. God I love publishing!