I'll Have A 777 Straight Up, With A Twist

If this is a 777, I'll take three, please.
Photo courtesy of:
http://www.cocktailsdrinkrecipes.com/

When I first started blogging, I have to confess that I didn't understand the purpose of blog hops, challenges, themed recurring posts, or awards. What are these strange, alien customs, and why do people do them, I wondered? What could be the possible reason?

Well, a year and a half in, I look back on my naivete (and yes I am skipping the accent on the final 'e' because I can't figure out how to get it into my post, dammit), and shake my head. I want to tell myself, these things are great, you idiot. When you get tagged in one you don't have to come up with an idea for your post that week!

So I owe Loni Townsend a big THANK YOU, because she tagged me in the 777 challenge last week, and now I don't have to come up with my own idea for this week. She also said some nice things about me, but mentioning them would negate the self-deprecating, snarky tone of this post, so I'll just say she's great, and you should go read her excerpt: it's from her WIP This World Bites, which is releasing NEXT MONTH, and which I can honestly say is hilarious and intriguing and entertaining, because I got to read it a few months ago. So, go check it out!

There - wasn't that fantastic?? Good. I'm glad you enjoyed it. Now on to the 777 challenge. I'll let Loni explain what it's all about: "For the challenge you have to choose a WIP, go to the 7th page, scroll down to the 7th line, and share the next 7 lines or so."

Easy enough, right? Well, Loni sort of requested that I choose one of my nonfiction WIPs, which is a little bit more challenging, because they're all fairly short (i.e. much less than seven pages long.) So I cheated a little bit; or rather, I put a little twist on the challenge, and double-spaced one of these pieces, and hey! look at that: it's more than seven pages long, and usable for the challenge!

So, here it is:

The hike we were merrily attempting with borrowed sneakers, one water bottle, and two apples was nearly six miles round-trip, with an elevation gain of approximately 2,200 feet. It was the sort of hike we usually did with plenty of water and food, proper shoes, and a detailed trail map: a bit difficult but entirely possible for the average weekend hiker, as long as that hiker was prepared.

Of course, we didn't know any of that when we started climbing. We thought we were on a short jaunt that would end in a glorious view, and as time passed and the day grew hotter and the trail showed no signs of ending, we started to privately doubt our trusted informant, then to openly question her, then to wish we’d never met her.

Isn't this out-of-context thing really confusing kind of fun?

Now I'm supposed to tag people, and free them from the requirement of coming up with a blog post. Unfortunately, I cannot remember who has done this and who hasn't, and who's been tagged and who hasn't...so...I'm (figuratively, not literally) taking a page out of fellow blogger M Pepper Langlinais's book, and I'm tagging all of you. 

That's right. If you're reading this, and you want to do this challenge, I say GO FOR IT. Let me know you did it and I'll give you a shout-out the next time I post...

...which will be in the New Year, because I'm taking the next two weeks off. So, take the challenge if you'd like, and comment here letting me know you did, and I'll visit you and then link to it when I get back.

In the meantime: Happy Holidays, everyone!! Have a wonderful Christmannukolstice and a Happy New Year!

The Not-Run Run

Ok folks, it's the dawning of the new blogging era I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, in which I write about stuff that's kind of about writing anything I want to. I enjoyed writing this; I hope you enjoy reading it, too. 

So last Wednesday, I didn't go for a run.

Perhaps this doesn't sound like news. I understand. For most people of varying fitness levels, it's probably not too unusual. We all have off days: days when the sky is too gray or it's raining too hard or the thermostat hovers around stupidly cold, or days after the nights we had a little too much to drink and got not-quite-enough sleep, and dragging ourselves from the warm, deep nest of our beds is just too damn hard. These are the days we don't make it to the gym, don't go for that run, skip that spin class.

Well, I say 'we', but it's not quite accurate. I have these days, but I go anyway.

This is not always a good thing. I am not an exercise saint. What I am is anxious. I lost a large amount of weight six years ago and while I've kept it off, I'm haunted by the fear that if I stop exercising for even one day it will all come rushing back, every last pound. The recognition that this fear is absurd, that skipping one day of exercise will not cause me to gain half a person's worth of weight, does nothing to lessen the brutal strength of it. So when I wake up on a Wednesday, which is my day off from my day job and therefore a day to both write and run, and I feel sluggish or lazy or just plain tired, I ignore my body's signals, shove my protesting feet into my sneakers, and head out. Every single time.

Yes. I have a tendency towards extremes. Moderation is something I'm working on.

But last week, I didn't go. I don't know why; some quiet, still instinct held me back. The fact that I could even hear this instinct, whispering like wind-blown leaves in my ear, is an achievement. Two years ago, the fear would have drowned it out. But not anymore. I listened, and I stayed in my pajamas and drank my coffee and worked, and when the sun became so bright around noon that I felt its presence like a physical hook around my spine, I went outside. But not for a run. For a walk.

It was one of those perfect, priceless September days, the sort the universe drops in our laps every now and then as if in apology for the coming New England winter. A warm, crisp day, a day washed clean, burning bright blue, with the kind of light, gentle breeze that lifts even the lowest spirits.

It was so beautiful and so precious that even though I intended to walk, I found myself running. Sprinting down narrow paths in the woods inside the park, kicking up fallen leaves; racing up small hills with the browning grass crackling beneath my feet. I ran like I haven't run since childhood, for the pure, simple joy of it. I ran because I could, because my body was strong and my legs could bend and spring and my lungs could take in great big gulps of that perfect, crisp air.

When I reached the top of a higher hill, I found I was laughing out loud. The sun kissed my cheeks and the wind caressed my hair and I laughed harder, not from the joy of running this time, but for recognition of what I'd been missing, all of those days and weeks and months and years when I forced myself to run out of fear. This. This is what I'd forgotten.

I stayed outside for a long, long time, returning home only when the sentences forming in my mind became too urgent, too pressing to ignore, and I had to go inside and put them onto paper. They came out of joy, out of space; they came because I didn't force them, and that is such a rare and precious thing that I knew I'd received two gifts that day.

All because I didn't run.

What Blog Am I, Really?

I've recently been having a bit of a blogging identity crisis. You see, the purpose of this blog is to write about the process of writing a novel. It says so, in big black letters across the top of the page, right under the header photo. I know, because I put it there myself, to remind myself about what I'm supposed to be doing when I get off-track and start talking about the perceived evil of e-readers or blog-comment etiquette. I need these reminders, or I tend to forget what I'm doing. A lot.

Here's the thing, though. I've been writing this blog for over a year now, and in the process I've learned something:

Writing a novel isn't always terribly interesting.

Gasp. Shocking, right? Who would've thought that a process involving a single person alone at a computer plumbing his or her imagination for endless details for hours and days and weeks and months and years on end might not be interesting???

Yes, well. It might seem obvious now, but when I started on this bloggy-journey, naive and hopeful and wide-eyed, I thought it would prove to be fascinating. And I mean those italics, as only a naive, hopeful, wide-eyed novice can. How fascinating!!!

And yet, it's not really fascinating at all for long stretches of time. Funny that. Weeks go by where the only honest blog post about my process is "I'm still researching," or "I'm still developing characters" or, worse, "I'm bored by my own writing in this scene, and I don't know why I'm bored, but I'm certainly not going to subject you to it until I figure it out."

For a while I tried to ignore this problem. I wrote about "still researching" and tried to make it interesting, and then I wrote about lots of other things that had nothing to do with writing a novel, all the while with this niggling, annoying pin jabbing me in the back of the head, telling me what was really happening was an identity crisis and I had to do something about it.

Obviously, the pin finally won, because here I am, doing something about it. And even better, I've devised an entirely writerly way of dealing with this problem.

I'm going to play with words.

You see, I decided that I've been defining "process" way too narrowly, as in "the actual writer things I do while working on a novel." I'm going to widen that definition to "whatever is happening in my life while I try to write a novel, and which I want to talk about." The premise being that all of the happenings are happening to me, the writer, and so they are in some way affecting the way I am writing said novel. Plus, I'm the writer, so I get to change the definition when I want to.

Perhaps it sounds like I'm making excuses. That's because I am. But I don't care.

You might now be thinking, "OK, so what does this mean for me, reading this blog?" You also might not. I don't know; I'm not in your head.

Let's pretend you are, OK? Great. Fair question. Truthfully, not too much. I'll still write about my neurotic brain and weird habits. I'll still complain about having too much to research or being overwhelmed by research or intimidated by writing characters from other ethnic backgrounds or whatever else I'm perseverating about on any given day. BUT I'll also write about something that happened to me, or a non-fiction piece I'm working on, or a story from my life that I just happen to want to talk about.

AND I'll do it without getting all guilty about it. How about that.

What about you? Do you limit yourself to a defined topic when it comes to blogging? Or, as a reader, do you get annoyed when a blogger posts about something other than what the blog is supposed to be about?