Walking (with) The Walk

If you've been reading this blog for a while, or just are used to hearing me yammering about my running all the time, you may have heard me mention an iPhone/Android app called Zombies, Run!, which has helped keep my runs interesting by adding a storyline and periodic zombie chases to them.  Now, the same UK-based folks behind that game have teamed up with the NHS and Department of Health to come up with something even more of you may be interested in.

It's called The Walk, and instead of setting it up when you're about to go exercise, you just start it at the beginning of the day, put it in your pocket or your bag, and let it keep track of your activity as you go.  All of the walking/running/stair-climbing/etc. you do during the day counts towards your progress in a story that involves your mysterious protagonist walking across the length of Great Britain to deliver an important package after an EMP blast shuts down almost all of the electronics in the countryside.  Hitchcockian spy antics abound.  As you make progress you unlock audio clips that tell more of the story, and there are a number of side-quests and achievements you can work on to switch things up as you go along.

I'm three days into it so far, and I've really been enjoying it.  It doesn't track my bike riding (the support folks I contacted said that motion's too complicated to monitor accurately), but the pull of the story has gotten me going out of my way to get in a few extra steps here and there throughout the day.  I've even been taking the stairs up and down to my ninth-floor office!  Progress is tracked by time, not by distance, so there's something here for folks at all levels of activity.  There's even an adaptive feature that can lower the number of minutes you need to stay active in order to complete the "missions" that make up the game (a slider in the settings screen lets you take control of this manually, too).

Now that the weather's getting colder outside (it's snowing like crazy here in New York as I type this), getting out and traveling long distances on foot may be a less-than-enticing proposition, but The Walk has me tempted to brave the cold a bit more.  I'd recommend it to anybody trying to avoid spending the entire holiday season curled up in a blanket on the couch (though hopefully you'll have time for that as well).  It's available for iPhones, iPads, and Android devices, and it's $4.99, but for the next few days you can get it on sale for $3.99.

Before I go, I should probably mention that buying an app called "The Walk" can prove quite difficult in the vast wasteland landscape of the iPhone's App Store, especially when there's a little show you may have heard of called The Walking Dead that's inspired quite a few apps of its own.  The company that makes The Walk is called Six to Start, so adding that to your search should be enough to narrow it down.  Enjoy!

Thoughts from a Binge-Writing Hangover

I'm back!  November's over, so I don't have my NaNo writing anymore as an excuse not to post here.  (Not that I wasn't finding plenty of excuses before that---this place has been a ghost town over the past few months)  I'm actually happy to be back to writing these entries: I started to miss writing as soon as I finished National Novel Writing Month (NaNo) this year, oddly enough.

Not that I wrote a story so amazing that it inspired me to have tons of confidence in my abilities, mind you.  I finally got all of Songs from Town (my NaNo novel for this year) that I could think of squeezed out of my system, and it had its moments, but I really had to push myself some days.  I ended up on surprisingly few rants, and there was only one major break from reality, so that's a good sign.  Writing did come easier to me this year, I must admit.  I even managed to get ahead of pace on Thanksgiving, which led to a rare lack of panic going into the home stretch.  It certainly helped that my novel this year was disjointed by design, going off to join new groups of characters at will.  I hardly found any characters that I wanted to stick with for more than a single chapter, though, which is unusual for me.  Normally it's the characters that drive my writing, but here they were often just cocktail napkin sketches in comparison to what I'm used to.  And many of them were horrible, horrible people.  I did, surprisingly, manage to tie up quite a few hanging plot strands in the last few chapters, albeit not in very organic or satisfying ways.  To expect that kind of result given how little I'd planned though, would be like betting on a miracle.

My wife was neck and neck with me all through this month, and for the first time I actually managed to validate ahead of her!  I ended up having to write an extra thousand words though, since a whole bunch of the ones I did write were stolen away from me by the validator.  I think it was my predilection for em-dashes that did me in---the words that they connected were counted as separate words in NeoOffice, as they should have been, but in the validator the fact that I didn't put spaces in there came back to bite me in the ass.  Still, I cranked those extra words out without too much trouble.  (I think I'll go back to Scrivener next year though: trying to find older scenes for reference in a ninety-some-page document was a major headache)

It's always a painful process for me to get back into writing after a long time away.  I always vow that I'm going to not take as long before I start again each year, but each year I end up losing track of that vow in the same doldrums that eat up a whole bunch of New Year's resolutions.  At least this past year I got a whole bunch of revising done (though I'm still only halfway through Suckers, the novel I was doing it for), and I started a promising new novel called Delta OUTSIDE of NaNo, which is unheard of for me.  Songs from Town was actually supposed to be a prequel to Delta (which still only has a few chapters to it after I got hung up on where to go next), but it ended up becoming its own creature, with only a hasty, eye-rolling tie-in at the end.  The bits of it that I had before November started were with me long before Delta came around though, so that makes sense.

Now I need to get back to revising.  The holidays are going to distract me all over the place, but I've got a good story with real potential, and I'm not going to let it flounder just because there are so many new and exciting things I could be doing otherwise.  The NaNo folks say that getting that Shitty First Draft (SFD) out of the way is the hardest part, and on some level it might be, but going back through that draft with a fine-toothed comb and taking out the shitty parts can be nearly as difficult, if not more so.  When you actually have to look at your own work with a critical eye again it can be deflating, and I think that in many ways I'm my own worst critic.  That's a good thing to be in the long run, I think, but there can be times of despairing, of thinking that I'll never be more than a talentless hack doomed to obscurity, can be hard to take sometimes.  (Granted, I may at least be doomed to obscurity anyways, but I'm never going to get anywhere unless I at least make peace with that eventuality)  Thank god I have such an amazing wife to get me through all this.  Her confidence in me begins where my own confidence in myself ends, and I always strive to be just as supportive to her.  And she's actually getting results!  The anthology that accepted her short story is supposed to finally be coming out sometime this month, and I'm over the moon for her success.  She's my inspiration and my rock, and together we'll at least get one or two of all our crazy dreams realized.