Writing vs. Running

I ran a 10K this morning up in Flushing Meadows Corona Park in Queens.  It wasn't my best race, given that even by 8am in the morning when the race started the temperature was already at 86 degrees, and I'm one hell of a sweater.  Granted, I'm not sure anybody ran their best race today, since I finished pretty well in the pack.  It's actually my fastest 10K so far, unless you count any given 10 kilometers from the 15K I ran back in April when the temperature was actually reasonable and my miles went by 30 seconds faster.  (It feels weird to be measuring distance in miles when a race is in kilometers, but that's how we do things in this country, apparently)

Like I mentioned last time, running's been taking up a lot of my time in the past few years, and that's time that I could be spending writing and revising novels or short stories or anything else that I might be able to find a publisher for.  Sometimes it feels kind of selfish, since running (or at least running in races) is really something that I'll only ever really be doing for myself (unless I volunteer for a charity like Team for Kids, which is something I've been meaning to look into for a while now).  My writing is a hobby that I do in the hopes of someday reaching an audience, which might not be the most noble or useful cause in the world, but I'd certainly feel good about making somebody else's day a little more interesting.

So am I going to have to choose between the two, or sacrifice running in order to have enough time to focus on my writing?  No, I don't think I'm gonna do that.  I can already see me forcing myself to stare at a blank page endlessly during a dry period, trying to will creatures to life that just won't come.  Couldn't I spend that time better by running?  I mean, it's not like I'm constantly thinking up story ideas when I'm out jogging around the neighborhood, but I don't listen to music while I do it, either, and I think that ends up having a pretty calming effect on my mind.  I need that calmness: that break from the responsibilities of my job and my household and my family.  I mean, I enjoy all three of those parts of my life, but sometimes I'm seized with an anxiety that I can't quite quantify when I'm surrounded by them for too long at a time.  There may be medications for such a feeling, but I've always worried about the effect that psychology-altering drugs might have on my creativity and my personality.  As long as I can run though, or go lift some weights, or bang away at the piano, I have an immediate outlet for that anxiety.  Writing provides that sometimes, but the effect isn't always immediate, and there's often some higher-level problem solving involved.  I need things in my life that I can just do, finish, and then look back on and say, "I did this!" without feeling like I'm wasting my time (which may be part of the reason I've drifted away from video games over the years...  That's a story for another time though).

So I'll keep running, and I'll keep writing.  The writing may come more slowly, but at least I have my daily entries to give me something under my belt pretty often.  In fact, I just signed up for the monthly challenge for July on 750 Words, where I need to write the titular number of words every day of the month in order to win.  Gamification has worked out well for me in the past (thanks, Fitocracy), so I'm hoping it'll work for my writing as well.  Granted, I've tried and failed at one of these challenges before, but I've been on a good streak lately (with the exception of one very busy day), and I'm hoping to continue it for a good while longer.  There are badges on 750 words for as many as 365 consecutive days, but I'm not gonna hold myself to a mountain quite that tall just yet.  I'm just going to take this one day at a time, and see how far it gets me.

I'm a better runner than I was last year, and I think I'm a better writer than I was a year ago too, although obviously the second of these claims is a lot harder to quantify.  In both cases I'm pretty sure that I can get better if I just keep plugging away at it.

On Writing, not Writing, then Writing Again

Last night I was thinking about getting back into blogging, and maybe even blogging about writing, in order to get myself to write more, even if it's just writing about writing.  So I go to my long-neglected blog, and what do I find?  I had exactly the same idea almost exactly a year ago, and I never followed up on it.  At all.  Also, I'm cringing reading those words, wondering how this stranger from the past ever could have thought what he was doing was witty, or original.  Maybe that's too harsh, but that's how I felt skimming those words, unable to read more than a few at a time.  Maybe it's the hopefulness of it all that bothers me the most, knowing how little has been accomplished since then, like that statue of Ozymandias lying in ruins amid the endless desert.

It's not exactly like I've been idle since then, though.  I've moved to Brooklyn, run another marathon, changed jobs, GOTTEN MARRIED...  All those things too a lot of time and attention, and it's shown in how little I've watched TV or played video games over the past years.  It still doesn't feel like things have entirely settled down (there's another marathon coming up in November, after all), but I don't think I have quite so many major milestones ahead of me at the moment.

So should I try this crazy experiment again?  Will it end up the same way?  Yes, and god I hope not.  Why have I started to feel hopeful again?  Well, a lot of it has to do with the fact that a friend of mine introduced me to a site called 750 Words a few months ago, and it's given me an excuse to start writing again in a non-NaNo capacity.  I was given extra incentive by a writing course I took back in the spring that introduced me to the concept of "morning pages", where you write at three pages worth of whatever comes into your head first every day, just to keep yourself writing.  So far I've written over 40,000 words on it during about 50 not-all-consecutive days, although I can't say I'll be sharing those words with the world at large anytime soon.  I've been writing words more to get them out of my system than to speak to any particular audience, so I've spent many of them going on and on about topics too quotidian or inane to be worth anybody else's time, and in some cases I've written out thoughts too personal and/or specific for me to feel like letting loose on the world at large (where they'll immediately be swallowed up by the din of another million voices aching to be heard, but still...).

The only problem is, if I'm going to start writing for an audience again, it's going to slow my writing down, making these entries take longer to write and lowering the chances that I'll actually follow through with them.  I'm not going to force myself to vomit every single entry onto my blog, but there are a number of topics that have been swirling around my head that I'd like to work through on the page, including some thoughts on stories past and present that would do me some good to address.

It feels good to get all this out onto a page, and I'd definitely recommend morning pages in general and 750 words in particular (they have badges, too!) to anyone who may be reading this who's also writing-inclined.  And if you'd like to follow along with my little experiment, be warned: I haven't turned my inner editor off completely (I find that downright impossible, and I think it's made my rewrites less painful), but I'm not going to be going through everything I write with a fine-toothed comb to make sure it's actually worth reading or even grammatically correct.  (Granted, I don't suppose many bloggers do this anyways, but I digress)  I'll try to excise anything that's obviously me just trying to fill words, so not every published entry may make it all the way to 750, which is probably for the best.  And if you are reading, please feel free to go ahead and comment!  It always helps to know that I'm not just hurling all these words into the abyss.  Even so, the abyss is still better than keeping my ideas in my head, where they'll quickly fester and fade.  When they're on the page they have a way of multiplying, regardless of who ever actually sees that page.

On Writing

I'm thinking of becoming a writer.

"But dude," you might ask, if 'dude' is a term that you favor, "how can you hope to make a career out of the written word when you haven't update your blog in a year and a half?  Surely this does not bode well."

That is quite an astute observation!  Rest assured, I'm making no plans whatsoever to leave my day job behind and spend my days concocting vast reams of prose.  I'm going to stay a programmer just as long as they'll let me, because I'm not an irresponsible idiot.  (Although there are persuasive arguments against that... (Um, not the part about me being an irresponsible idiot))  When they stop letting me program for my current company, though---and god knows that's not unheard of, given these uncertain economic times, my company's history in particular, and my experience with my last job---all bets are off (except for the whole "needing money to live" part).

Good lord, just looking at all the parentheticals in that last paragraph makes me cringe; am I really cut out to be a storyteller?  In a way, writing's always been my job, since I already spend my days in front of a computer, creating worlds of the words, not-quite-words, numbers, and odd punctuation that constitute my Java code.  I'd argue that every program is a story, though usually not a linear one, and often not an interesting one.  The world of code has its good writers and its bad writers; I'd like to think that I'm one of the better ones, although I don't think that fact particularly qualifies me to write anything else.

No, I got into writing through NaNoWriMo, and as a result I now have over two hundred thousand words of (mostly rushed, non-publishable) fiction to my name.  I recently finished workshopping about a quarter of those words (heavily revised from their original form) with some of my best and most critical friends, and the results of the experience were encouraging enough to make me believe that I can turn the words into something resembling a book.  It's a tale of vampires versus zombies, so no, I certainly don't have any lofty artistic pretensions here, but it may actually be something that a good chunk of people will enjoy reading, even given how played-out both those races of creatures have become at this point.

Now the question is how quickly I can muster up the energy to revise the story at least one more time, fix a few awkward elements, and find a way to make it about 50% longer.  No big deal, right?  Now please excuse me while I go hyperventilate in that corner over there...

Fallout 3: My Life as a Tutorial

I'm still going through the training parts of Fallout 3, but I've got some early thoughts:

• Hey, Liam Neeson's my dad! And, um, his wife dies giving birth to me. Hmm... I didn't realize the uncomfortable (and completely unforeseeable) real-life parallel there until just now.
• Woah, that's some intense customization they let you do with your look. Favorite part: the half-million interestingly-titled facial hair options.
• The whole concept of teaching you how to play the game via flashes of your life from birth to adulthood is a pretty cool idea. What's not cool? Turret controls. Walking around like I'm driving a tank is something I've never been able to quite get the hang of. Can't we just assume that I want to face in the direction I'm moving unless I say otherwise? At least I can invert the up/down part...
• I'm also really digging the little kids' book that introduces your stats.
• My "G.O.A.T." (S.E.?) exam says that I have a future as the Vault's chaplain, which apparently makes me good with bartering, medicine and lock picking. Okay...
• Ooh, exciting things are happening, and it looks like I'm about to put those lock picking skills to good use!

To be continued...

Doin' Time on LittleBigPlanet

So the other night I finally set up the PlayStation 3 that I'd been using as a carrot to get me to finish NaNoWriMo (see my last post; yay, my slacker vampire vs. zombies story is complete!). After giving the controllers an extra day to charge, last night I finally jumped into the first of the two games that came with the thing: LittleBigPlanet (LBP).

My first two thoughts:

1. Maaan I wish I had as much time for playing video games as I did in the good old days.
2. Nintendo systems have been spoiling me with how fast they let me get into a game.

Okay, maybe that second point could stand a little explanation. Before I could start playing LBP, I was forced to download three updates for LBP. Now granted, this isn't something that's gonna happen every time I boot the game up, but geez... I'm somebody who grew up with cartridges, where you had to make damned sure that a game was 100% before it shipped and oh god I sound like an old geezer now I'll just shut up.

So I was a bit miffed, but when the plummy narration kicked in I started feeling all warm and fuzzy inside again. I love all the personality they crammed into these little "sackboy" characters, and the first level was a pretty refreshing way to get the credits sequence taken care of. Just one thing, guys: ease up a little on telling me how wonderful and creative your game world is. That's my job, okay? I'll get around to creating my own levels later; just let me explore a little first.

I customize my guy as a little penguin-mozarthair-mustache dude, and I'm off to the races. Ooh, pretty colors! I get to enact violence upon Humpty Dumpty for extra points! The tutorial stuff comes in a little hot and heavy (I'd like to play around with the concepts they teach me for a little while longer before learning new ones), but I can see how other people might be more impatient to get past the learning phase and into the wider world.

Oh, and there's stuff to collect! Lots of stuff! And it lets you customize stuff more! And... wow... that's quite a bit of stuff I've collected there already... It reminds me of Animal Crossing; I hope I don't end up with "stuff fatigue" like I did with that game.

I'm still getting the hang of the controls. Moving between the foreground and the background is an interesting twist, but having three different "depths" may have been a bit of a stretch: sometimes I move between them without meaning to, and it's hard to tell how far back some of the things floating in the air are.

All in all it's been a fun experience so far, although I wish there was a bit more of a story to keep the momentum going from one level to the next. I understand why that's not a huge priority, given that the whole "build your own level" aspect is one of the game's big selling points, but it would've been nice.

Next up: Fallout 3, which promises to eat up hundreds of hours of my time if I let it.

National Novel Writing Month

It took me a few days, but I'm finally got ahead of the day's word count for a change:

Watch this space to see my progress (or lack thereof)!

Edit: Now that I look at it, the word count on this widget is wrong (i.e. way lower than it should be). Oh well...

Edit 2: Hey, it's fixed again! (Or at least in is as I'm writing this) Still not 100% sure I trust it, but... we'll see.

Shouting Infinity?

I want to try a fairly ridiculous stunt this fall for NaNoWriMo, but first I want to talk about it in a way that should show if it's worth doing or not. My plan would shut out that popular fifth symbol that's so hard to work around, but I want to do it in a way that won't look as though I'm doing a bunch of cocky grammatical gymnastics to avoid it. Fifty thousand words is a damn gigantic goal to start with, but to do it this way runs toward downright insanity. How am I going to stop it all from sounding as though I'm straining to sound normal, and how am I going to do that for fifty thousand words if I'm not a particularly fast typist to start with?

I'm studying what I'm going up against right now, and it turns out that what I'm trying to do is known as a lipogram. A book known as Gadsby is what I'm trying to outdo with this particular kind of lipogram; it's also fifty thousand words long, but it it took far upwards of my thirty days to finish. So what I'd do would still qualify as a fairly significant thing.

But I don't know... It's taking a lot of work just to wrap my brain around what I'm doing right now, with this blog post, and this is just a microscopic dot of what I'd find my sorry ass staring down if I bound my hands this way for a full month of quick typing. Could it possibly work? Could I find a story that would sound okay in this format? Writing this way isn't as much fun as I thought, but I'm still just finding my way. It could smooth out if I just plug away at it for days and days, couldn't it? I still don't know if I can summon up that kind of gumption, though. What do you think? Is it worth it?