Tag: Running

Motivated!

On By Dan MelnickIn PersonalLeave a comment

The cycle continues! After running myself ragged two weekends ago, I spent most of last weekend being the laziest bum this side of lazy-bumsville. And it was awesome!

I got my running in, wrote some and had a couple hefty chunks of Final Fantasy XIV too. So, everything I wanted to accomplish on my lazy Friday got done. On top of that, my main character in FF can almost touch 50 and no longer is dressed like a sex slave. AND, not only am I 3/4 of the way finished with my latest novel, but the Pitch to Publication contest has me motivated to knock this thing out by the end of the month. If my rough outline to actual word count conversion is working, it’s looking like I’m about 25k from the end. I just want to fist bump everybody I see. I’m so motivated. Aren’t you motivated? I can’t stop saying motivated!

The weekend wasn’t entirely selfish either. We cleaned up the house some by getting rid of old clutter to replace it with new clutter. We also tackled the nursery some more. It’s functional, as in two babies could live there, but it’s not the most organized. Or so I’m told. Every time I think it looks nice, my wife either dumps more stuff in there or she just rearranges everything and leaves piles to sort through later. The babies won’t care which drawer holds their burp cloths! But I’m learning one of the first lessons of being a new dad, I suspect: keeping my mouth shut when my wife is on a rampage.

We also watched the World Cup. We’ve been following it since the beginning of the tournament and now that it’s over, it’s kind of bittersweet. I’ve grown used to looking forward to the next game during the week. We’d usually go over to the inlaws and watch it on their screen and I’ve have a text thread going on my phone with a bunch of people back home. Each game was always a mini party. So, the buildup was great and the payoff was definitely worth it, but now that it’s over, I’ll miss the festivity around it.

There’s a lesson in there too right out of Inside Out but I don’t want to ruin the movie for anyone. We got a chance to see that one too over the weekend. We used to ration our movie theater experiences like nobody’s business, but with the babies about a month away it doesn’t take much convincing to get us out there while we still can. So yeah, Inside Out is amazing! I figured, I’d like it. With the current state of Disney and Pixar, it’s pretty safe to guess that anything they come out with is going to be good and I gotta say that I was definitely not disappointed. The story was great, the music was awesome, the voice acting was freaking perfect and the whole package just left me with all the warm fuzzies I was hoping for.

Wow, looking back, that was quite the weekend wrap up! Oh, and happy belated 4th, people. The day in which we celebrated Will Smith saving us all from the aliens …

Welcome to Earf.

The Boy Blunder

On By Dan MelnickIn Writing ProcessLeave a comment

I got caught up on word count. See, I told you I would.

I also need the weather to hold out so I can mow the grass tonight. Otherwise, it’ll put a damper on the epicness of tomorrow. Here’s the deal:

I have the day off for the 4th. I plan on running when I wake up. Then I’m meeting the inlaws out for breakfast. Come back, get some writing done. Play some video games – probably Final Fantasy XIV so I can catch up to Heavensward – and maybe see a movie that afternoon. What’s that you say? The most perfect day ever? It’s pretty damn close. I’m really excited about it and hope that cutting the grass won’t somehow sneak into my dream day.

I did the math and I’m just over 3/4 of the way through my novel. That was farther than I expected, but I’m getting to that point where I’m ready to put this sucker to bed. Instead of the fatigue like last book, this time I’m getting excited to finish. There are still plenty of things that need fixing and tweaking, but I want to get the bulk of the story finished this month. I’m using Pitch to Publication to help my pacing.

Although, in an ironic – some might say, unfortunate – turn of events, my entry email got all messed up. Why haven’t Microsoft Word and Gmail learned to communicate with each other correctly, yet? It’s not like each of them is a popular choice for their chosen medium or anything …

The ending portion of the entry email is to include the first 10 pages of your manuscript, double spaced. Well of course it didn’t copy over correctly and while I was busy fiddling with the paragraph and line spacing, I must have hit the plain text function and then hitting backspace somehow sent the email. Wonderful. Thanks Google. Hopefully a contest in which the reward is editing service will overlook an editing blunder in the application. Fingers crossed.

All of this attention to my work is having me second guess my protagonist. Don’t get me wrong, it needs to be him for the story to function, but I can probably make him more relatable. At least include some better flaws or something. I’ll think on it and get back to you.

Countdown

On By Dan MelnickIn Writing ProcessLeave a comment

Writing is a discipline.

It’s true. The simplest distractions or interruptions can all too quickly rip you out of the moment. I was having another one of those days. I slept through my alarm, my back was killing me from a bad gym tweak and a morning spent helping my wife move out of her classroom, and on top of everything it was storming like a biblical apocalypse movie outside so it was pretty easy to decide that today would not be a running day. It was time to listen to my body.

Fine, well then I was going to get to work and write extra hard. I want to get this novel finished next month and this was a golden opportunity. That was until I had a fight with my wife about something stupid. Point is, the shouting scared my little creativity critters back into their trees. It took a while to coax them back down and I was finally chugging away but then my phone would ring or somebody would come in my office or they’d need me to catch a pokemon or … OK well that last one might not have been true, but it was pretty close.

Anyway, it just reinforced the whole concept of you can’t always choose when you write. Something will always come up that either sounds more appealing or is actively trying to stop you. Unless you make a living by writing and your personal time is also your work time, time management is pretty freaking huge. This goes beyond turning off your WiFi or whatever so you don’t get sucked down the internet rabbit hole. This is sentences flowing freely and then – oh something shiny! – the well literally drying up a moment later. This is where the discipline part comes in.

Yes you can’t always choose when you write, but its hard to go in cold too. Prewriting, brainstorming, anything that’ll keep me thinking about the plot in between writing sessions is huge. As I type this post, my phone is buzzing out of control as my wife keeps texting me. See? Distractions can come from anywhere.

I got my words in today and at the end of the day, that’s all that matters. Kind of like the first goal of the last Women’s World Cup game. It wasn’t pretty, but I’ll take it. The longer these distractions go on, the less I write. The less I write, the less I like the book, the less I like the book, the harder it is to finish. You get the picture.

My life has become a ticking clock and in a month and a half – maybe only a month?! – it’s going to explode and reveal two baby dragons. That’s a good thing. An amazing thing. A thing I’ve been looking forward to for almost 3 years. But if I already have all of these distractions vying for attention, I imagine that shit’ll increase exponentially with the onset of babies.

Everything’s Amazing and Nobody’s Happy

On By Dan MelnickIn Day Job, PersonalLeave a comment

This morning has just been one big comedy of errors.

I was going to go for a run. I love running. I need to run. It burns off all the excess stress and worry and even pent up excitement. I feel so much better throughout the day if I ran that morning.

So I woke up ready to go at 6:30. Then I heard it was raining. OK, not running anymore. I take the dog out. Rain dies down. OK, running is back on. I figure what the hell. I’ll wear a hat and a poncho and feel like a superhero. I finish eating and get ready. It’s 7 am. I spend the next 15 minutes stretching. Then I can’t find the poncho. That takes another 10 minutes. I could run without it, but I’d get soaking wet, probably ruin my phone and with my luck, catch a cold. And seeing as how I’m the only able-bodied person in my household right now, I kind of need to stay healthy.

Grumbling, I give up on running. It’s now 7:25. I can still make the gym if I hurry. I throw work clothes in a bag, tramping through the house for the umpteenth time and figure my wife probably hates me at this point as she tries to sleep. I take out the trash and head off to the gym.

It’s still raining, but a light rain. The kind of rain you don’t mind running in. So naturally everyone around me is driving 10 miles an hour under the speed limit. This isn’t snow people. It’d been raining for hours. Going 35 isn’t going to cause your car to hydroplane …

I finally get to the gym. It’s 7:42. What should have been a 12 minute drive took like 20. My membership expired. Well, turns out it expired at the end of April but the machine was down and nobody caught it. Until today that is. So that took a minute to renew. I go to the locker room and somebody’s claimed my locker. It’s a small room but there’s a core group of regulars. We use the same lockers every day. This is inexcusable.

I race through a 45 minute workout in under 30, rush off to shower and change and discover the jerk who took my locker. It’s an elderly gentleman who’s always there. I talk to him all the time. He should know better. Meanwhile, I get a frantic call from my wife who thinks I’m out running and never came home. I explain my misery.

I get to work on time, but today I got roped into conducting an interview for our open GA position. Thing is, that’s not my job. I have nothing to do with this. Someone else in the office is supposed to handle all of this, but somehow it ended up on my shoulders …

It’s just one of those mornings.

So I know what you’re thinking and believe me, I’m thinking it too. These are totally first world problems. Oh boo hoo I was late to the gym. Oh my god I had to renew my membership when I got a month and a half for free! And how inconvenient to interview somebody when it could land them a job and literally better their future. Yeah, I get it. These aren’t real problems. I’m kind of mad at myself for being such a whiny baby about them.

Thing is, it’s good to vent. With my wife super pregnant, most everything falls on me. I’m starting to crack a little. Don’t get me wrong, what she’s going through is so much more important and I’m not mad at anybody in the situation, it’s just some added pressures in life. Normally, I’m fine dealing with everything. Hell, I welcome it. But that’s because I run. I can run out those stresses and I feel better about life. Puts things in perspective.

Everything that happened this morning could have been totally manageable, I probably wouldn’t have given it a second thought if I’d just gone running …

EDIT: I’ve been dicking around for 45 minutes so I wouldn’t get caught up in something before the interview. Just rediscovered(?) the interview is Monday at 10, not today. It continues!

Summer Coat

On By Dan MelnickIn Personal, Writing ProcessLeave a comment

There’s been some debate about the emphasis of story structure before you even begin writing over the years. As usual, it comes down to what kind of writer you are. The biggest knock against it is that having too much of your story beats planned out takes the fun out of writing it in the first place. It becomes too formulaic. Too dull. I’ve come to the conclusion that if I need to label myself into a writing category, I’m probably most like a “plotter.” I need an outline to show me where I’m going and as a resource to collect all of the random scraps and pieces and I can’t use in my current scene but I know will show up later. My outlines tend to be detailed in some places and incredibly vague in others. It’s my road map that gets me where I need to go.

This is the first time that I built in actual story structure beats right into the outline. Up until now, I’d like to think that I had an intuitive notion of what needs to go where. I wasn’t always right, but that’s kind of the point. So this time, I have the thing divided into the four typical parts with a few notes to myself at each junction to remind me not to make the protagonist too awesome yet or remember, the guy should be scared at this point.

It’s definitely helping keep the story on track, but more than that, all of these beats give me something to shoot for. Normally, I’m driven by A.) the ending and B.) at least one really cool scene that I’ve been thinking about since I’d even begun writing. But now, in addition to A and B, I have all of these smaller destinations to gear up for. If anything, I feel that it’s helping my pacing and lets my story breathe as I work up to such and such and then fall back down again for the effects. Established writers, you may be smacking your foreheads right now and saying “duh,” but I wanted to point this out for anyone else who’d been teetering on the fence with me. This whole novel so far has just been chock full of revelations for me.

So much so that I was able to convince my wife to let me write when we go away next week. When it comes to our Disney vacations, I write like a maniac beforehand and then make up my lost work afterward. Usually, we’re too busy during the trip for me to get any time to actually sit down and write. If anything, the only battle I pick is to go running a few mornings before whatever else she has planned starts. This time around, we have next to nothing going on. That’s the whole point. We want some rest and relaxation and with her being uber pregnant, she’s going to want to take it easy. It was her idea for me to bring the netbook this time!

Another thing I wanted to mention …

It’s shedding season, so that’s awesome. I pulled all of this off of my dog last night.

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Here’s a closeup and a sandal to show the scale.

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I’m seriously considering saving all of her fur and stuffing a pillow. Then I will send that gross pillow to my brother because who really wants a pillow stuffed with dog fur?

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Regardless, she looks pretty happy.

I probably won’t be posting next week. All of that time will be used for writing, running and probably eating instead. Hope you all have a good week and I’ll see you when we get back!

Seahorse

On By Dan MelnickIn Personal, Writing ProcessLeave a comment

Work is finally turning around, my friends. I mean real work. Work-work. It’s one of three times a year that constitutes crunch time in the truest meaning of the term. Normally, it’s a black hole sucking abyss that is all consuming. A mad dash where I work as hard and as fast as I can for a week and a half and pray I make it out alive.

This time around is a little different, though. I was driving into work feeling pretty pleased with myself. I ran 7.5 miles this morning and I was working on some prewriting in my head when I remembered what I was actually driving myself too. The black hole does not allow time for things like writing on the side or you know, lunch. I went from super psyched to super pissed in about one second. But then I remembered that I could finally start training. It’s taken two months, but they’ve finally replaced my old position at work with somebody else. All this work that has to be done for this looming deadline? Yeah, that’s her worry now, not mine. OK. OK. She doesn’t know how to do any of it yet … So I get into work, ready to give up all of my free time and start working with her. We’re at it maybe 45 minutes when she says she has a handle on things and I should go do something else and check in later so she can practice. Fine by me.

Black hole averted.

I got back to my office and for the first time in a long time had nothing to do. Looks like I was getting in some writing after all.

I got to expand on a scene I started over the weekend. After placing both my protagonists in mortal peril, the next bullet point on my outline has them recovering with a side of exposition. I realized, though, that if I did it that way, it felt too much like an info dump. Instead, I spent a thousand words just on having one of them wake up and take a shower. It sounds dumb, but I think that after everything they’d been through – the reader included – that all parties involved needed time to breathe. We could build to the exposition later, but for right now, we all needed a hot shower to calm the eff down.

When people talk about the writing process, the concept of pacing will sometimes get brought up. It falls right in there with scenes and sequels, but it’s often a judgement call. You can plot it and plan for it, but sometimes it just makes sense. The funny thing is that I first started to grasp the need for pacing when I started writing comic books.

For years, that was all I wanted to do. I’d do anything to break into the comics industry. I remember showing my first full length script to a friend and a professional in the biz and after padding my ego, the first thing he said was that it needed at least one splash page. I thought those were just for the artists to show off or something, but he explained that no, it allows the story to breathe. Yes, they’re usually big, dramatic moments, but it’s really just a place to slow everything down for a minute and let the reader take it all in. They’re like a visual pause.

I’ve taken that advice to heart. It’s a little different to have a splash page in a novel. At this point, they usually fall under the wow category instead of the reflection one, but it was thinking about stories visually that helped me wrap my burgeoning writing brain around the concept of pacing in general. You can’t always be rush-rush-rush, hell, even Sonic stopped and had a chili dog every once in a while.

Over the weekend, my wife and I sat through an all day intensive baby basics course at the hospital. We got to meet some personnel and see what the rooms look like for the big day in a couple of months. It helped alleviate a lot of worry and put some more excitement in the hype tank. It’s not that I wasn’t looking forward to them before, but now I’m really excited about it! We also sorted through some baby clothes people had loaned us.

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We have a lot. And that’s just for the boy.

And when we were at the hospital, there was one part of the class that had all of these physical activity stations. Most of which were places to practice hand and hip massages for when she’s in labor and has nothing to do but sit and wait through the pain. She got to relax for a change and I pushed and pulled on stuff I didn’t know could go those directions but I guess they helped reduce pressure somewhere. Go figure.

Oh and I got to try one of these on. She said she was getting tired so I told her I’d carry the babies for a while.

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Assemble

On By Dan MelnickIn PersonalLeave a comment

It’s been a rather momentous couple of days …

First and foremost, this morning, my wife and I went to the doctor’s for the monthly ultrasound. Although, this is the last monthly as we’re heading into biweekly territory from now on. Everything is great. Both of the little dragons are coming along nicely. Adequate limbs and digits. Hearts and spines. It was funny. I was watching the flickering images of the ultrasound, looking for the ghostly visages of my future children’s faces and it occurred to me that if I spotted something else: wings, horns, a tail … I don’t even think I would have blinked. That’s the kind of head space I operate in. Bat wings on my kids? Sure. That makes sense.

I’ve made a couple of deadlines for myself … things to accomplish before the babies are born in August. These are in addition to the usual house stuff: Fix the nursery, retile the kitchen floor, clean up the mess so we don’t look like hoarders anymore … you know. I’ve decided that I’m going to finish my current novel and run a half marathon before the babies arrive. I’ve worked it out with myself. I don’t necessarily need a sponsored event. I just need a day where I go for a run and end up hitting 13.1 miles.

I’m an avid runner and I’ve done it before, but I’m not really in half marathon shape anymore. So with the weather finally nice again, I’ll be out there more often than not. Actually, on Saturday, I hit a milestone. Since I’ve been keeping tracking of my running miles over the last couple of years, I hit my 1,000th mile on Saturday! That’s like running from New York City to Daytona Beach, Florida! (Yes, I Googled that distance. I tried for Orlando because I thought it sounded more impressive, but that was like 1077 miles instead … soon.) It’s only taken a few years and I know I’ve missed some runs in there, but seeing the number laid out like that makes me feel pretty damn good about myself.

Lastly, I saw the Avengers: Age of Ultron over the weekend like the rest of the world. I don’t need to post a review here because, hey, who didn’t see it, right? But I wanted to say that I liked it. I liked it a lot. And I’m glad I did.

A few months ago, a good friend of mine, David, had a heart attack while running. He was 51 and as far as I knew, in pretty solid shape. He was actually actively reforging that shape into something better. He loved running and he loved Marvel. My god, did he love Marvel. I’ve been reading Spider-man and his buddies for almost 20 years now, but David rekindled my inner fanboy like noone else. He was just a passionate guy. Every little snippet, tease, image or rumor just made his day and he loved to talk about it. There were other things going on in his life and Marvel was exactly the wish fulfillment and escape he needed. He’d been counting down the days for the Age of Ultron release.

It may sound silly now, but after his accident, my first thought was that he’d never get to see how this grand experiment ended. He had so much emotionally invested in this franchise that this revelation actually hurt. Time has passed and the blow has softened, but watching the newest Avengers movie in the same weekend I hit my 1,000th mile got me thinking. If he’d been around, we probably would have grabbed a beer and engaged in a discussion along the lines of:

David: Dude … Awesome!

Me: And when he-

David: So awesome! God and when-

Me: Loved it!

Rinse and repeat.

I miss ya, buddy, but I’ve read comics long enough to know that no hero is every truly gone. Even though I couldn’t share the events of the weekend with him directly, I know he would have been both proud and excited. It really has been a great couple of days.

Until next time. Excelsior!