Author: Pavowski

I am a teacher, runner, father, and husband. I am an author-in-progress. I'm bad at jiu-jitsu. I know just enough about a lot of things to get me into a lot of trouble.

Bamboo Patience

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This is one I tossed off while I was guest-posting at LindaGHill’s site many moons ago. It’s a good one, though, and I wanted to have it on my site, too, because I’m greedy like that.

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I’ve just read a fascinating article (which is always dangerous) and I went and generalized it (which is always entirely justifiable… maybe not) and made it about me (which… come on, I’m a blogger, what do you expect).

An article about bamboo.

I’m not a gardener. In fact, if the word “gardener” has a polar opposite, then I’m that. (Blighter? Destroyer of things green? Seriously, you should see my front yard. By which I mean, my front collection of weeds.) But through the whimsy of the internet, I found myself reading this article about bamboo farmers and success. It’s worth five minutes of your time, but here’s the quickly-generalized, me-centric summation of the article.

Bamboo is one of the fastest-growing plants on the planet. It grows so quickly and so prolifically, and is so incredibly strong (it has a tensile strength close to that of steel) that…

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Double (Stroller) Trouble

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Running is hard, right?

I mean, it’s so hard that for a lot of people, the simple and straightforward difficulty of heaving air in and out of the lungs, hammering the legs one after another against the pavement, swinging the arms like disembodied chicken wings, and proceeding in that fashion for — what, five minutes? ten? twenty? — is enough to send them screaming from the prospect of ever running again. “Not for me,” they’ll say. “Maybe if I’m being chased,” they’ll say. “Bad for my knees anyway,” they’ll say.

AND it’s hard making the time to do it. Even just starting out, you have to budget a solid thirty minutes to each and every run (walk-run, walk-walk-run, twenty minutes of walking with two minutes of running, and every other permutation included). Add to that a few minutes of stretching (you are stretching, right?) and a few minutes of warm-up. Then, of course, unless you’ve somehow mastered the leaking of pain and suffering out through your pores, there’s a requisite cool-down and shower when you get back. Personally, I can attest that if I neglect the post-run shower, my wife will maintain a ten-foot bubble around her person at all times until I get around to it. So round up and call it an hour. That’s an hour. Each and every time you step out the door, that’s an hour of your life down the drain, until you really catch the bug, and then the hour can easily turn into two or more on the weekend. But let’s be conservative and call it three hours a week. That’s a Law & Order marathon. That’s a hellagood nap. That’s a Lord of the Rings movie, which you’re watching again instead of exercising because help, Legolas is so dreamy.

So it’s hard to do and it’s hard to make time for. And that’s before you’re married. And before you have kids. Once you check those little boxes on your triplicate form of life, running gets even harder — because you’re more tired all the time — and tougher to make time for — because you have no time left! So if you want to keep it going, you make sacrifices.

What form do those sacrifices take? Well, you can give up sleep and start running at 4 in the morning. If you live close enough to work, you can run there and back, although you might run into some interesting difficulties caused by your hygiene. Or you can find ways to double up and do two things at once.

That’s what my wife and I did not long after our son was born — we bought one of those jogging strollers. And I loved it. And I hated it. Loved it because suddenly I could get my runs in when it was convenient, get the boy out of the house and into some fresh air, and give my wife some time to herself. Hated it because it makes the run into a full-body workout about twice as intense as the run itself. But the sprout loved riding in the stroller, so it was all good.

Then we had sprout #2. And suddenly all the headaches and impracticalities of parenting get magnified — not doubled, as you might expect, but exponentially more difficult. Time is even harder to come by. Luckily, the same solution presented itself anew: my sister and her husband were generous enough to get us a double jogging stroller.

I’ve written before about the singular experience of being a dad pushing around a double stroller. The reactions I’ve had are universally positive, and I get a lot of reactions, because this thing is hard to miss. While the single stroller is a somewhat odd-looking variation of a well-known accoutrement of family life, the double stroller is a whole different animal. It’s massive. It’s unwieldy. It doesn’t fit down the aisles of some grocery stores.

Knowing all that, I’ve been tentative about the prospect of actually using it for its designed purpose — to load the kids up in it (both of them, simultaneously) and go for a run. It’s a damn sight heavier than the single, partially because it’s so massive in its own right, and also, obviously, because it carries two sprouts instead of one. It’s harder to steer, by dint of being heavier — with the single you can just press down on the handle a little bit and the front wheel will lever up off the ground, making steering a breeze. With the double, the same mechanic works, but the lever is not nearly so responsive, and really requires two hands to accomplish gracefully. “Next time,” I routinely promised myself, or, “when the weather gets nicer.”

Well, this weekend, the weather got nicer than it’s been since October, and the wife had to work, and well, I had some miles to make up, so — into the stroller the kids went. And you know what? It wasn’t nearly so bad as I had feared.

Yes, the stroller is heavier, but that cuts both ways. It’s harder to get it moving, but it carries a momentum all its own. Once I got up to a good trot, all I really had to do was steer the thing, and that was accomplished easily enough with a bit of pressure on the handle. Uphills were a bear, there’s no sugarcoating it; but downhills make up for that. Sprout the second fell asleep in about fifteen minutes, and sprout the first sat merrily watching the streetlights and bushes drifting by for the duration. I’d feared that the double would be about 50% harder to wrangle than the single, but in practice, it felt more like 10%; there, but hardly noticeable. The uphills were the only place where I really felt a difference.

But oh, the pain that would come after. If pushing the single stroller turns a run into a whole body workout, then pushing the double is like doing p90x at 3x speed. Okay, maybe not, but the subtle trick of the stroller is that it works entirely different muscles on the run than running by your lonesome. The shoulders and core get a share. The forearms feel the burn. The glutes… my god, the glutes get hammered. And of course the effect is exacerbated by the fact that we’re just coming out of hibernation, and I haven’t pushed a stroller at length since September.

But summer is coming.

And summer means daddy at home with the kids, and when daddy is at home with the kids, daddy needs to get out of the house with the kids. So the stroller is going to be a staple around here.

Luckily, with cargo like this, I think I can get used to the extra workload…

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Achievement Unlocked: First Edit Complete!

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There’s a great moment in Hook, that early 90’s Peter Pan reboot, where Tinkerbell suddenly grows to human size and her house explodes around her as she embraces her true feelings for Peter Pan, confessing her undying and eternal pixie love for him.

Actually, that moment was a little bit weird. Creepy, even, somehow. But that’s off the topic. She unleashes a blast of magic she didn’t know she had, and with a demure little gasp of surprise, she yelps, “I did it!” Just as much in shock as Peter.

Well, that’s me right now.

Because I did it.

I bound up the sprained ankle I mentioned in my last post — you know, the one where I stepped in a literary pothole — and heaved myself bodily across the finish line. And that’s it. It’s over.

Well, not over over. But the first edit is over. Like really, legitimately, no-more-bullsharknado over. The only thing left now is one final pass for formatting, and then I can put the last nail in the coffin and decide who I’m going to burden with the first reading of this coalesced glob of proto-babble I’m tentatively calling a book. And for that step, I’m allowing myself no more than a week. One week — seven days — and then it’s time to figure out who I trust enough to tear my crazily crafted tapestry to shreds.

But here’s a dirty secret. I didn’t want to be finished. No, that’s not right. I was dying to be finished. No…

Truth be told, I was 50-50 split on whether I wanted to be finished with the whole thing or whether I was going to undertake another massive rewrite. It would have been easy to take the rewrite and stretch the process out for another month or more. So easy. I could still do it, in fact.

The fact is, I just slapped a band-aid on the problem of the disappearing character. She had disappeared without a trace, and I just wrote a magical exit from the narrative for her. (There’s magic in my story; I can totally do that.) Solving the problem she presented for me consisted of writing a single paragraph and changing a few sentences in the chapter at hand. That’s all.

But while I was writing the easy fix, a bigger fix crept into my head. A divergent fork in the road. The road overgrown with weeds and bramble and teeming with dark critters and glowing eyes floating in the mist. And this time… this time… I decided to let the harder road be.

You can bet dollars to doughnuts, though, that I wrote down the idea for the rewrite in case I need it later.

So, that’s that. The first edit is concluded. Or so nearly concluded as makes no difference. Concluded in every practical sense. Pat it on the head, send it on its way.

So what does that mean? It means it’s time to stop thinking of this novel as a pet project and get serious about the business of turning it into an actual book that you, reading this, can actually hold in your actual hands. Or, you know, into a collection of ones and zeroes that your handheld computer can belch up at you without the need for all that clumsy processed tree getting in the way. Either way.

And then…

And then, I guess, it’ll be time to don the greasy garb of the pit fighter to begin once again the dirty work of drafting something new. Because momentum matters, and just because the first edit is done is no reason to consider the work finished.

I was reading some notes by Stephen King about how he prepares to work on a story, and he wrote rather anti-eloquently that he gets the idea in mind and then just goes about his life until the muse — and I’m paraphrasing here, but the operative words are definitely his — shits on his head. Maybe I should start carrying a roll of toilet paper around in my man-satchel.

You know, just in case.

This post is part of Stream of Consciousness Saturday.

Broken Ankle at the Finish

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I know, okay? I get it.

It’s become too much of a motif around here, this procrastination, this failure to complete, this inability to batten the last hatches. If writing my novel has been a marathon, I’ve snapped an ankle in the last mile. Or maybe sprained it. Or maybe I just tripped and fell and I’m only really really tired, and every scratch feels like a gash, and every shallow breath is a gasp. But that’s no excuse for not slogging myself across the line.

There isn’t much left to do. There really isn’t. I can only belabor the point so much. I can only pretend for so long that I’m stuck on an issue — this character isn’t working out so well, or that plot turn doesn’t feel quite right — before the truth bubbles to the surface like an eyeball in your soup: that I’m not stuck on an issue within the novel, I’m stuck on finishing the novel.

Because that’s all there is. This first edit has drawn on like an endless summer, and I’m bogged down just a mile from the finish line. The car’s blown a tire and there’s no phone service, and even stepping foot out into the sun has me sweat-soaked and exhausted. The prospect of knuckling up and walking it out to the finish has me dreaming of shade trees and ice-cold lemonade.

The last issue is this one character. I don’t know what to do with her, and I could conceivably go back and write her into a few more scenes or write her out of the novel completely… it honestly makes no difference to me at this point. I’m almost ready to hand the manuscript off to some beta readers (a term that never made sense to me… I mean, I guess I’d be the alpha reader, but does that really make sense? Anyway…) and just let them tell me what to do with her, but then I know it’s probably not a professional move to hand off a work with glaring, unresolved issues and expect other people to fix them for me.

But even more than I’m frustrated at my block about finishing this thing, I’m even more frustrated at the prospect of not finishing it. I didn’t come this far; I didn’t write 90,000 words and then re-write about a third of them; to give up now. I can smell the blistered pork of the hot dogs, taste the swirled sticky sugar of the cotton candy. (What? It’s totally gonna be a carnival when I finish.)  No, I’m going to finish this damn novel if I have to crawl across the line dragging two dead, broken legs behind me.

And sooner rather than later. Because I’m a little bit burned on it.

Not that that’s not glaringly obvious or anything.

*Removes cobweb from eyebrow*

WordSpawn

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It’s a little-known perk of writing that writers get to do something truly remarkable. I’m not talking about the godlike power to create empires of the mind, to breathe life into characters and to spawn images in the minds of our readers. Nor am I talking about the Herculean ability to overcome the blank, intimidating expanse of the blank page. I’m talking about a quieter power, but a greater one.

Writers get to invent words.

This is a subtle power, one that can’t and shouldn’t be waggled around like a magic wand in a seven-book epic about teenage wizards (if ever there were a metaphor). It’s a power that should be practiced with care, delicacy, and great reservation. It’s the power to change the way people think and communicate, if you use it right.

Imagine where we’d be without words like “schadenfreude?” (The Germans are really good at this.) “Kerfuffle?” “Google?” Seriously, imagine your life without Google and try to tell me that the power to create words isn’t incredible and earth-shattering.

Sure, English is chock-full of words already. Good ones, too. Great ones, even. Still, there are those times when you’re casting about for just the right word, one that perfectly encapsulates the thing you’re talking about, one that leaves no room for confusion, one that immediately creates meaning in the mind of your reader, even if they’ve never heard that word before. And the problem is, as broad and expansive as the language is, we just don’t have words for every situation. ‘Twere impossible to have a word for every situation locked and loaded in our memory at any time. Sometimes you just have to make one up.

I do this all the time, and most of the words suck. They’re good for one use only, and once used, they disappear down the gullet of memory and are never seen again. Once in a while, though, you hit on a winner: a word that’s useful, memorable, and catchy enough to merit use by others. Because communication is a two-way street… it’s no good making up an entire lexicon of new words here in my lair if nobody else sees fit to use the words, too.

But today, a breakthrough. A word that might — might — catch on.

I didn’t even make it on purpose. I was just trying to alliterate, and I accidentally created a word that’s already resonated with two readers here in my sphere. Maybe it’s resonating with you, too, and you don’t even know it.

A thing I do a lot here at the blarg is ramble. I have a way of overstating and overthinking things, and I end up going on at length… possibly longer than is necessary. I own that. It’s a fault, but it’s fun for me, and this is my sandbox. I also love to complain, again, probably more than is necessary or healthy. And what do you get when you combine the two? A rant? Sometimes, but not always. I don’t usually rise to the level of anger characterized by a rant. A gripe? Well, a gripe is quick and small-scale. No, when I complain at length it’s like those rumbles in your stomach leading up to a really unpleasant excursion in the restroom. They go on forever and leave you feeling cranky as your innards get all twisted up in knots. The only remedy is getting it out of your system. A grumbling ramble. A “gramble.”

I recognize that this word sort of describes the thing that maybe your grandfather might do about the state of his retirement checks, or that your cranky English teacher might do about the work ethic of his young, irreverent students. As such, it’s not a particularly glamorous addition to a lexicon. But it’s a good one nonetheless, because sometimes you just need to bitch and moan about this one thing specifically, perhaps well beyond the point where the average listener feels sympathetic to you. You need to gramble.

So it’s time to start a movement. You read a blog entry from some guy going on and on about how long he had to wait in line for his driver’s license? Call him out for his gramble. You need to spout off about your boss’s idiotic cornflower blue tie and how ridiculous it makes him look? Fire up the gramble. Kids kept you awake all night and it’s all you can think about or talk about at work the next day? Ask your co-workers to pardon your gramble.

You know this is a word you need in your life. You know you’re dying to use it. Do it. Embrace the dark side, and embrace the raw creative power of language. It’s time to make this a thing. Go get your gramble on.

#gramble