Category: Running

I run a lot, and sometimes I write about it. It doesn’t have to mean anything. Things don’t always have to mean something!

Trail Fail Becomes Trail Win

PavowskiLeave a comment

The wife and kids have been out of town for almost a week, and daddy has been able to get a lot of things done. Lots of writing (on the novel, if not so much around here), lots of things around the house (knocking a few things off the ol’ honey-do), lots of things I don’t normally get the chance to do.

Like trail runs.

Living in suburbia and working a more-or-less typical 9-to-5 schedule, then coming home and being a daddy, I don’t have a lot of time to get away. I love running for its simple step-out-the-front-door-and-go nature, but of course, stepping out the front door gets me to only a limited number of possible routes I can run. There’s the mall loop, which I’ve completed more times than even bear counting. There’s a slightly longer circuit that takes me around the local strip malls. Then, on the weekend, I stretch that loop out and roll through downtown, over to the train tracks and past a bunch of mom n’ pop businesses over closer to the railroad tracks.

But I’ve run all of those routes dozens, if not hundreds of times. My feet practically slide into their own custom-made grooves in the pavement. Not much adventure there, outside of dodging the traffic, of course. So the chance to switch things up without having to hurry home for my daddy responsibilities is too tempting to pass up.

We have some good parks and good trails around here, and I’ve run several of them during races and the occasional weekend sneak away, but not nearly regularly enough. There’s nothing quite like trading in your roadside stomps for covered bridges…

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Cascading rapids…

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And enough greenery to make you feel like hugging a tree, or maybe eating one:

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So I’ve set off for a few of them over the past few days. And I’ve learned a few things.

First of all, trails are hellish and heavenly on your feet. Hellish because you hit all kinds of rocks and roots and bumps and sudden drops and hidden steps and any number of obstacles that you don’t hit on the roads. I’m embracing my minimalist shoes again when my feet feel fit (which has been a lot, lately), so I really feel all the bumps in the road. The trails are leaving me with hot spots in my feet — not pain, but soreness and tenderness — which is actually rather a good feeling despite the discomfort. Like a scar after a knife fight, sort of a badge of pride, a proof that I was there and I went through something. Then again, the trails are heavenly, because there’s none of that non-compactable asphalt or concrete underfoot. It’s all dirt or grass or a lush, springy bed of fallen pine needles and leaves pillowing my feet along, like the fingers of angels ferrying me to happiness. Sweet and sour.

Second of all, and more importantly: with trails, you have to know what you’re doing. I checked out maps beforehand and figured I knew pretty much what I was looking out for — the trail goes in such and such general direction for about a half mile, then follows the river for a bit, then cuts back inland toward the rocks shaped like a couple of donkeys humping — but the problem is, when you’re out there surrounded by nothing but green, one donkey hump rock looks pretty much like another, and judging distance is about as easy as cross stitching blindfolded. (Is that hard? It sounds hard.)

Long story short, I got lost. Day 1 I got a little lost and increased my estimated distance by about a half mile, running 3.7 when I meant for a little 5k. That’s no big deal. Saturday, though, I was aiming for 4 miles and ended up running almost six. Which is fine if I’m in shape, which I’m not, because I’ve been nursing my plantar-fasciitis beset right foot back to health. Not only did I increase my mileage spontaneously, but I did it over some of the toughest terrain around: the riverside trails of Sweetwater Creek State Park. Now, there’s beautiful scenery to be seen, and in fact, you’ve probably seen some of the terrain I was running on…

That’s the New Manchester Mill Ruins, and Katniss and what’s-his-beak make an appearance there when they’re in District 13 in Mockingjay, Part 1. (Let’s not talk about the nonsense of splitting any of the books in that series into two movies. Let’s just not.) The trails at Sweetwater go past this relic and up and down some sheer rock faces as they follow Sweetwater Creek past rapids and on into lonely meandering stretches of the river. Really, really gorgeous area.

And I got so lost. My first warning sign was these stairs:

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It’s hard to get a sense of scale, but I’m pretty sure those stairs are equivalent to a seventeen-story building.

I had just gotten finished climbing what felt like a 30 degree incline for about a quarter mile up — so steep and so long I was literally pushing my knees down with my hands to keep going — when I realized I had absolutely no idea where I was or which way was back. Luckily, about that time, a guy and his dog (seriously) came running through a field of brilliant sunny daffodils. He and his pup are regulars, and he was able to point me back to relative civilization: “Oh, just go that way for about two miles, and you’ll see the signs guiding you back in.” This, when I was already at the 4 mile mark for my 3-and-a-half-mile run.

Well, not to belabor the point, but I did make it back. My feet were trashed from six miles in my minimal shoes and I was sweating like the traditional whore in church, but man, there’s something to be said for the journey. I ran almost six miles and did some serious hiking for at least an additional mile in there, and it was simultaneously the toughest workout and most rewarding and enjoyable running experience I’ve had, maybe since I ran my first half marathon. Just pure fun and happiness, despite how beat-up I was afterward. I’ve heard the term “runventure” before, and I always thought it was a little dumb and ridiculous, but this particular run, I think, qualifies.

Anyway. Point is, if you’re going to go running a trail — especially if you don’t usually go running trails — maybe bring a map.

Or, if you’re feeling adventurous, maybe don’t.

First Run in Hokas – A Terrible Review

Pavowski2 Comments

I have a history of conducting really bad science when it comes to fixing myself. For starters, I’m balls awful at self-diagnosing, whether it’s writing or running or dadding or whatever… see, to fix a problem, you first have to know what the problem is, and I’m pretty bad at that. It’s why I married a woman much smarter than I am — so that I have somebody to point me at the right targets. Then, I tend to take on too many things at once or dive headfirst into new things rather than easing in, to the effect that whether I succeed or fail, I never really know what to attribute the success or failure to.

But I’ve got this injury. In my foot. For a while I thought it might have been tendonosis, but lately it feels like good ol’ plantar fasciitis, but one way or another, my freaking foot hurts, and it’s been hurting for a while. And I’ve tried a handful of things to fix it, including seeing a podiatrist, taking breaks from running, stepping up my running, eating only fried chicken on Fridays, consulting with spirit guides… and it still hurts. So it’s time for drastic measures.

I’m not the kind of guy that believes in magic bullets, but there comes a point — and that point in my case is when I’ve been dealing with more-or-less chronic pain for the better part of a year — where you’re willing to try just about anything. So among the many things I’m trying to fix the pain right now are some new shoes.

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I know, I know.

They look ridiculous. But I got a pretty sweet deal on them and, like I said, I’m willing to try anything.

If you don’t run in running circles (haw) you might not be familiar with Hokas and their ilk, so to put them in a nutshell (which is impossible, I mean, just look at the size of them), they are a new thing in running, the inverse pendulum swing from the minimalism trend that happened in the late aughts. Where minimalist shoes aimed to make shoes feel less like shoes by dint of removing padding and stabilizing elements and “putting you more in touch with the road,” Hokas and other so-called “maximalist” shoes take the opposite tack: they add frankly ridiculous amounts of padding to desensitize you to the surfaces you’re running on entirely. (I should note that “desensitize” is my word, not theirs.)

Now, I think minimalist shoes are the bomb. I think they are the way and the truth. They may have contributed to my injuries, and I’m willing to own my part in that, because I probably jumped in too fast and didn’t give myself the appropriate time to adjust. That said, I still believe in minimalism, because I believe in evolution, and I don’t think that millions of years of adjustment to the earth below our feet would have crafted a foot that needs perfect shoes to make us good at, you know, walking or running on said earth. Shoes being a construct of the past couple of millenia of human development, I’m going to trust natural selection and say that probably our feet are just fine as they are, and maybe it’s the way we’re treating our feet that’s fargoed up. But I digress. I’m not here to argue minimalism vs maximalism, I’m not here to open the Born to Run debate or touch on barefoot running or any of that.

I’m here because in desperation I ordered these shoes, and I’m going to try them out as part of my latest effort to fix my feet so that I can run pain-free again.

Let me make all appropriate disclaimers: “maximalist” shoes are too new for there to be any studies drawing far-reaching conclusions about their effectiveness at preventing or recovering from injury. However, there is a ton of anecdotal evidence out there, and much of that anecdotal evidence comes in the form of gobsmacked distance runners who are amazed that these shoes have allowed them to start running pain-free after extended bouts with hip pain, knee pain, ankle pain, back pain, foot pain… you name it. So I ordered them, and they got here, and I took them for a run yesterday, and here’s what I learned.

  1. They are huge. I’ve sat at 5’11” my whole life, and these shoes put me comfortably in the 6’3″ range. My wife, a demure and delightful 5’2″, tried them on and was able to look me in the eye for the first time in her life. The air just feels a little thinner while you’re wearing them, and maybe that makes you a little lightheaded, and maybe that’s why the pain goes away.
  2. They are soft. Boy, are they soft. Reviewers often describe them as “like walking on clouds”, which is the most overused simile in shoes, and I won’t be using it, because it’s nonsense. You can’t walk on clouds in the first place, and no shoe is going to remove all the groundfeel from your feet. That said, even just stepping into them and taking a few tentative steps around the living room I could feel my feet sinking into their pillowy depths. They compress like a worn-in tennis ball, which is to say, quite a bit, but not so much that you go right through it like you would with a down pillow or, if you must, a cloud. The padding underfoot is sensational, and it really does feel awesome just to walk around in them.
  3. They are bouncy. That tennis ball analogy I used was not a mistake. I thought hard about the best way to describe what running feels like with these things on, and it struck me. Every step is like landing perfectly on a tennis ball. You land, you feel the resistance, the resistance gives more than you expect, and then as your weight transfers over, there’s a spring effect that feels like the shoe is catapulting you forward just a little bit. That effect was disorienting in the first half mile or so, but once you get used to it, it feels normal.
  4. They are grippy. Here’s my primary concern about these shoes, especially having tried minimalist shoes and even my bare feet: you get used to feeling what’s under your feet and adjusting accordingly. That’s impossible in these clunkers. My kitchen floor feels exactly like my lawn feels exactly like my driveway feels exactly like pavement feels exactly like the rocky mudfield out back of the tire shop I run past every day. My concern is that I’d end up slipping because I can’t feel the little rocks or sticks or tiny bumps in the ground or whatever, but this concern broke apart in the atmosphere before I got to the end of the street. The sole of the shoe compresses so much that it actually seems to conform to whatever’s on the ground like a coat of paint going on over my shoddy drywall work in the bathroom. In short, the entire sole gets down on every step. It even makes this sound, like you’re running on velcro, with every step. The sound will probably go away as the shoes break in, but it demonstrated pretty clearly what the shoe was doing: bending and flexing to every contour of the road/lawn/tire lot.
  5. They are light. Enormous as they are, they’re as lightweight as any traditional shoe I’ve had, which seems counterintuitive I guess, until you begin to think about the composition of that sole that bends and flexes and compresses like silly putty.
  6. They are snug. Shoe sizes vary depending on manufacturer, yeah, I get that, but these fit me oddly. The length is fine, but it’s almost as if there isn’t enough room for the height of my foot in the shoe, which makes me wonder about taking out the insoles, even though I’ve never had to do that with any other shoe. Also, the toe box is — for my taste — exceedingly narrow, and my toes feel pretty squished in there. I can’t say I love that feeling. It’s hard for me to imagine running five or six or ten miles or more that way, but maybe they’ll loosen up as the shoe breaks in.
  7. They are huge. Did I say this already? It bears saying again. They’re enormous.

The question is, how did they do on the run?

First impressions only, but they felt pretty damn good. The pain in my foot lately feels like a needle going up into my heel, and I had a bit of that at first (as I do on every run). But by the end of the first quarter mile or so, that pain was gone completely; so completely that I switched to a heelstrike briefly to see if the issue was still there (spoiler alert, it was — and the shoes didn’t protect me from feeling the pain in a heelstriking stride), but as soon as I readjusted, it evaporated again. Lovely. Now, my aches and pains have a tendency to work themselves out after the first mile or so, so my good feels might be attributed to that alone, and not the shoes… but I didn’t have any additional pain later in the evening like I’ve had after my last few runs.

There’s more to be seen, here, but at least for the moment, I’m hopeful that the Hokas are going to help me out. It’s my hope that I can use the Hokas to start getting some regularity back in my runs — start pushing my distance up again, in other words — while allowing my feet to “rest”, while I can continue to use my minimals once or twice a week to keep strengthening my feet. We’ll see how that plays out.

In the meantime, however, there is no cure for how goofy they look. Temper that, of course, with the fact that I much prefer wearing something like this…

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Min/Maxing my Footwear

PavowskiLeave a comment

If you’re a regular at this blarg, or if you know me, then you know that I’ve been struggling with foot pain in one form or another for… ehh… erg… about a year and a half.

It started when I tore up my foot on a nail in our back porch, continued when I recovered from that injury and promptly blew up my left heel with plantar fasciitis, and continues further still when about a year ago I did something (doctor never did tell me exactly what was going on) to irritate the heel and Achilles in my right foot. The other injuries have all healed, but I’m still battling my right heel. The pain ebbs and flows like the tides. I’ll have good weeks and bad weeks, solid months and shaky months. One day I can go run a brisk eight miles and feel no ill effects, another day I can shuffle through a low-intensity three miles and be hobbling for days afterward. It’s maddening and frustrating.

And of course, it plays havoc with my running. It’s impossible to set any long-term goals because I don’t know if I’m going to have to slow down on my training to accommodate my injury throwing a tantrum. Over the last several weeks, I’ve been trying to fit in some speed workouts again, and it’s been going fine… until Monday, when I tweaked the heel again and spent the rest of Monday and Tuesday limping.

My wife — ever incisive and ready to call me out when I’m being dumb (thanks honey) — pointed out that I started having all these issues about the time I went bananas over minimal shoes and started trying to do a lot of my runs in my Vibram FiveFingers. Shoes that I love. I’ve written about them before. For good measure, she points me to stories of marathon runners, like, just off the top, this one from the NY times; marathon runners, plagued by injuries, who have tried this new shoe and had their chronic injuries vanish like students in the bathroom when the principal walks by.

And I’m conflicted. I’m wary of the magic bullet, and I don’t want to believe that simply buying “the right pair of shoes” is going to solve my problems. By the same token, I don’t want to believe that wearing “the wrong pair of shoes” is responsible for the issues I’m having.

And that doesn’t even touch my bias. I got into running when the minimalist trend was flying high. I read Born to Run and bought into the hype. The thinking was “less cushioning, more natural mechanics”, and boy oh boy does that keep in touch with my philosophy in general. Or at least the philosophy I try to believe in. Less stuff gumming up the works. More focus on what you control. Letting the body do what it’s meant to do without gadgets or ridiculous footwear getting in the way. All that hippy-dippy treehugging kind of stuff.

Maximalist shoes, from my vantage point, seem to go against everything that I thought was neat about minimalist shoes. Minimal shoes strip out the cushioning so that you feel more of the ground beneath your foot. Maximal shoes cram more and more cushioning in there to further insulate you and make every step feel the same. Minimal shoes allow for fuller range of motion so that the leg and foot can follow the circuit nature designed for them more closely. Maximal shoes cut out the motion of the ankle instead, keeping you “locked in” to a “better form”. (I’m air-quoting those because those are my unstudied perceptions. Make no mistake, I’m not an expert, and I’m not nearly impartial.)

Also, and this cannot be stated heartily enough, maximal shoes look RIDICULOUS. Honestly, they look like elevator sneakers. Just look.

The thought of even putting those on my feet makes me feel like I’m going to topple over like a tower of tinker toys. (We won’t say anything about the goofy toe-gloves I prefer.)

Still, the demon of doubt is in there now, clanging off the inside of my skull and raising all sorts of argument. Much though I love my minimal shoes, I really don’t want to accept that this pain in my foot might just be something I have to live with for the rest of my life.

I love my minimal shoes, and I loved the thought of unburdening myself from conventional shoes. For a while, it was great. I want to believe they could be great for me again, but the possibility that my minimal shoes have done this to me is getting hard to ignore. Could there be something to this maximal movement? It’s all anecdotal evidence at this point, but could it work for me?

I have to find a way to make running work for me again. When I run well, I write well… when my running suffers, so too does my writing. Could these land-whales be the way to get it back?

I have to think about this.

Double (Stroller) Trouble

Pavowski6 Comments

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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MudStuck

Pavowski1 Comment

I was out for a run once, and it had been raining in the days before. The sun had been out for a day in between the rain and my run, so most of the ground was relatively dry; even the dirt patches had baked and packed down solid. There were still deep standing puddles here and there at low points in the road, but they were obvious and easy to avoid.

The day was gorgeous; clean spring air, soft breeze, shade from the verdant, rain-thickened trees. The kind of run that makes you feel alive and calm… you know, all that hippy-dippy crap that I usually try to write away from. I had gone a couple of miles, completed a neat loop through a well-marked part of the trail, and was about half a mile away from the trailhead and my car. I had expected to get muddy from stomping through the elements so soon after a rain, but surprisingly, I had stayed relatively clean. I relaxed into the last mile, putting on a little speed and feeling the wind on my face as I streamed along the shaded path.

KASPLORCK-CCCHHHHHHHHHUUUUUUUPP.

A mud pit, cleverly disguised as a perfectly ordinary patch of dirt, had engulfed my shoe and yanked it unsanctimoniously off my foot. Through some miracle of physics I retained my balance and didn’t pitch over on my face; then I had to hop on one foot to circle around and look at what had happened. I’d plunged my right foot into mud six inches deep, and once ensconced, the suction was great enough to remove my entire shoe. There it sat, inches below the surface of the mud, sunk in a perfectly fitted crater with mushroomed edges, slowly beginning to fill with muddy water from the surface. I bent to try and yank it out, but with only one leg underneath me I couldn’t manage enough leverage to dislodge it. There were only two options — sink my unshod foot into the mud to establish leverage to pull the shoe out, or try to worm my foot back into the shoe and unstick it that way. Both choices would leave me with a horrific muddy mess on my foot, not to mention that the shoe was already past done.

I was beyond frustrated, and after the fact, I would realize that there was not a single good reason for the frustration. I had set out for the run knowing that the trail was likely to be a muddy mess. Had I hit the mudhole at the beginning of the run, it would have fazed me not a tick. The problem was, I made it through the run nearly unscathed, clean enough to let my guard down and start imagining a future where I wouldn’t have to stumble in the door and leave my laundry to dry on the porch before I could even step foot inside the house. Timing, I suppose, is everything.

Okay, so, this is an allegory, right? The through-line of this blog is and always has been my writing project. There’s a healthy dose of side business in the flavor of my kids, running, stupid stuff I see on TV, and what-have-you, but really, it’s all about the writing, all about the book, and that’s never more true than now. I was — am — will be — this close to finishing the first edit of this book. I can see the finish line, taste the clean air on the other side, feel the grass growing softer underfoot.

And all of a sudden, a mudhole yawns open beneath my foot and swallows my shoe.

In short: there’s a character in this piece. A character I like a lot. A character who’s critical to the early stages of the story but not quite so critical to the end. And due to that duality, some poor notetaking, and, I’ll admit it, a pretty glaring oversight, this character has turned into the Gordian Knot of the book. The problem? In one scene she’s there, helping to drive events and throwing down obstacles of her own; the next, she’s not. She’s simply gone. Like I totally forgot to write any sort of resolution, or anything even close to resembling a resolution for her.

And I’m stuck. I don’t know what to do. I made it through the whole muddy trek of this edit — even undertaking some fairly major changes to the story — without getting particularly dirty. Nothing I couldn’t hose off with a stout drink and a hot shower. But I don’t know how to fix this, and I can’t picture a future in which it’s fixed. Back up and write her out of the narrative completely? I fear the story will collapse in on itself like a matchstick house, and I’ll have to rebuild it piece by painstaking piece. Forge ahead and cram her back into the final third? The can of sardines will burst, and I don’t know if I’ll ever get all those tiny, stinky fish back into the tin.

I don’t see a way to fix this without diving in and getting myself covered head to toe with the inkstains of major narrative surgery. And I was so close.

There’s a third option, of course, just as there was a third option with my mudbound shoe. Leave it, and hobble home in my socks. Just forget about it and hope that my readers do the same. (Not likely.) Or, pile this and all the other little nitpicky problems the story has sprouted into a neat little pyre and nuke the whole mess from orbit. Leave no survivors. Take it back to the blank space.

Okay, so there’s really not a third option.

So if the blog has been a little sparse lately (and let’s face it, it has been), this is why. I’m stuck.

That’s not an excuse. I’ll find a way around. I didn’t come this far to shamble home with my shoe left in the mud. But it’s a problem I need to solve before I can really feel comfortable in my writing again.