Enough about me, I want to tell you about two of my imaginary friends. I’ve never met either of these guys, so for all I know either or both of them could be a Russian mobster, Paris Hilton, or a dog. Those disturbing possibilities aside, they seem real enough to me — a significant step above the voices in my head, for example — that I’m going to take them at face value. After competing with them all through November for NaNoWriMo word count, frankly, they’d better be real.

In addition, each has recently demonstrated independent third-party verification of their existence. California writer Chad Grayson’s story “Jadeflower” is part of the recently-released Destination: Future (amazon.com, Barnes & Noble). I got to know Chad through WordPress — either he stumbled across my blog, or I stumbled across his.  He’s a great guy, and based on his blog he’s a damn fine writer.  Trying to keep up with his NaNo output was both inspiring and frustrating. I’m looking forward to my copy of Destination: Future arriving in the mail.

Canadian writer and podcaster John Mierau has been giving away his genre-crossing short fiction for over a year on his Serving Worlds podcast. I first encountered John on Twitter when he insulted my entire profession, so I immediately started following him there and listening to his podcast. Last week he was the guest interview on Episode 119 of the Dead Robots’ Society podcast (I’ve mentioned DRS before, and again, it’s well worth listening to in its own right), talking about Serving Worlds and his NaNoWriMo novel.

Both of these guys helped me get through NaNoWriMo, and John’s podcast has carried me through many a run and long drive. Their creative output is well worth checking out.

I had my first full 10 mile outdoor run in weeks? months? this morning. There’s just enough ice on the ground to make it hard to really pick up the pace, and wearing enough layers to make a run in 17-degree weather comfortable slows me down too, but I was glad to be outside. One of the podcasts I listened to on the run was Escape Pod #237, “Roadside Rescue” by Pat Cadigan.  It’s a very short story, very cool and thought-provoking, like a lot of her work. Cadigan gave me nightmares my senior year of college with a short story about an alternate history where the 1968 presidential election went so much worse than it did here, and what happened to the country after. I can’t remember the title or find it easily online, but it was published around 1990 or 1991 in either Asimov’s or Analog. I was a political science major in college, and I wrote probably half a dozen papers on either the ‘68 election or the careers of candidates who ultimately ran for President in that election, and the story sank its claws deep into my brain.  I haven’t read a lot of her work since then, but now I’m planning to go back and catch up on everything I missed.

It’s been a busy few weeks. Here’s a quick rundown, the good and the bad:

• A mentally ill parishoner burned down the church my wife and children attend, doing millions of dollars in damage and forcing them to seek temporary space for the next 9-12 months.
• My wife got swine flu and, mostly, recovered.
• My father came for a visit!
• Junior spent the first night of my father’s visit throwing up.
• I had to go to Austin for a few days while the Siren was sick. The Lass and I tried to work out a meeting in the holographic projection we call the real world, but our schedules didn’t mesh.
• A case that was going to have me in Peoria for a week and a half straight for an arbitration settled at the last minute.
• I wore my Vibram FiveFingers for a half-hour treadmill run shortly after my last post, and they chafed in a couple of spots badly enough that my feet bled. I’ll try them again to see if I can break them in a little, but I think they’re just a size or two too small.

Well, enough of that. We’re all in reasonable good health, I’ve started to get some more work done on Breezeway, despite having a busy time at work (I can’t recommend Merlin Mann’s recent post, “First, Care,” highly enough to assist you in getting off your personal stick, by the way). My running is off and on but I’m registered for the Shamrock Shuffle and getting ready for the start of the racing season in less than two months.

Unfocused Girl and I are testing for our high green belts in taekwondo next week, so today was board-breaking practice ahead of the test. Witness the Unfocused Family’s destructive might:

That’s five boards: Unfocused Girl and I each broke two, and Junior broke one. After TKD, Unfocused Girl and I take a marital arts weapons class. We recently moved from nunchaka to bo sticks, and our new bo sticks arrived today:

Don’t let the smile fool you — we Unfocuseds are totally badass.

I’ve been hearing chatter about running barefoot or in shoes with minimal cushioning over the last couple of years, and while I was interested in the abstract idea, for the most part, I ignored the phenomenon.  I didn’t see how it would apply to me — a middle-aged distance runner with little access to any running surface more forgiving than asphalt and cement.

Reading BTR convinced me to take it more seriously; I spent some time reviewing other websites and podcasts on the topic, I decided to try it out.  As it’s January in Chicago, I’m not planning on going out for a barefoot run anytime soon.  I tried a couple of short treadmill runs barefoot, and noticed right away that my gait changed to a forefoot strike.  After putting my shoes back on (the treadmill belt is very rough on the soles of my feet), I tried to keep running with the barefoot gait, landing on the balls of my foot.  My lower calves were sore for a couple of days because I was using different muscles, but my feet, knees, and hips all felt surprisingly good after these runs.

My new running shoes?

I ordered a pair of Vibram FiveFingers – follow the link, they’re impossible to explain otherwise – to wear on the treadmill and outside once it warms up.  Unfortunately, they got here just as we got hit with a nasty virus Junior brought home from school, and I haven’t had a chance to try them out.  Since it’s 45 degrees and raining right now – completely inappropriate weather for January – I think I’ll get my run on the treadmill this morning, and try them out for a mile or two.

If you’re interested, here are some additional links on running barefoot or in minimalist shoes:

Barefoot Ted

Born to Run Links Page

Phedippidations Ep. 141: Running Barefoot

Phedippidations Ep. 203: The Pose Running Method

I recommend checking the show notes for the Fdip episodes, especially #141; Steve does a good job collecting relevant links.

Time for a run.

Happy New Year. I hope your holidays rocked. I missed most of Hanukah with the kids because of travel for work, but we did dance the Horah to Bare Naked Ladies at least one night, and got the candles lit a few times. I did manage to teach the kids the dreidel game, which they enjoyed for about five minutes until I heard Junior complain that Unfocused Girl “gets all the gimmels, and I keep getting nun!” That ended fast.

Things at the job quieted down over Christmas, but of course, just as things slowed down for me at work, the Siren’s commitments ramped up, from finishing her NaCoBakMo cookie baking (which was very successful, thank you to those who participated), to directing the Sunday school Christmas pageant at her church. She managed it all with her usual combination of sleep-deprivation and almost frightening competence, and at approximately 4:15am Christmas morning, everything was finally done.  Starting two and a half hours later, we had a lovely Christmas. We were even able to take a few days up in Wisconsin over New Year’s.

I made no progress on the novel in December after Dec. 2. I should have been able to get a fair amount done in the week before Christmas while the Siren was sewing, blogging, and baking until the wee hours every night, but I think I’d hit the end of the mental road and it was all I could do to spend hours screwing around on Facebook and Twitter. The entire second half of December felt like an extended adrenaline crash that I’m just started to get through.

I’m determined to make some progress on Breezeway Blows Town in January, even if it kills me. I’ve done Write or Die once or twice since New Year’s, which helps.  Yesterday, I sat down to write, and it took me four hours to write 600 words. I didn’t have any problems with the words coming, I just couldn’t keep my ass in my chair, and when I was seated in front of the keyboard I kept checking FB, Twitter, email, etc. Lucky for me, the kids were perfectly happy in the basement having an impromptu Ultraman marathon in their underwear (don’t ask me why; the basement is awfully damn cold, even with the gas fire going), and the Siren was sewing more doll clothes, so nobody cared what I was doing.

I managed a little better today, just over 500 words in less than two hours, including an hour-long nap when I fell asleep after the first 72 words. I was less distracted by social media and more by legitimate, if unnecessary at this stage, Internet research. Not fast, but it beat my performance yesterday.

In order to get our NaNoWriMo writing chops back, my NaNo buddy John Mierau and I have made a solemn pact to write every day for the remainder of the month. Even if I only manage 500 words a day, that’s more than 10,000 words added to Breezeway by January 31, bringing me that much closer to finishing the first draft. More important, it will get me back into the habit of daily writing, which is the only way to get this done. Even more important than that, it will give me an excuse to taunt John on Twitter on a regular basis. By the way, if you’re not listening to his podcast of his short fiction, you’re missing out.

I’m more than halfway through the story I’m trying to tell in Breezeway, and I’m still amused by it, even if no one else will be. Meet the Larssons was interesting in its own way, but it never gave me the opportunity to write anything like this:

“They’re moving!” Frankie shouted.  The car leapt forward into traffic as he mashed the accelerator.  The side of the Crown Vic scraped along the front bumper of the beige minivan, with a tooth-rattling grind.

“Fuck!” Luca shouted.  Tony twisted around and saw the pimp had spilled his mocha frappucino all over himself and the back seat of the Vic.

Tony snarled and yanked the gun out of his pocket, ripping the lining.  With his left hand, he mashed down the power window button and fumed for the 2.75 seconds it took for the window to open.

See what I mean? Meet the Larssons got way too heavy.  Breezeway is still just plain fun, the way I meant it to be.

I thought about writing a 2009 wrap up, and maybe I will, but right now I’m really looking forward to 2010. I’m going to finish the first draft of Breezeway soon, hopefully before spring, then move on to revisions. I have plans for my running, which I’ll talk about separately. And I just started watching Firefly, which I downloaded from iTunes. I’ve never seen it before, and series opener, at least was fantastic.

I’m back in that comfy chair and I’m falling asleep again. Better hit PUBLISH before it’s too late.

I don’t have any idea what to do. I’d like to get back to Breezeway — I haven’t written a word since Dec. 2 or so — or hit the treadmill for a bit, but I’m still groggy from all the extra sleep. I’ve been running on 5-6 hours most nights for the last few weeks, even on weekends, because I’ve been traveling back and forth to California and my body clock is all screwed up, and after going to bed at a normal time and sleeping late I feel like I’ve been hit by a truck.

Maybe I need some cookies. And more coffee.

I’m going to start with some statistics.

• Word Count, NaNoWriMo 2009: 51,324.
• Word Count for 2009 as of 10/31/2009 (fiction): 19,533.
• Word Count for 2009 as of 10/31/2009 (fiction & nonfiction combined): 37,353.
• Billable hours, 10/2009: 177.
• Billable hours, 11/2009: 183.
• Workouts recorded, 10/2009 (running, strength training, taekwondo): 15.
• Workouts recorded, 11/2009 (running, strength training, taekwondo): 9.
• Weight gain, 10/25/2009-12/1/2009: 3.2 pounds (apparently, the last time I weighed myself before NaNo was 10/25, but I don’t blame any of the weight gain on Halloween candy eaten before 11/1).

I believe I got less sleep in November than usual, but I stopped keeping track before the month started so I don’t actually know.  There are probably other stats I could try to measure, but these give the flavor.

We interrupt this post to swear quietly and kick the wall. WordPress just logged me out when I tried to save the draft, and I lost about two paragraphs. We now return you to your irregularly scheduled blog post.

The most important thing about NaNoWriMo is that I wrote. I wrote every damn day. Even when I worked 14-15 hours, I did at least a 15 minute Write or Die session and banged out 350-400 words.  Most days, I was anywhere from a few hundred words ahead of goal pace or even a full day’s worth; I think I was only behind on three or four days out of the month, and only once more than a few hundred words behind. I generally wrote about 2000 words a day, but I had several days of more than 3000 words, and on Nov. 28, the day I crossed the 50,000 word mark, I wrote 3900.

In other words, I was consistent. I wrote day in and day out, whether I was energetic or exhausted, inspired or out of sorts, excited, bored, happy, sad, up, down or sideways. I gave up television a couple of years ago; for November, I cut back on screwing around on Twitter and Facebook (I still posted; I just didn’t pay as much attention to your status), and while I managed to keep posting semi-regularly to this blog, you may have noticed that most of my updates were pretty short. I was saving my word count for NaNoWriMo and Breezeway. I also stopped noodling around on the new piano, which I don’t think anybody missed.

I wrote the way I imagine professional novelists write, like it was my job. I wrote like the mortgage depended on it. And it worked. The narrative progressed at a reasonable pace, and the rough outline I hashed out for the first two-thirds of the story in October helped.  Only three of the 36 scenes I’ve written so far match up with the outline, but they essentially run parallel to it, so I still have a good idea where I’m going without being locked into anything.

If it hadn’t been for NaNoWriMo, I would probably have finished 2009 feeling like it had been a nearly wasted year when it came to writing fiction. I got around 14,000 words into Project Hometown and started a short story that seemed like a good idea when I started but 5800 words in turned into a joyless timesuck, and spent my summer on a non-fiction project that was satisfying and and actually, you know, published, but it meant that I didn’t write any fiction at all for the entire season. Now, no matter what I get done in December (on Dec. 1, my goal was to get to 75,000 words in the Breezeway draft by New Year’s Eve, but that’s looking a little optimistic given my work schedule), I consider 2009 a success. I won’t have finished another novel draft, but I’ll have gotten damn close.

One more note on Breezeway: I like what I’ve done so far. It will need major revisions, but I’m not totally embarrassed by it, either. I only started to get the main character’s voice about 35,000 words in, so I’ll have to fix his early scenes and revise the story a bit to make his actions more consistent with what his personality is turning out to be. I may also want to reorder the scenes a bit to make some events happen earlier, which would changing the pacing, but I’m not sure about that.

I’ve also started thinking about how to rewrite last year’s novel, Meet the Larssons. I put it away three-quarters of the way through the second draft, because it had turned into a mess.  I’m thinking about starting to type in those edits but revising it further as I go, to see if I can salvage it. I feel like I’ve finally gotten the necessary distance to give it the rewrite it needs. I have also thought about rewriting it from scratch so that I won’t feel tied to the original version at all, but that may be too drastic.

The side effects of doing NaNoWriMo were different from what I expected.  I think it’s safe to say that NaNo did not have a very significant impact on my work. I billed a few more hours in November than in October; both months were about average.

The physical impact was considerably more noticeable; I worked out less often in November than the previous month, and the workouts I did were less intense (shorter long runs and no speed work, for example); I worked out less in October than usual because of the week off to recover from the Urbanathlon. I ate more junk than usual (especially while the leftover Halloween candy lasted) and went to bed even later than I ordinarily do, which was part of why I exercised so much less — I couldn’t get up in the morning to go for a run, and I was writing during lunch so I couldn’t go to the gym. The 3.2 pound weight gain was bad enough, but I think it understates the changes from unused muscles and so on. I feel much more out of shape than I did at the start of the month.

The Siren can speak to this if she likes, but I think I got a little better over the course of the month about not completely hiding from my family to write. At the beginning, I think I shut myself off more, but about halfway through I was confident enough that I was making good progress that I reengaged a little. Unfocused Girl kvetched a little on a couple of nice Saturdays that I spent the afternoon in the study instead of chasing her around the backyard, but, after November was over, I asked her if she thought I had ignored her and Junior and she said she didn’t. She might just have been telling me what I wanted to hear, but she seemed genuine enough.

For me, NaNoWriMo was an almost entirely positive experience. If I do it again in 2010 — and that isn’t a given, since I don’t know what I’ll be working on in 11 months — I’ll try to keep my running going a little better, at least, and maybe go to bed a little earlier (although I’m not sure why November would be any different from the other 11 months in that respect), but I wouldn’t change much else about the way I did it. My primary goal was to reboot my fiction writing habits and make a good start on Breezeway, and I did both. Word count aside, NaNo worked out exactly the way I’d hoped.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go for a run.

Just a reminder that every day through Christmas Eve, the Green Eyed Siren is making a new batch of cookies for NaCoBakMo, National Cookie Baking Month. Make a donation of $25 or more to the Irving Park Community Food Pantry and email her the receipt and she’ll send you a batch of mouth-wateringly delicious homemade cookies. As an added incentive, we’ll match the first $500 of donations. So donate today! Or don’t, and then there will be more cookies for me! Check out the Siren’s latest NaCoBakMo update here.

Breezeway Blows Town, Day 30:

51324 / 50000 words. 103% done!

That’s right, baby, I gave it 103 percent!  As promised, I sent the draft so far (minus the spoilerrific notes at the end) to the Siren — I actually loaded it onto her Kindle for ease of use.  Let me say that again: my novel (so far) is on a Kindle, just like Stephen King!

Yeah, yeah, I know. Let me have my moment, OK?

I’m already sad NaNo is over, but I’m getting slammed at work so it’s just as well.  I’ll try to recap later in the week.  Meanwhile, go check out what the Siren’s cooking up for NaCoBakMo today.

• Ran 6.39 miles very slowly (1:04:04).  It was my first run since Nov. 17, and my longest since Oct. 25. I lost a lot of speed (and muscle) in the month spent in front of the computer every waking moment, and it will take a little while to get it back.
• Read a little of the Sunday New York Times for the first time in mumble mumble.
• Worked. I’ve got a lot going on at the office (and out of town) between now and Christmas.
• Went to lunch with the Siren and the kids at the diner for the first time in weeks.
• Played Sorry with the kids while the Siren went to the supermarket to buy more butter, flour, and sugar for NaCoBakMo.
• Went to the supermarket after the Sorry game to pick up the dishwasher detergent that the Siren forgot so she could focus on baking cookies.
• Worked some more.
• Listened to Christmas music. The Hanukkah music comes later, closer to the holiday itself, because there isn’t as much of it that I like.
• Ate some cookies before dinner.
• Listened to the first episode of The Cinnamon Bear with the family during dinner.
• Ate some more cookies for dessert.
• Got the kids to bed.
• Worked more.
• Had one last cookie.
• Paid our property taxes.
• Told the kids to go back to bed.

As much as I enjoyed NaNoWriMo, and I did, it’s good to be able to do a few other things, too.

IMPORTANT: You may have noticed my references to NaCoBakMo and eating cookies, lots of delicious cookies.  The love of my life, the Green-Eyed Siren, has started the first ever National Cookie Baking Month to raise money for our neighborhood anti-hunger charity, the Irving Park Community Food Pantry.  You can read about Day 1 here, and Day 2 here.  She’s baking cookies every day from now through Christmas Eve, and will send a batch to everyone who donates $25 to the IPCFP before then and emails her the receipt. Please participate so that I don’t end up eating all of these cookies myself.  To encourage you further (although if you’ve ever tasted the Siren’s cooking, you would need no further incentive), we’ll match the first $500 in donations.  Get off my blog and over to hers to read the details and see pictures of the delectable dainties as she makes them.

FINALLY, I leave you with The NaNoWriMo Song, because it’s awesome: