NaNoWriMo Hiatus

What's up, everyone?

This is just a quick little announcement post to let you all know that I'm not dead, but I'm going off to write a novel and I won't have much time for blogging.

I wish I had something suitable and dramatic for my temporary exit, but I got nothing. Hopefully, though, when I come out on the other side, I'll have a finished draft rather than just a bunch of words.

I did it, once, before. I don't see why I couldn't do it again.

KAAAAAAAAAANG!

As a fitness professional, I have a front row seat to a lot of psychology. People and their bodies are a fascinating phenomenon to watch. They really are. People have entirely different reactions to the same things.

Casting Call

So, uh. It's about to get all close and personal up in here. But, you know, it's a blog, so that's how it goes from time to time.

I don't know if you've noticed, but National Novel Writing Month is coming up. For those of you who don't know, it's a month dedicated to writing long form fiction. There's a site for it and everything, and the idea is to churn out fifty thousand words of fiction. Or non-fiction. Or five ten thousand-word stories. Or ten five thousand-word stories. The whole thing's become rather nebulous as time has gone by.

Also got bit by the 8-Bit Bug

I first heard about it when I was in college. I was reading web comics - always a good use of time in college - and one of the writers mentioned that he was going to be attempting this crazy thing where he wrote a novel in a month. I did some research and signed up on a lark.

I finished it - made it past the 50K mark. The other writer did not. That was pretty awesome.

I've done it every year since then, and every year I've made it through to fifty thousand words. Pretty cool, huh? Seven years of survival. You'd think I had seven novels just up and ready to go, and with self-publishing becoming the next big thing, I should be just raking in money hand over fist, right?

Well... not so much.

You see, a strange thing has happened to my writing. I find, as time goes by, that I settle into this cycle. I go for broke in November. I spend December as a broken writer, not able to put a single sentence down. The rest of the year is spent reclaiming my identity, slowly but surely, until I finally arrive at November, fresh and ready to blow myself to smithereens.

It's a real problem, the burn-out. And while there isn't an easy fix for it, there is a simple one: the grit and grind of a daily writing habit. I've read about Seinfeld's tactic of using a calendar and making sure he marks every day that he works on material, creating a chain of productivity that requires relatively little willpower. It's all about maintaining the habit at that point.

I suspect that I will be able to maintain my writing past November, and it's a prospect I look forward to with great eagerness.

Because Hyperbole and a Half legitimizes... everything.

But there's another problem, a new pattern emerging in my longer works. I get this idea about a world, about its quirks and the kind of story I'd like to tell in it. And I start to tell it... and it just peters out into nothing. Frustrated, I try another angle, another start. Same thing happens. I end up with fifty thousand words of beginnings and middles, but no ends, in fact, not even a decent arc to show. Seven empty promises that took seven years and 350,000 words to say that they weren't coming true.

And I've been thinking about it, really digging in to figure out what is going on, why this is so hard for me. I love writing long fiction. I love spending time with compelling characters, and watching them hit soaring heights that just don't happen in short fiction.

And that is precisely my problem. I don't know how to write compelling characters - all I ever write is myself.

That sounds depressing. Have a puppy.

93% of all sads disappear in the presence of Corgis.

All my protagonists have more than just a piece of me - they're a piece of me combined with lots of other smaller pieces. My first novel, a sort of "the Crusades, but fantasy!" piece, was about a warrior monk who went forth to have his absolute faith challenged by the horrible things he was seeing. That was me dealing with college. The next one was a young man waking up in the future to find that he's been given a badass cybernetic body and is being expected to fight in a war. That was me dealing with the fact that my brother went off to join the Marines.

Another was an inversion of Twilight, a vampire romance told from a male perspective. I actually got a real kick out of that one - who better to write a romance than someone who's never been successfully romantic, or been romanced in turn? - but the protagonist was me too. Poor, snarky, and spent a little too much time obsessing over pull ups.

True story: this image actually inspired the novel that year.

The bottom line, if I'm honest about it, is that I'm not interested in keeping up this same pattern. I need to change it, which means I need to address my lack of characters. Unfortunately, I'm a little handicapped on this. I'm too sane to have voices in my head, reacting like an entirely separate person. I dunno how the hell my friends do it. I don't really know how anyone does that.

But what I do understand are systems. And I have an idea - I'm going to start looking for prompts and writing my characters in reaction to those prompts. I've got a whole 19 days yet to figure out MC-kun sounds and if there's an MC-chan in the mix somewhere and what the hell any of it means.

Maybe it won't make a difference, and I'm just doomed again. But it's a different approach than what I used before, so there's the chance that things can be different. It's a shot I gotta take.

So, tell me. Is this a good idea or a bad idea? Am I on the right track or am I lost in the woods? What about you? Do you have voices (and have you seen a doctor)? Or do you rely on systems to write out your characters?

The Flip Side

Here is a story that you are probably familiar with.

It's five o'clock. You have done your due diligence to your duties as a functioning member of society. You have done the job and you have done it well.

Take a moment to applaud yourself. It's cool. I'll wait.

Because America is on a big time health kick, you decide that you're going to go the gym tonight. You've made a habit of going, and you feel like you might just do awesome tonight. Your scale hasn't moved very much, but it doesn't matter. Tonight's the night where something awesome happens.

Now, this story splits a little bit depending on who you are. If you're a woman, you probably wander over to the treadmill because you ate your salad, and then you accidentally had a breadstick. You have officially landed at 1201 calories, and that just won't do.

If you're a dude, you are probably burning to look like Ryan Reynolds, or Chris Evans or any of the other built stars. And you totally know how it's gonna happen. Yep. Men's Muscular Magazine, or whatever periodical you subscribe to, has listed a perfect, six day split routine where you work on one part one day and another the next. And your'e good about it. You don't even skip leg day.

Either way, we can draw these stories back together along a single common thread: the odds are really good that they've been hitting the gym every day this past week.

And you feel like you have to. You don't compromise on the other areas of your life - you still have to work, you still have your social life to consider. You can do it all.

Of course you can't.

Maybe it won't happen today, or tomorrow, or the next day, or even in the next week. But something will go wrong. You'll start to notice that your lifts aren't moving as smoothly as they were before, or that your runs leave you more tired than they used to. The vitality and health that you feel like you should have will not be there.

And the temptation is to say that it's not normal, it's a mistake, it won't work that way and you can just power through it. But your body isn't going to let you get away with that.

Thus, we are brought to the other side of the coin: active rest.

Pictured Above: Not Active Rest

I'm gonna blow your mind a little bit. You don't get stronger or faster when you work out. Strength and speed and power and all that jazz are adaptations to stress. Exercise is the stressor. And when you are stressed, the best way to recover is to get some rest.

Resting is the other side of intensity. Where you push with the utmost intensity, you stress yourself to a greater degree. Your body responds by recovering you beyond that threshold, to prepare for the next bout of stress. This, in turn, allows you to be more active, which necessitates further rest. It's a virtuous cycle.

But on the other hand, who really, truly wants to sit around and do nothing all day? One day, yeah, that's fun. But it will lose its charm, I promise. And besides, you're working your body hard to get the adaptations you want. Don't you deserve the chance to see it in action?

Hence, active rest. Active rest is the idea of putting your body through the motions. You're not looking to stress yourself, but you are looking to get your blood flowing, and the nutrients flowing from one place to the next.

And the neat thing is it can be anything you want. You can go for a walk, go for a hike, play some Ultimate, ride a bike. Whatever it takes that you enjoy doing that gets the blood pumping. It'll work.

So! What kind of stuff do you do when you workout? And what kind of stuff would you like to do for fun to relax from the stress?