Clash of the summer goals

This summer I laid out a series of goals that I thought were reasonable, but would also require a tremendous amount of effort on my part. These goals were spread across a few different goal making categories, but the common thread was that they would help me rediscover who I am. I wanted to read tons, write tons, spend plenty of time with those close to me, and I wanted to work out twice a day and lose a pound a week, which would have put me at roughly 13 pounds lost for the summer.

Quite early on in summer, I realized how difficult this truly was. Getting up at 8 in the morning and walking by 9, gave me plenty of time to write a little bit or read a little bit before Martina came home from work, but doing all three of those things in the same day turned out to be quite difficult. I tried a variety of combinations, but ultimately, the clashing goals left something out, and that something became my workout routine. It turned out that this summer, I felt it was more important to take care of who I was inside. Instead of working out twice a day and losing 13 pounds, I worked out once a day for the first half of summer, and ended up losing 7 pounds this summer. It was 8, but I put a pound back on in the last few weeks, which is totally fine.

Since I wrote a 10 page fantasy story for a Fantasy literature class my junior year in high school, I have wanted to write a novel. My senior year I wrote a 2 page slasher story for my Mystery and Terror Lit elective class. Once I got out of high school, I wrote dozens of half finished, half baked stories of varying genres. Eventually I stopped write prose all together. I wrote a ROM-COM screenplay that is roughly 50 pages long during college, and eventually a zombie screenplay for a Horror film class in college. After college I pretty much turned to verse. I wrote poetry nonstop for a few years. I have notebooks full of poetry. In that time I tried to go back to prose. I tried to write a novel about how David's death changed me as a person. I tried to write a novella about a guy who had not slept in a month. I tried. I tried. I tried. Nothing ever stuck. I kept going back to verse. Poetry was my creative saving grace, but I knew deep down there was more that I needed to say, not to anyone else, mind you, but to myself.

I have toyed with screenplays, play writing (I still love my idea for a play), and I even tried to write an old timey radio show once. My entire life in filled with half finished ideas. Then the worst thing happened. I stopped writing. I was blogging at the time, between this blog and my movie review blog, but for over a year, I just stopped writing. I was not making time for it because the entire enterprise just frustrated me. What was the point when I knew I was not going to finish it anyway?

When 2013 began I was at the lowest I had been in a few years. I did not have a teaching job, and I was working the exact same job I had in high school and college. I was barely able to contribute to my life financially. Instead of wallowing, I had an idea for a title of a poem. It was called "Curbside Redemption." I tried to write this poem about two people confessing things to each other while sitting at a curb in 2 in the morning. It was not working because verse was just not the right avenue for it. That title turned into the ending of a short story, where a guy, utterly destroyed by his own infidelity, confessed to his girl on a curb at 2 in the morning, and while she walked away from him, it allowed him to begin to feel like he could work on his issue, therefore finding his redemption. The story was a disaster. Everything about it was forced. I was 5 pages in, and I deleted everything I had, except that title. That title just kept haunting me, begging me to find the write story befitting of such a great title.

Around this time a friend asked me if I could watch her youngest kid a few days a week, which would include dropping the kid off at swimming and then picking her up an hour later. I started to think about this title more, and because I was now given this new place to write, and time to write, I thought about what would have happened if I had made a few different decisions in my life. What would have happened if I had given into certain things, or people. Once I stopped thinking about the Curbside Redemption being one of romance, the entire story just hit me. It was a teacher feeling redemptive after a conversation with a student. From there it just clicked. When it was all said and done, I had a legitimate novella on my hands. I felt reignited. It would not have mattered if everyone who read it just hated it. It was something I accomplished!

Finishing that novella reminded me of how badly I have always wanted to write a novel. I put it on the bucket list I shared with my students last year, and I got it in my head that 2014 was going to be the year of the novel. My students had just finished reading Into the Wild and I was becoming incredibly interested in cross country road trips. The idea for my novel was that a man would meet a woman, and after a whirlwind few days, they would get in a car and drive across the country together. Each chapter would switch points of view. The guy was going to be a sheltered guy who thought this woman was going to save him from a life of loneliness, and the woman was going to be a woman running away from all sorts of messy choices, who half way through the trip was going to realize the guy was expecting her to be a savior of some sort.

I started it over and over again, but ultimately it was a waste. It never felt honest, so I sat down one day and thought about what spoke to me. In Curbside Redemption I had tackled the life of someone allowing his addictions to control his life, and through this blog I have spent years thinking about how I have used food like a drug my whole life, but never thought of it in that way because we usually only see addiction as something that makes someone out of control. I decided to tackle addictions in my novel. I decided that the novel would be about 5 people whose lives connected through one character. I would tackle food addiction through two different lenses, gambling addiction, and a character whose constant searching for an escape to emptiness led her into a series of bad decisions. I also wanted to tackle a variety of issues. In fact, I might be tackling too many, but who cares?

This summer I have completed what I think is 75% of my very first novel. Yes, my physical goals fell by the wayside, but this novel has been insanely cathartic. It has allowed me to write about how it feels to be obese in an every day setting. How uncomfortable public transportation is, how sitting at a bar with stationary stools can be painful and embarrassing, and a whole host of other things that I didn't even know I was dealing with until I started writing. My goal is to finish my first draft before 2014 is over.

I have to do it because I already have my project for 2015 thought of: a collection of short stories revolving around the theme of TIME. I want to explore different genres, different styles, and different narrative structures, but be loosely connected by time. I have two stories already thought up.

Who knows if I will ever let anyone read any of these new finished products, and who knows if I ever plan to do anything with them (probably not) but it is the sense of accomplishing long standing goals that keeps me moving.

This post was meant to be more about the challenges of having so many goals, but I guess I really needed to write about the writing process.


As the school year gets going, I am planning to rededicate myself to my journey to health, so I am hoping to keep blogging semi regularly.