on writing, mine and others'

This evening I experienced something truly phenomenal, even by New York standards.  I went to an event at Barnes and Noble, a "conversation" between the authors Judy Blume and Tayari Jones.  I'm still not clear on the motivation for bringing these two together - Jones' third novel just came out in paperback, but Blume wasn't promoting anything in particular, and of course has no need to promote anything, and they have such disparate audiences and styles that the attendees were a very mixed group.  But as they talked, I realized that they both write about the same thing, the thing that virtually all serious modern fiction is about: what it means to be and become yourself, what the voices of the silent sound like, and - as Tayari said - what the real secrets are.

I stayed to have books signed by both authors, and spoke to Tayari briefly.  She recognized me but couldn't place me, and I told her I'd taken her fiction class in Illinois.  She remembered me then, and she was surprised and pleased that I'd moved to New York.  When I took her class - years ago, and it seems lifetimes ago - I was lost in my own life, displaced and misplaced and confused about who I was or whether I was anyone at all.  In her class, I wrote story after story with different details but all about the same thing: young women who had lost the person or the thing who made their lives make sense, as I'd lost my own best friend a few years earlier.  I wrote about these women breaking out of their lives, but in my stories they never seemed to go anywhere.  Tayari told me two things: that I should never write about New York until I'd lived here, and that the problem with my stories was that I wrote silent heroines.

It took me years to move to New York, but I realized quickly that she was right about my heroines.  Over the years, I'd written at least a dozen stories about women who, discarding a few details, could have been all the same person.  Deferential, recessive, invisible women.  Deeply unhappy women who told nobody - not their misunderstanding friends or their unsatisfactory boyfriends or their critical mothers, not their therapists or their deities because they typically didn't believe in either, not even themselves - what they wanted in life.  Women who drifted, who wound up in situations that made for interesting stories but difficult lives.  These were the characters I wrote because they were the only characters I really understood, because this was the only way I knew how to be.  My heroines were silent because I had lost my own voice.

After the class ended, I put aside the short stories.  It was summer and I wanted something light and fun.  I began reading children's literature - Harriet the Spy and Anastasia Krupnik and A Wrinkle in Time.  Books about girls (there are so few about women) who spoke out loud.  And I read the Harry Potter books for the first time.  I started imagining a girl, part Hermoine and part Harriet and part Anastasia, and a quiet prepubescent life of reading and solitude, and what would happen to that little girl when her life developed a mind of its own.  I started writing, not the kind of drawn-out and heavily wordsmithed writing I'd done previously, but just writing.

I wrote ten pages, took it with me to the Iowa Writer's Workshop, came home inspired, and started writing faster.  Every Saturday I'd sit in Barnes and Noble - I'd bring a sandwich and buy coffee and snacks and stay there for hours, reading children's books and typing - and write another chapter.  I'd write fast, switching settings when I ran out of ideas.  I published the chapters on my university web page, and some of my friends and family read them.  I wrote for a season - eighteen chapters over four or five months - and then it was finished.  I'd written a novel.

The novel was called The Library Cave.  It was a short novel, really more of a novella.  Since then I've revised it, lightly - the project of seriously editing a work of that length is something I don't quite know how to embark on.  I started writing a prequel and a sequel, but neither of them had quite the same magic, or maybe I was just in a different place.  A few months ago, I realized that The Library Cave, which I'd been telling myself I'd finish - revise or expand - for years, was done.  It wasn't perfect, but the time of writing it had ended, and I wanted to release it into the world in a format more cohesive than the list of chapters on my (now very defunct) university web page.

So I published it as a kindle book.  Reader(s), this is an advertisement.  I published it under a pseudonym because I was embarrassed, because I was afraid of putting my name next to something and not having the ability to remove it.  But it's mine, it's out there, and if you're interested you can buy it for $1 or - if you're a Prime member - borrow it for free.

40th Annual NYRR Mini 10k

I have kind of a weakness for events like this, that bring people - usually women - of all stripes together to run.  Forty years ago, the idea of women running, or participating in any athletic endeavor, was mildly scandalous, and now women run professionally, women run in tutus, women run wearing t-shirts bearing their name or their cause or the phrase "I [heart] Sweat".  Central Park West was closed on Saturday morning so that over six thousand women could run up it, and many of their male friends and partners and family ran on the sidewalk alongside the race or marshaled the course or cheered.  

As for me, I had a great race.  I had half-intended to just run it as a regular workout, since I haven't been running very much and it was 70 degrees an hour before the start.  But in the excitement of the race, my first mile - at a "comfortable but brisk" perceived exertion and up an gentle incline - clocked in around 9:36.  I slowed down a good deal after that, or thought I did, but my second mile came in at 9:46.  I was starting to feel the heat by then - I was experiencing "brownouts", where my head would get prickly and I'd start to see spots - so I kept "slowing down" and clocked in a 9:30 mile on the hills above 100th St.  

(About these speeds - I know they're not impressive for most runners, but for me, this is fast.  Very fast.  The last 10k I ran, two years ago, was at an 11:03 pace, and I typically race around a 10:30-10:45.  So paces with 9's in front of them seem fast to me.  Dangerously fast.  It's a good thing I didn't look at my watch after the first mile, because I'd have certainly psyched myself out and backed way off the scary paces.)

By the fourth mile I suffering.  This part of the course is a steady, moderate uphill with very few breaks.  I'd been walking through every water station to pour ice water on my face and neck - heat really doesn't agree with me - and had stopped feeling dangerously overheated.  But despite the breaks, I couldn't stabilize my heart rate or breathing.  My legs were getting tired, I hadn't been mentally prepared to race, and my mental game was down.  That mile came in at 10:18, my slowest of the race.  

The rest of the course was easier.  I was able to recover on the fifth mile for a 9:41, which I'm proud of because it's typically hard for me to bring my speed back up after a significant slowdown; this was a real triumph of mental game  I started to fall apart on the last 1.2 miles of the race; I was mentally in it, but my legs felt loose and heavy, and I ran a 9:59 sixth mile, probably a very uneven one.  I got a little bit of fire back at the end and finished with 0.35 at a 9:26 pace.  

My garmin total was 6.35 miles at a 9:48 average pace; and my official time was 1:01:58 for 6.2 miles with a 9:59 average pace.  For me this is... well, kind of incredible.  I'd said something, a few weeks ago, about how it would be cool to run a 10k in under an hour, but I thought it would take a long time - multiple seasons - to get in that kind of shape.  But based on this race, it would really just take a cooler day, a flatter course, and proper mental preparation.  

As time passes, I am increasingly aware of how lucky I am.  A lot of that luck is an absence of bad things; it seems like chronic physical illness or pain and persistent financial difficulty are two of the things that most readily sap away happiness, and I'm lucky to be free of both of those.  But it's more than that.  I haven't been terribly adept at arranging my life - in fact, I haven't really arranged my life at all - and yet somehow I've happened onto an arrangement so awesome that I don't think I would have dared to try to arrange it.  Not to gloat, but I live in a not-completely-awful apartment in an awesome neighborhood, I have a good job that I'm good at, and I spend my spare time attending cultural events and playing outside.  The other day, I was accidentally a complete bitch when I interrupted a semi-serious conversation with a friend in order to go to bed because - as I told her - I had to get up in six hours to get a spin bike.  I don't just have white girl problems, I have upper west side problems.

I feel like I talk about this a lot, and like it maybe gets old, and my reader(s) are tired of hearing about it.  But it really does baffle me.  How did I get here?  It feels like I spent ten years wandering in the desert of academia before arriving pretty much at random in the promised land (NYC as Israel is not actually the worst analogy ever).  Sure, the city is draining sometimes, there is stress, taxis are evil, etc.  But I don't see how I could ever stop being grateful for being here - in a city that is the setting for so many movies and so many dreams, and in a life that surprises me constantly with its variety and ability to renew itself.  Sometimes I wish I had gotten here sooner, but I think maybe I needed that decade of wandering, because "here" is not just New York; it's the state of being out of the wilderness that was my twenties, when I had no idea who or what I might be and was utterly at the mercy of every flickering whim around me.  

I'm working late tonight (in the endless, evil cycle of making bugs, fixing them, submitting tickets to test the fixes, waiting for the tickets to be picked up, and discovering that I've made some different bug), but I don't mind so much because every night this week I've left extremely early (by which I mean 6:15, 6:30, and 5:15(!)).  What did I do with these hours and hours of freedom?

1) Pilates.  I've done pilates before.  During grad school, I did exercise videos or DVDs most days, and I had a pilates-lite (crossed with aerobics, very weird) DVD that I did as a sort of rest.  I went to one or two pilates classes a couple years ago.  And I've occasionally done a set of 10-minute pilates workouts (that you can do, like, one every hour so you don't get too tired).  So I knew it would be hard, but it was really really really hard.  Like, at one point, I was shaking.  And it goes on for an hour.  What I found interesting was that the tone of the class I went to a couple times a couple years ago, which I'd thought was peculiar to that instructor, was replicated almost exactly in this class.  A sort of mocking chumminess.  Maybe it's a pilates thing.

2) No spin class.  Spin class was cancelled due to the gym being locked.  It was very sad, but I did get to go to another gym.  And starting today, I can go to any gym I want because my employer approves of fitness.

3)  Book club!  The book this month was Girl in Translation.  Three of us read it and found it thought-provoking.  We met at Bar Veloce, a Chelsea standbye, which was as I remembered it - expensive and right above the train tracks.  We talked about the fact that a fourth book club member is getting married next weekend, and what we should wear.

4) The Wall Street Run, which is, as per its name, a run on Wall Street.  Actually it's a three-mile run in the financial district, for which they have to close a number of narrow streets that are probably usually choked with cars and taxis.  It seemed like every bank, hedge fund, insurance agency, newspaper, and hospital in the city, plus Fresh Direct and the NYPD Bomb Squad, had a team.  It was kind of cool, having 12,000 people who don't usually race take over downtown Manhattan on a Thursday afternoon.  And then the race started and I realized that "people who don't usually race" translates to "people who have no idea how fast they are going to run and therefore start in the eight-minute-mile corral even though they can only run for three minutes at a time".  But it was still kind of cool, because we went all around the financial district and finished on the water, and they did a good job providing us with water and fruit and Jenny Craig snacks (I ate two of them as my pre-race snack, because I tend not to be very good about eating sufficiently when I'm at work, and probably the whole point of these snacks is that you are meant to eat only one and then nothing else for twelve hours.).  

After the race I ran home, which was 5.25 miles.  There's something really awesome, to my mind, about traversing large chunks of the city on foot, and going from one place to another when you thought of those places as being disconnected.