Screenshot 2022-05-15 at 18-33-45 2022 Ragnar Trail Zion

Try Challenging Things

This month, I was able to complete a challenge I first signed up for in 2019: Ragnar Trail Zion. The trail relay race was originally scheduled for May 2020, but like so many other large gatherings, was deferred repeatedly until this year. Eight friends completed nearly 130 miles of trail running with over 15,500 ft of cumulative elevation gain through the canyons, ridgelines, pine forest, and mountains of near Zion National Park in the high desert of Utah.

The scenery was absolutely gorgeous, and the course just as brutal. Being mostly flatlander Virginians, we found ourselves significantly under-trained for the dry air and base altitude of 6500 ft. But you know what? We did it. We completed every segment, and even though it took us 3 hours longer than we estimated, we finished the challenge and went home as Ragnarians.

What challenging thing have you been wanting to try? What's holding you back? What if you just, you know, DID it? It may not go as planned (our Ragnar certainly didn't), but you might be pleasantly surprised and proud by how you feel at the end, having shown up and done the thing.

--Nalin

Literary Inspiration

Recently I had the chance to attend two events that really boosted my inspiration level for writing.

One was attending a guest lecture entitled "Refugees, Language, and the Meaning of 'America'" by Viet Thanh Nguyen at the College of William and Mary (thanks to Laura, who works at the Reves Center for International Studies that hosted the event, for getting us VIP tickets that skipped the lottery!). See the linked blog post for more details.

The second was RavenCon 15, another event that was supposed to happen in 2020 but was repeatedly deferred until it finally happened last month. I was the Science Track Director for this con, but fortunately also got several chances to sneak away from the Science Track itself and attend a number of writing panels, mostly on the business aspects of being an independent author, which I found very useful.

Writing Update

My short story The Karma of Ponds was finally rejected by The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. This makes rejection #5, but with three of them being personal. This is how it goes -- I still have faith this story will find a home. I've submitted it to Fantasy magazine, and it's now pending.

Rassam's Eye has gained about 5000 words since the last update, now at about 17,500. I think I'm almost done with what might be considered "Act I" of the story, about 25% in. However, I haven't written much on this draft in a few weeks, in favor of shinier objects at the moment.

On the one hand, there's a part of my brain that wants to be horrified at the lack of progress vs expectation. On the other, as I've blogged about recently in Getting Unstuck and Writing Career Regrets, one of the biggest killers of creativity is feeling obligated to work on something. So I'm not going to do that! I'm sure Rassam's Eye will gather word count when my mind wants to work on it. In the meanwhile, I'm trying to remember that there are other, better ways of measuring writing productivity -- like showing up consistently for myself and my creative pursuits.

I've been consistently setting aside time for writing in my life, but much of it has been on musing or brainstorming, and a good deal of it has been in a physical, handwritten notebook. I plan to blog on the takeaway from that soon. I've also added an In Work page to the website, so that I can track multiple open projects at once, and not feel as bound to a single "main" project.

Content Consumed

Fiction
  • I finished Paradise, by Abdulrazak Gurnah. I enjoyed it, though I felt that it was slow going. I think it took me some time to understand the slow build that was happening and what he was trying to do. The ending says a lot, though under the surface, about colonialism writ large yet also how the seed of it is rooted in how humans often think of and use each other at an individual level, no matter what type of person is the one doing it. Beautiful descriptions of eastern Africa, and the mix of cultures there, and a lot of very well drawn and diverse portraits of East Africans themselves as people.
  • Blew through Ursula K. LeGuin's A Wizard of Earthsea on a single cross-country flight. I wish I had gotten to it earlier in life, I think I would have absolutely loved it and completely lost myself in that world. It's labeled "Juvenile Fiction" but it is better written, more thought-provoking, and more engrossing than many books intended for adults that I've read. So much to like... strong ties to the natural world, the enemy is the darkness within (not a war against some easily otherized beings), people of color are subtlely and seamlessly normed instead of being tokens (or, say with Tolkein or Narnia, always only the other or the enemy), and the prose itself is really beautiful to read. Add to that a really unique world (an archipelago of hundreds of islands in a seemingly endless sea, rather than a stock megacontinent) with a cool map I could stare at for hours! .
  • Currently reading: The Only Good Indians, by Stephen Graham Jones. Picked it up after reading a raving review in NPR Books... so far, it is CREEPY but thrilling, and the prose is fantastically snappy and interesting.
Nonfiction:
  • Finished Our Endless and Proper Work, by Ron Hogan. I picked it up in response to a positive review in Poets & Writers magazine, and I think that review does it justice. In short: what if you stopped focusing on publication and the end product, and started opening yourself up to the joy of daily practice and the exploration of the questions you find yourself returning to over and over? You might find you actually produce more (and better) quality creative output, and are happier about it to boot.
What have you been reading or watching? Any recommendations for me?
I do love getting your feedback and comments, so please continue to reach out. Thanks for reading, and see you in the next issue!
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