it's hard not to slip into the dire belief that if i'm not going to pennsylvania and canvassing or spending all spare time phone banking or both that the country will slide into fascism and it will be all my fault. i sent 300 letters to georgia and feel good about them, and i know that we're all trying to correct for what we now think of as complacency leading up to hillary clinton's loss in 2016, but i should not have pitched a big story that's coming due on 11/7, or pushed another big story's deadline to 11/4, or both, right? i've been making little swiftie-style beaded bracelets and sending them around the country to friends and family—PGH FOR HARRIS WALZ, WHEN WE FIGHT / WE WIN, WRONG RALLY—which doesn't make a lot of sense, but here we are.
the half marathon last weekend was surprisingly okay! mysterious things happened to the ball and toes of my right foot around mile 11, so i started folding in a bit of walking at that point, but my average pace ended up being around a minute slower than what i ran in the NYRR's new york half in 2015, which is not so terrible. i wasn't going to undertake another half until this one again next year, maybe, but i got an email about entering the lottery for that NYRR race, which isn't until march and is so popular that my chances of a spot are slim—i don't think i've ever made it through that lottery, i've had to fundraise my way in with charity slots—so eh, why not? i'll have enough time to train properly for it, and i've enjoyed creeping back up into running more than 5K at a stretch. my body doesn't love those long runs, not that it ever did, really, but their utility for smoothing out my nerves in the years since i stopped drinking has been undeniable.
to my great surprise, i got a shoutout in the annual nature and science writing anthology i've been courting for the last couple of years. my philip k. dick joke title, out there in bookstores forever! i actually updated my website bio to include the longlisting and wondered if i'm any more likely to score an agent for the book i'm hoping to write; dare to dream, or something. i revisited the exchange i had with an agent a decade ago after an editor connected us and he maintained that i should have a proper proposal, which would include a couple of completed chapters, before shopping myself around for representation. so what i'm currently doing—slowly picking up secondhand paperback copies of related nonfiction and working my way through them with dogearing because i keep forgetting i have sticky notes next to my bed, makes sense? i would like to apply for a writing residence to work on part of this, that was always one of the sub-projects that attracted me to a longer project, but i'm still unclear on where i'm supposed to be in the book process when i do. maybe it's time to actually start asking friends with longform credits about that?
these overlapping big stories standing in the way of my saving democracy have netted me more practice with interviews than i've had in a long time. they're exhausting, first dates and blue-book final exams all at once, but they're also satisfying in the way that Having Written is satisfying. maybe they will generate the momentum that will tow me through a massive manuscript, though i really need to jump on that if so, since my principal subject's surviving children are quite old. i rationalize my shyness in relation to them by telling myself that the book is and isn't about her, it's really about all the things she touched and, you know, the real book is the friends you make along the way, but that's not really so. i need to hitch up my big-girl pants and talk to her kids while there's still a chance they'll talk to me. if i can make myself vulnerable to astrophysicists and entomologists, surely i can make myself vulnerable to them.
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