I went for a run today, my first since I moved home to Cody two months and two days ago. I would say it felt great to be running again, but my relationship with running is much more complicated than that.
I need to run, something I know intellectually. But it takes a lot of emotional energy to talk myself into it, each time. I have an amazing ability to find excuses and wimp out. And then I feel bad because I didn’t run.
Once I get going though and find my pace, I feel pretty good, except when I run out of breath and don’t. Still, the fact that I’m out and running keeps me going, both because I am competitive and hate to quit, and because I feel pretty darned saintly to be exercising.
The best part is after I finish, when I feel simply and unambiguously great, my body tired, but loose and limber, my mind righteous, and my spirits high because running takes me outside, and as my artist-friend Sherrie York says on her website, “outside fuels our insides.” Time in nature is the best medicine for body, mind, and spirit.
Today’s run wasn’t long–I did about 2.5 miles through quiet streets and down the hill to the upper bench above the Shoshone River where it winds in its shallow canyon past town. I ran through fragrant sagebrush, looking for signs of spring in the still-winter-brown high desert landscape, like the mat of dwarf phlox in the photo above, the living parts of the aged mat greening up.
I followed the city-maintained river trail with its great views of the surrounding Bighorn Basin landscape until its end, and then I headed back, slowing to a walk for the switchbacks up the steep hill, and then running through city streets to home.
(The photo at the top of the post is from that river trail, looking southwest to Spirit and Rattlesnake mountains on the way to Yellowstone; the photo above is looking down-river in the opposite direction toward McCullough Peaks, a badlands wilderness northeast of Cody.)
On the renovation front, the biggest progress this week has been in the attic, where my contractor, Jeff, has been adding vents so the attic can breathe, which is important for all sorts of reasons, including letting the roof cool down in summer, and keeping mold from growing up there.
The other big change is the small bathroom taking shape in my bedroom, with a washer-dryer closet next to it, and a narrow linen closet between. When it’s all finished, I’ll have my own little suite–bedroom, bath, laundry, and my office opening off the bedroom.
The unused end of my bedroom before, with my office on the right.
And now, with the walls of the bathroom and laundry center taking shape, the plumbing and wiring roughed in.
Looking the other direction at my bed and its corner of windows that makes me feel like I’m sleeping in a treehouse…
On the writing front, I finished a feature article for Wildflower Magazine, and when I turned it in, my editor wrote back to say she loved it, “and thanks for making my job easier.” That’s music to any writer’s ears!
The more difficult part of my writing week was yet another rejection for my memoir, Bless the Birds, with a lovely note from the editor who said the writing was beautiful, the story touching and engrossing, and the characters and sense of place powerful. But she didn’t want it.
After listening to a webinar with Brooke Warner, publisher of SheWrites Press, I think I know what’s wrong and why despite all of the praise for this memoir of my heart, no editor has snatched it up: it’s the economics of publishing today. Memoirs normally run between 70,000 and 80,000 words, and Bless the Birds is 97,000 words, albeit downsized significantly from 125,000 in last summer’s intense revision.
Brooke explained the money end in a way I hadn’t heard it before. Sure, she said, a memoir or novel can be longer, but when an editor is making the calculations to sell a manuscript to the publication committee, she or he has to justify additional length in terms of some kind of great platform to drive sales, because the longer a book is, the more it costs, “and margins in publishing are already thin.”
A manuscript of more than 80,000 words, Brooke said, simply costs too much to produce. And then she added for me what was the kicker, “and people are reading shorter and shorter these days,” in part, she explained, because they’re reading in snatches of time between other commitments, or on a mobile device.
So I’ve made the difficult decision to clear time in my schedule and dive back into a manuscript I thought I was done with. My aim: shrink the word count by more than 20 percent and make the story stronger and more compelling, more universal, as I do so.
And not shred my heart along the way; this is a love story, but it’s a painful one. I owe it to the guy in the photo below, and the life we made even as brain cancer ended his, to get the story right so it can help us all live our days well and with grace, whatever our path.
Richard Cabe, 1950-2011
PS: My apologies about the issues with the comment function on this blog. It’s always been annoying, and now it doesn’t work at all. Sigh. Another thing to deal with in time, and thanks for your patience!
