Last year I wrote the rough draft for Fire in the Belly and even met that goal a bit early. However, I know I can churn out large walls of text on command, so long as I have a compelling story to write. I've done NaNo enough to know that, and the fact Clarion gives you six weeks instead of 30 days actually makes it a little more relaxed as far as pace goes. So I've set myself a goal that feels much more challenging - I'm going to write a short story a week, for six weeks. 

As far as word count goes, this seems laughable compared to pounding out over 100k words in six weeks. But to me it sounds pretty intimidating because I have a hard time keeping it short, coherent, and interesting. I need more practice with short stories, so this will be my chance to do just that.

Oh yeah. And I'll keep working on the current novel draft during that time too. Not sure if it'll still be King's Hand or if I'll have moved that one to the percolating pot and gotten started on the next thing, but we'll see.

Of course, the write-a-thon doesn't actually get moving until June 24, so I can always change my mind and crank my writing goal up a notch. We'll see. Maybe if you all heckle me enough, I'll do it. 

Either way, please consider supporting me in the write-a-thon!

Sorry it took me so long to get back to this, my fellow fat nerds. I'm now settled in Houston for the summer (yay, internship) but it's playing hell with my ability to run because good god have you seen what they call air here? It's like a gelatinous solid dropped straight from the Devil's microwave. I'm more likely to concentrate on biking and weightlifting this summer (once I'm cleared by my physical therapist, that is, argh!) so is there any interest in reading about those, too? Let me know.

Anyway, let's dive in.

So you're starting to run. You're shuffling and doing intervals and maybe pushing yourself up to 20-30 minutes as a stretch, but it's rough. What other tricks might a fat nerd have to make getting up to speed less torturous?

Well, to start with...

It's not a race.

Really. We get this horrible thing in our brains because of PE in school, I think, where we believe that if it ain't fast, it ain't running. And there are quite possibly going to be jocks lapping us at any moment, ready to yank our pants down and laugh mockingly as they go flying by.

Let it go. Just let it go. This isn't a race. Slow down.

If you're running in an area where there are a lot of other people, it's okay if they pass you. Don't feel bad. Unless they're assholes, they're just cruising on and minding their own business and giving no shits about how fast you're running. Do them and yourself a favor and give no shits about their speed either.

You need to learn the difference between pushing yourself an pushing yourself too hard. If you push yourself too hard for speed, you're more likely to end up with an injury, which is a very frustrating thing that'll stop you from running for a while. Sometimes you're going to want to challenge yourself with your pacing, which is awesome, but don't kill yourself. And you know what? Sometimes it's awesome to just cruise along, take your time, and feel good.

You'll be able to relax and have a lot more fun if you're not worrying about your speed. Once you're over the initial weeks of soreness that tend to haunt the first few weeks of new exercise, running should leave you feeling good, not exhausted and full of existential and muscular anguish. Find yourself a comfortable pace and stick with it.

Which brings us to the next point:

Keep it light and quick.

Pacing-wise, this has really worked well for me. First off, you want to keep your steps light. It's a lot easier on your joints, trust me, and you have no reason to be pounding the ground if you're not being chased by a ravening zombie horde. Until you've got a good handle on how a light impact feels, it helps to leave off the ear buds for a while and just listen to your own footsteps. Concentrate on making as little noise as possible while still trotting along. Sometimes it takes a while to figure out, and that's okay.

The other thing that helps is that you make your steps quick. Which means by necessity taking smaller steps. There's an excellent description of this technique at No Meat Athlete (thanks Chelsea for turning me on to that) and I encourage you to give it a read. This also helps you run more lightly.

Now, over at NMA they've got you shooting for 180 steps per minute. I don't think I've ever done anything that fast in my life. I feel good and relaxed at around 160 (I use Carmalldansen (speedy cake remix) as my pacing song, of all silly things) but I'll work my way up eventually.

Because while you want to shoot for a fast pace, this is another thing where it's not a race. Work up to it. You're not going to jump off your couch and immediately hit the ground running at 180 beats per minute. (Or if you do, let it be know that I hate you. A lot.)

Once I get my pace set, I tend to run independently of whatever music I've got going. However, if you want a little pacing help, check out Podrunner. There's a really nice selection of mixes at different bpm.

Don't look down.

Another army guy trick: keep your chin up. You know what the ground at your feet looks like - you saw it a few seconds ago when it was farther away. You don't need to look at it again, it hasn't changed in that short amount of time.

This is a thing that will help you with breathing. If you look down, you tend to hunch, plus your airway's kinked and you can't suck wind as effectively. So just keep looking ahead and trust in your feet. You do it all the time when you're walking.

This also, I note, helps keep you from running into tree branches.

Not that I'd know anything about that.

The only exception I'd make to this rule is if you've hit an extremely rough patch on a trail, or if you're negotiating the sloppy remnants of snow in the late winter, things like that. If the terrain is actually dangerous, pay it as much attention as is necessary. You should only have to look down for a few seconds. If you need to stare at the ground any longer than that, you might want to reconsider the location you've chosen.

While you're at it, don't hunch your shoulders. Really, just relax. 

This is a thing that happens to me sometimes when I'm really tired. I tend to hunch my shoulders and try to pull myself along with my arms, since my legs obviously aren't doing their job. If you feel your shoulders creeping up toward your ears, if you're not standing up straight, fix the posture issue. That'll help you breathe too.

I always had a problem not being sure what to do with my arms when running, since everything feels fairly weird at first. The key really seems to be that you want to (a) be relaxed but (b) not so relaxed you're flailing. Don't clench your hands, keep your elbows bent comfortably, keep your shoulders relaxed and swing comfortably from there.

Which has proved problematic for me recently, since I've had such issues with my right shoulder. Thankfully, those seem to have been resolved by the surgery and everything appears okay now that I'm allowed to run again. But when you can't move one of your arms properly, you start to realize just how much your arms are involved in the entire process...

But anyway. Don't tense up. Every bit of energy you use to be tense is energy you're wasting on fighting yourself instead of running. Relax. And if you're tensing up because you're that tired or in pain then STOP. You have my permission.

Cheat Codes

Still none. Sorry.

Dear Sir and/or Madam:

Thank you very much for bringing to my attention the important issue of (circle one):

a) white people losing their privileged position/racial majority in this country

b) your deep feelings that gay people getting married somehow renders your marriage less special

c) your barely concealed rage that we no longer live in a fictionalized version of the 1950s

d) your horror that Christianity is no longer the accepted default religious position and those damn Muslims/Humanists/Atheists/Sikhs/etc insist on existing

e) the basic unfairness of a universe that refuses to allow you to scientifically support your religious/crackpot ideas

f) your deep philosophical point that I am fat/a chick/a chick that doesn't wear make-up/obviously some kind of lesbo/a hippy pinko feminazi/etc therefore am incapable of being right

g) [write-in space here for issues not covered]

Your opinion is not actually important to me at all. In light of that, please allow me a moment to explain just how little I actually care.

Imagine, if you would, that in the deep recesses of the past my blackened, shriveled excuse for a heart was capable of giving a fuck about you. Not because I thought that you might actually have had a point, but rather because I could recognize your basic humanity and thus stir myself to the level of empathy necessary to give a single, lonely fuck about what you had to say.

This single, sad little fuck ran up against the crushing behemoth of your entitlement. I attempted to engage in reasonable conversation on the misapprehension that such a thing is actually possible in the comments sections of most websites. But then the jaw-dropping assertion that, say, pointing out that straight white men have it kind of easy is somehow racist hit my poor little fuck like a rocket sled crashing into a block of ice. That fuck I gave was easily shattered into at least one hundred pieces, one or two of which I was able to recover for later use.

I would have tried to recover more of my poor, pulverized fuck but you burnt my fingers with your incoherent inability to spell or use even the sophisticated grammar of a second grader and I retreated rather than suffer further.

And then that just kept happening. 

Over and over again, I attempted to give you what remained of that original fuck, and you continued to crush it under the weight of your certitude that life is spectacularly unfair to you because there are people who, shockingly, want the same opportunities you were born with.

Thanks to the internet and the free range of jaw-droppingly stupid opinion available for instant consumption, the fuck I once gave has now been divided and diluted to the point that you could search through every molecule that has ever existed in the universe and find no trace of it.

So at this point, the best I can manage for you is a homeopathic fuck at a dilution somewhere past 400C. Which, if you believed in magic, might actually have some kind of meaning. But given that I'm a woman of reason, it means I literally have no fucks to give you at all. In the entire universe, not one single fuck exists of mine that can be yours in regards to your entitled whining. Ever.

Have a nice day.

I'm probably not going to rant about what you expect. It's pretty standard these days for struggling writers who haven't scored their first novel publication yet to go off on bitter, venomous screeds about, for example, Stephanie Meyer or E.L. James and how damn unfair it is that obviously I can string words together in a superior way so where are my millions and by the way I've figured out that stalking isn't love and ARGH.

Whatever. Whether it's true or not when someone complains about quality of writing and cringe-worthy plot elements, it all comes out sounding like sour grapes anyway, just waiting to be crafted into the finest whine. (See what I did there?)

Actually, I've got a much more specific problem with Fifty Shades of Grey that has nothing to do with writing quality. In all honesty I don't know what the writing is like in that book and I have no intention of ever finding out, because dental surgery sounds more appetizing to me than vampire BDSM erotica. But you know. Whatever floats your boat.

My problem begins and ends with the fact that Fifty Shades of Grey started as fanfiction.

I wrote fanfiction for years before I ever started writing my own original work in any kind of serious way. Hell, I still write fanfiction today in the rare moments I have spare time. (This is me, side-eyeing that unfinished Avengers fanfic that's staring at me accusingly from the internet.) I still meet people online who remember me from my days of writing Gundam Wing fanfic where Duo murders the shit out of vampires with a narrative flair lovingly borrowed from Laurel K. Hamilton.

This is the thing about fanfiction. You do it because you love someone else's story. It's a way for fans to have a conversation with someone else's art, and for that art to answer back. Fanfiction did amazing things for me. It taught me how to write dialog and how to put together a plot that could span 80K words and still keep people interested.  It's awesome and fun and a magical way to waste time that you really ought to be using to, say, study for your oceanic geochemistry final because your brain has just melted.

But always, always, always you are in communication with someone else's art.

Someone else already did the hard work for you. They created the story, the world, and characters that, rightly or wrongly, people like and give a shit about. They worked their ass off to create a base of fans who are now predisposed to seek out and like what you write because they loved the original. Even if you're writing a complete alternate universe, you are still dipping your toe in a pool that some other person built for you.

At its most basic, it isn't yours.

And that right there is the thing that just pisses me off about Fifty Shades of Grey. Changing the character names and doctoring the details so that they're no longer a match doesn't do anything to alter the fact that the story involved borrowing someone else's ideas and playing 'what if?' with them. And at the point you're making money off of those ideas, you're no longer borrowing them - you're stealing them.

Back in my Gundam Wing days, I actually had a couple of people who really liked my stories suggest that I either just throw them on Lulu (uh, no, I don't want to get sued if someone notices) or alter them a bit for plausible deniability and self-publish. I never took those suggestions seriously, even though I probably could have done it fairly easily. Hey, that's what a global find and replace is for, isn't it? But it wasn't right. The characters weren't mine. The concepts weren't mine. And I knew that tarting them up a bit wouldn't change anything because what was in my head when I wrote the stories wasn't from me.

But Rachael, you ask, what about things like Laurie R King's Mary Russell novels? Or you would if you were some kind of creepy stalker who had broken into my house and observed my bookshelves for a few minutes. Obviously, I'm okay with what is basically fanfiction of Sherlock Holmes being published for profit. I'm okay with things like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.

This is the difference, and I think it's an important one. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is dead. Jane Austen is dead. They've both been gone for a long time, and are obviously no longer capable of creating their own stories with their own characters, let alone be financially hurt by someone grabbing their coattails and going for a ride. Frankly, it's been long enough since those works were created that there's even an interesting question if modern writers can even add to work because perspectives have changed significantly. And of course, those issues are entirely separate from works that are still under copyright, but are used with permission of the author or estate.

As someone who hopes to have novel credits to her name some day in the near future, the commercial success of Fifty Shades of Grey both infuriates and scares the shit out of me. The success of someone else wouldn't necessarily diminish my own (in this case purely hypothetical) success, but it's still, to put it bluntly, unfair.

But really, that pales in comparison to my utter fury as someone who writes fanfiction. As fans, the contract we make with creators is that if they're nice and let us play with their toys, we'll give them back in good condition. We admit and revel in the fact that we are playing in someone else's sandbox. At the risk of sounding melodramatic, Fifty Shades of Grey is a betrayal of what writing fanfic is supposed to be about.

Legal technicalities aside, arguments about just how much resemblance to Twilight is too much aside, that is the issue. There's plenty of fanfiction out there that bears only a passing resemblance to the work upon which it is based. But normally, the writers have the integrity to admit that their jumping off point wasn't something that came from within them, and thus it's not right to try to capitalize on it. It's cheating.

With how successful Fifty Shades of Grey has been, I won't be surprised if we see more people taking fanfiction and trying to rewrite it into something with at least a veneer of originality. I've never been good at guessing the future, so I'm not going to make any sweeping predictions about how this could change things for fanfiction in general. The communities of fans who share their enthusiasm and stories are so enormous that global or fast change seems highly unlikely. But it does make me sad regardless, because the entire endeavor feels so much less innocent now.

...which I suppose is only fitting since we're talking something that was originally BDSM porn fanfiction.