MWFA: As a review for everyone, that's Make Writing Fun Again, my plan for the summer. And guess what? It's working! Every day, I think about ways to make writing fun and do those things. What I've noticed is this: doing the fun little snippets make the work writing easier. There was even one day when the work writing was the most fun writing I did. Amazing. It's happening. The fog is lifting and the fun is coming in. Also, the book is getting much closer to done. Speaking of...

The Book: I am working on it a lot, and it's getting written. On drafting days, my goal is to average two thousand words. That's a lot. It's like six or seven pages. Every time I get to 8000 words, I "finish" those chapters and hand them in. "Finish" is in quotation marks because we all know they're not actually finished. They're just readable and reasonable. The word count goes from 8000 to about 6000 at this point, but the words are much better. And then, when all 90,000 words of the book are in that shape, we can revise it all again. And then again and again, but with help. It's happening. Did I say that already? It's happening. It's happening.

Running: I trained really hard and well from December of 2022 until a couple of weeks ago. My plan was for my big finale of this training cycle to be a half marathon. But, when the week came, I just didn't feel like doing it. The race I picked was small and not super well-supported. The weather was hot and humid. I was overwhelmed by the task of writing my book. I just decided to bag it. I think it's fine. I'm taking a month of very easy running, and then I'll start back again to some regular training. I'm running a fall marathon, and I probably won't bag that. It'll be marathon #10.

Driving: Mac got his permit. He's permitted to drive. I'll begin his instruction thusly.

Here's the problem: I feel terribly miffed about not going to the Taylor Swift Eras tour. Even though it can't be actually true, it feels like everyone has gone to the show and had the best time of their lives. Everyone except me. 

And while everyone was at the show, they got to do one or more of the following: wear a sparkly jumpsuit, put glitter on their faces, make and trade cool friendship bracelets with Tay-themed messages on them, and cry with joy and fulfillment.

Meanwhile, I'm sure my life has meaning, but I'm not sure what it is now that I've missed out on this iconic experience.

The whole impetus for the MWFA project is to enjoy my writing more. 

Because it's hard, and it sucks, right? And it makes me feel bad about myself? 

But not blog writing. Blog writing is fun and makes me feel like, hey! I have so many years of stuff I've written and collected all right here, right on this website!

And do you know what else is fun, even about writing novels? 

It's fun to color in boxes to show how much you've written and then give yourself a sticker when you've reached your target. I met my target every day of the week this week, so I got five stickers. 

FIVE STICKERS!

The stickers have an oceanic theme. They include a shrimp, a stingray, a couple of sharks, and an octopus. They are printed in whimsical colors and with cartoonish eyeballs. If I saw these animals in real life in the ocean, I would not be thrilled. But in my little bullet-ish journal? They're frickin' thrilling.

The next step is editing these 8000 new words and that seems hard and sad to me right now, but I have a policy that works in a metaphorical sense for this situation. 

The policy is ONE BOX AT A TIME.

Editing these 8000 words is in tomorrow's boxes.

I have a few problems, and one of them is that I have three dogs. I don't think I've explained this reality, as I've hardly written anything here in the last few years. This is what happened:

We had one dog, Teddy, a perennial puppy whose vertical jump measures at least four feet, whom we welcomed into our family in 2015.

Next, it seemed like an excellent idea to get a pandemic pup in 2020. Though it was embarrassing to procure a cashier's check for "Cockapoo of Excellence" as the world shut down, I stand by that decision. Two dogs is great.

The third dog, we couldn't have predicted. Skip was my late brother Kevin's constant companion and loyal pal. When Kevin died suddenly in April 2021, the only right thing to do was to add Skip to what could loosely be called a pack. Skip is a weird little guy and behaves not a ton like a dog, so "pack" seems like a stretch. 

Anyway, Skip is one of us now, and I think is about 13 years old. His eyesight and hearing are going fast.

Ok, and also, all three dogs need regular haircuts. They're those kinds of dogs. Megan, the best groomer, books out months in advance, and I can never call on time. So, sometimes, I have to clip them. It's harder than it looks.

Here are some of the comments I've received before, during, or after trying to groom the dogs:

• "Oh, KC, please don't."
• "Mom, you did them dirty."
• "Let's leave it to the professionals."
• "It looks like they're diseased."

• "Do they have mange?"

I had an epiphany on my run today, and it was that I should have FUN writing every day.

Making Writing Fun Again (MWFA) is my idea to counteract the deep insecurity and sadness I feel when I try to write novels, which I've been trying to do (and doing) for like six years. 

Quite simply, in the time that I've been a professional writer, I've come to mostly hate writing. Or, to be more precise, I hate the way it makes me feel.

Because I'm a good problem solver, I tried to brainstorm ways that writing could be fun for me once again, as it was in the days of yore. And, I thought of this blog. And, I thought of captions on Strava, the exercise app. And, I thought of Instagram stories.

First, to MWFA, I wrote a long thing on Strava about how writing makes me feel. I wrote about my deep insecurities and fears. I felt good when I hit "Update." And then an hour later, I realized I sounded like an overly emo psycho in that "piece." My hope is that not too many people saw it.

My whole brand is pretending to be normal, right? I need to be a little more surreptitious about my actual neuroses. 

So next, I did a little draft of an Instagram story about MWFA. Unfortunately, on review it seemed a little disturbed, so I deleted it.

And then, finally, I came here, and I wrote this entry. 

The blog is defunct, so I think it's okay. It can stay. If you read this, maybe be careful about letting me know. It's like a journal that's online, but that like no one reads.

 My fourth book has a weird plot. 

What happened was that I wrote three books about suburban motherhood. Each one had a different take and a different setting and a different world with a different set of rules. I like each of those projects a lot, and sometimes, I can't believe I even wrote them. It seems so bizarre and hard to produce a book. Still, even after I've done it a few times.

And, when I finished with Home or Away, I just didn't have anything else to say about suburban motherhood. It took a while to figure out what the pivot was going to be, especially because my editor and publisher get to collaborate on that. Collaboration always takes longer, but experience tells me it's generally worth it.

We all went pretty far on two different ideas before bagging them and going back to the drawing board for my real fourth novel, my first (pretty-please) non-pandemic release. One of those discarded ideas I'm running right back to when I finish Book 4. It's going to be Book 5. But in the meantime, I'm immersed in a funny-yet-poignant, quirky-but-believable, high-concepty story about mistaken identity, deception, and--this part came as a real shock to me--grief.

Least surprising surprise ever, right, since my own brother died eighteen months ago? Every main character has a powerful grief wellspring hanging out in their motivations for every damn thing. Figuring that out (it took 200 pages or so) gives me some ideas about how to move forward.

Moving forward is happening. This Thursday, I'm printing all the pages and taking stock.

I just zipped over to ALittleLeeway, a blog I have loved for lo these 18ish years. It inspired me to write here. Blogging has changed a lot for me in the last several years, obviously. I won't recount the reasons here, and instead, I'll just give a Status Report. This blog is known for those.

Fitness Training: I didn't write about it, but I ran a pretty good marathon in the first week of October. It was Twin Cities Marathon, and I ran my second-fastest time ever for that distance. I had a new running coach this last year, and she really had me in tip-top shape. Now, she says I have to get stronger in terms of my muscles. That's how we get to the next level.

The trouble is that I'm not what we'd call a brave soldier when it comes to doing sit-ups and push-ups. Still, I'm doing them. Because a couple of things I am very good at are following directions and seeking external approval and needing gold stars to feel worthy as a human being.

Book Writing: I'm not going to lie: writing the fourth book has been a bear. A big scary grizzly bear straight out of hibernation. But now, I'm kind of rolling on it. There are words hitting the page. The whole thing is a mess, but I am optimistic that someday, it won't be. And there are some really good parts. That's all we need for now.

Christmas: Today is Christmas Eve. Generally, this is a very hard time of year for me; but today, I'm feeling happy and generally cheerful. We're taking it and running with it. Stuffing it in our pockets and rolling it around between our fingers. That's the plan.