All the Horrible Girliness

I didn't sleep, but I might be on my way. Anne Lamott helped. I told my trainer (no matter how many trainers I hire, she will always be my trainer, the first, the one) on chat that I'd probably eaten 7000 calories today and she said she didn't feel so bad for having cheesecake, then. I like that in a friend.

Vampires, man. I don't know. Shit. So many rules to follow, but even worse, so many you have to make up. You have to figure lots of stuff out. Spiritual or scientific? What's the metaphor? Because monsters are never just monsters. Or maybe I could just leave it all up to the unconscious mind and type; this would be preferable, but I hate it because my unconscious mind will suddenly hit the brick wall of my knowledge. Like in a story I was writing the other day, this guy BLAMMO! was on steroids. And I was like, REALLY? Really, Samus Mind? Does he have to be? Can't I take that out, pretend that never happened? Because now I have to stop writing to research steroids. And Samus Mind was all like, nope, right, and she sounded cheerful about it. Nope, he's on 'roids, and I'm not giving you another word of the story until you figure out 'roids, and the gateway performance enhancers.

That's been going on all through this novel. I've typed out about 100 usable pages, 1.5 spaced, and it's been all because of hard work because shit keeps happening that I have to research. Rodrigo was a conquistador? Brilliant, okay, wait what? He proved himself to the natives with some kind of Amazonian insect? But I don't know anything about insects. Shit. And so I go researching, and after a lot of false starts I discover the correct insect and I'm like wooopaaaah! and I go writing writing writing until I discover that the main character is into punk. So I email a friend who knows about this stuff and I say I'll save the punk for the rewrite and I plow forward. It all feels like plowing, man. I'm so proud of those 100 pages because usually I'd give up a lot quicker.

Which reminds me, I was thinking about that today. I mentioned in another entry about piano, how I faked it a lot, how I didn't try very hard to succeed when I was growing up, and now I'm quite different. I wanted to give up at the range today about midway through. I was embarrassing myself around all the experts with their compound bows and their targets with holes only in the yellow. I made some self-deprecating jokes, like when my arrows went to the left of the target I'd say, "Okay so if the animal I'm aiming at just skitters THIS way, I'll have dinner..." Luckily, they laughed. But it was tough on me, my ego sucks. But then things started to click, one at a time. One guy told me where to put the string, how to aim it, and once I did that, my shoulder locked back and I went, oh! I did it again the next time, I felt it, and then again, and again. And pretty soon I was shooting so damn well that the other people were watching, and saying encouraging things, and making impressed noises, not so much because of my skill but because my arrows had been landing on the wrong targets for an hour and suddenly I was hitting my own, and mostly keeping it within the circles too, and sometimes getting it into the yellow, and often grouping them, which I learned means that they're all hitting in the same place, almost the same hole in the wall.

I felt good about myself when I left because I'd wanted to go home before the things clicked. One guy said that it takes him sixty arrows to start hitting where he wants to hit, and he was mega experienced. I thought about how embarrassing kickboxing used to be when I sucked at it, and I had that same experience when I first *got* the round kick. One of the teachers said, once you get it, you got it, and it's true. You feel it, and then you got it, and you just have to throw a million more round kicks to perfect and maintain it.

I read a study about weight loss; they'd put a bunch of people on different diets and they found that none of the diets were particularly better than the others, that what counted was sticking to it. Same thing with quitting smoking, apparently; the goal is not to Not Fail but to Not Stop Trying. Isn't this a lesson we learned from a little train when we were kids? Add this to the list of stuff I think the Bug really needs to know while growing up.

posted by Samus @ 12:14 AM