Marathon Training Day 44

Today's Training: 3 Miles

Total Mileage: 104 Miles (Not counting the 3 tonight)

Pleasant surprise this morning: Got in to work and checked my work email only to discover that we have our first submission for the Teen Literary Magazine. A couple of poems. This is great, but with the deadline looming (Aug 5) only a week away, I'm concerned about having enough stuff to publish. To help fight against it the marketing department has been extremely supportive and giving in their time and energy to help get the word out. From whipping together fliers to getting an article in the Lansing State Journal, as well as on their website, myspace, and twitter, they've done everything in their power to get the word out to area teens, and now it just falls on the very talented youth to show us what they've got.

When I say talented, it's not an exaggeration. So far I've had two of the writers workshops (July 3, and July 22) 6 were at the first, and 4 at the second (3 returners). All of the participants were girls (of the middle school variety) and there was not a single rehashing of the Twilight plot. As far as that goes, I consider it a win. That is to say, I have nothing wrong with Twilight. I think Kevin Smith in his comments at Comic Con this year nailed the sentiment we should be feeling:

It's definitely something that I've found myself doing in the past (back during Harry Potter I was guilty for it until I read it, and loved it). But beyond that, as far as the writers workshop goes, it pleases me to see people being original with their fiction, and I've been finding that the more original the teens are being with their writing, the better it tends to be.

I've not been doing much on the writerly front as I should be lately. A few measely story starts, reading about 200 pages of the Rider (it's around 520 typed pages). I've been talking a lot about it with friends (writing, and the rider), but it's been one of those dead sort of things of late. Last I checked my spreadsheet (the one tracking all of my short story submissions) everything I've sent out has been rejected. There were a couple close calls, and one story is sitting in the hands (or slush pile) of an editor somewhere, but for the most part I'm being lazy with no excuse.

It's this point in the blog where I should be making platitudinal oaths to write a thousand words a day, or edit my novel by some insanely close date, or submit things, but I wont. Suffice it to say those things I should be doing, and if this writing career is something I want to be doing, I'll start thinking seriously about actually doing it. Really what I should do is just try finishing a brand new short story. Maybe I'll hop on that this afternoon after work and a run.