Running to Write

I often smirk to myself that I used the act of running as a device in my novel, An Ever Fixed Mark. A little private not so funny joke with myself. Only the joke comes now, a year after publication – three years after the completion of a first draft. Because much like my writing habit, my running habit is rather dormant.

Both are activities I enjoy. Really love, actually. But for whatever reason, it is like pulling teeth to inspire myself to get started with either. Then once I do it, once I get through the huffing and puffing of that first painful try, awakening the atrophied muscles, I realize I not only had fun but feel better about myself and life.

So right now I’m more or less in a six month exile in a small town of Central Massachusetts. I spend a lot of time in a car and at a desk in my forty (plus) hour work week. My brain and my physical energy drains from that repetition. But… then I smell the premature thaw in this rural New England paradise and I think it’s time to start again. Start running. And start writing.

Tomorrow starts a week of fifty-ish degree temperatures. There is no ice on the roads. Not to mention, I now live on roads with very little traffic. It's early enough in the season there are few annoying insects. Gauntlet on the ground. I am going to run.

I will run down the road and past the house and lake that helped to inspire so many of my novels. But most especially the one that keeps nagging my thoughts these days. A story about a house and all the memories trapped within it. Memories trapped in houses tend to be a favorite theme in my stories. Most especially in this one, whose working title is In Memory Locked.

But more about the book in later posts. Because there will be later posts, to blow the dust off this neglected blog. And maybe this post is more for myself than anyone who reads it… but lest anyone reads it, there is the embarrassment factor of not doing what I said I would do. And then maybe the happy consequence of this coercion will be the increased oxygen flow to my brain and the glimpse of the house that makes me want to write about Helen Langdon Bradshaw and all her trapped memories.