I have neither worked on fiction nor have I ridden a bike, even on the rollers, in two days. The last time both of these things were true was in July, and that was not having written. I don’t necessarily ride every day but I do write every day and it is a curious, if not unexpected, combination. Curious as they are remarkably different activities in a physical sense but in the same degree similar in a more spiritual sense, and in any case when I’ve been feeling down it’s those two things along with sleeping that my therapist asks if I’ve been neglecting.

So.

During the last two days we hosted Christmas at our house, had stay-over guests, cooked and baked and made coffee. While I said every evening that I planned to wake up early and ride the rollers and write, I managed it neither day (or today: but today I am gloriously free). While I’m perhaps a little disappointed that I couldn’t manage it I am at the same time accepting of it as a yearly blip in a schedule that — let’s be honest — has been going on only half a year, but has been going on half a year, so it’s not exactly as if I were worried about losing a new habit. I’m sitting at my desk now, one cat by the keyboard, the other behind me grooming itself on the reading chair, and I’ll get to the bike at some point today, if only briefly. I have a house to put back together and overdue library books to return and beer in the cooler from yesterday that needs drinking. We do our best with what we’ve got. "Man plans, god laughs," and all the rest of it.

And now the cats are bothering each other. It is obviously the idiot still wearing a cone that’s the aggressor. Two more days.

It’s nearly the resolution time of year and while I think we skipped it last year, we do, mostly years, set some kind of intention or make a list of things we’d like to accomplish. For the last few years I’ve had "finish a draft of the novel" on that list, and the last two years I’ve had "complete a super randonneur series" on that last. Last year I did the series and did not finish a draft of the novel; this year I finished a draft of the novel but did not complete the series. These two things were not particularly related so far as cause and effect, but as not completely separate, either.

We may as well begin with bikes. This summer was the summer of 200ks for me. It was a PBP year, which meant that the normally short schedule was even shorter so folks could qualify in time,^[1] and I was doing my best to drag my friend Alex into this wonderful, oddball corner of the sport. Scheduling conflicts abounded: so I skipped what might have been my 300k to do 200k scheduled that weekend with him, and had my own schedule conflict with the next 300k (plus it started all the way up in Maine…​), and by the time the 400k rolled around we’d met some other folks wanting to hop onto the season and so did yet another 200k up to Portland, ME, the benefit of this being, of course, that we did not have to ride the way home in the cold and rain (the weather was absolutely awful, and I am still so grateful to Chris — I think his name was — who’d opened his home to the riders and fed us hot soup and tea).

While I somewhat mourn the fewer miles in my legs, I generally had a very good time riding with friends this summer, and I really wouldn’t change anything. It’s enough time on the bike that I’m not really concerned going into this upcoming season, even if I have some larger targets. It’s all about miles in the legs over time, you see: like writing.

A piece of advice I got on my first 600k brevet: "Randonneuring is the art of relentless forward motion." And so writing novels.

Partly it was a function of continuing to recover from an MFA and partly it was a function of what we had going on at home during the last few years and partly it was a function of either having poor discipline or an unreliable "practice" or both. "It" being my inability to finishing the fucking draft of the novel, I mean.

I don’t regret doing an MFA in Fiction. I got a few good friends out of it, even if being friends with writers is sometimes challenging (I love you poets, and). I got to work with one or two really impactful teachers and mentors. I read a lot and learned a lot and most importantly I did, by the end, write a lot. The expected simile: writing words are like miles in the legs, and it’s something you get better at by doing it.

I’d known this after undergrad. I’d taken a very excellent year-long class on novel writing and had taken that work into my senior year as one of my theses (which, along with my thesis in philosophy, was not exactly successful, but the point is that it happened, I think). I was better at it because I’d written a lot of words and had spent a long time thinking about how they ought to fit together.^[2] But you lose track of things when you’re twenty-two and at your first "adult" job and I’m sure there were other excuses besides. But it was about the practice of it, though. The work.

Essays like this one, or certain species of short stories, can be more or less banged out in a morning, a day (especially if, like this one, you’re not really planning on doing much editing). Novels require a different kind of endurance. And I’m no expert, but I have drafted two (published none, obviously). I tend to write either very long or very short. It’s a sprint or 200+ kilometers.

Sometimes you do get lucky: things just come out. You happen to find yourself in a flow state and what you spit out is pure gold. Sometimes it’s downhill and you have a tailwind the whole way. But more often it’s about turning the cranks over again and again, taking a wrong turn because you’re too cheap to buy the "good" GPS head unit and you circle back, take the other fork (which, of course, is always uphill); it’s about putting a word after another and then deciding that one was kind of shit and so deleting it or maybe putting another word before it or a whole line or maybe you comment out the whole paragraph and begin again — 

So I keep my head down and take an hour, half an hour, twenty minutes, whatever I can get in the morning and put down a sentence or two, a paragraph, a few hundred words, and over time my breathing gets easier, my legs gets stronger, I can get up the hill just that much quicker and I remember that the reward is in the doing of the thing.^[3] It’s nice when you’re done with a long ride and you’ve got wild endorphins going and the friends you go out to dinner with afterwards are convinced you’re high as a kite, and it’s nice to see a byline, sure. But those things are transient, ephemeral.

The work, the turning pedals, are always and forever there.