The weather in Boston is wintry. By which I mean, we’ve finally had some cold days, cold like 17°F when I leave the house in the morning, and there is a lot of ice on the bike paths and frozen slush in the lanes. The roads themselves are pretty good, but the requisite path connections between my house out in the suburbs aren’t the best. Some are OK (around Fresh Pond is "OK"), some are kind of shit (the path on Concord Ave to get to Fresh Pond). You still ride to the office because riding to the office is what you do, but I was tired last night, unusually so, when I got home, I think because of all the extra effort and attention required to stay upright, visible, sufficiently in the way as to be noticed.

I’m not complaining: it’s kind of fun, but it’s effort.

So I was thinking about winter miles and indoor training again on the way in this morning. I’ve got rollers set up with the fixed gear bike in the basement and that works OK for days when it’s shit like this and I don’t go into the office, but riding into the office is still the best way to get those slow, long winter miles. In theory I’m starting from a place of higher fitness than I started a year ago but it’s still January and I feel slow. What I like to do is, of course, ride relatively slow for a long time, but it would be nice to be a little faster. I obviously don’t have the time to do "real" "winter miles", like slow 200ks once a week, but the slow commutes back and forth to downtown scratch the itch a little bit. They keep me "fit enough." I’ve left the gears on my bike^[1] despite good reason so that, when inevitably it’s too warm for a Boston winter, I can get a "good" "long" ride in. It’ll come.

Winter also seems to be the time for revisions, which also are slow. You hope that after the holidays you’ll have all this time to work on projects and really focus on things, but then somebody gets sick and you’ve still got house guests and you have to buy groceries and all the rest of it and the time evaporates. So instead you do line edits between meetings at work and avow every afternoon that in the evening you’ll have time, but no, not really, you’re too tired or you want to spend time with your wife and get beat at Backgammon or watch "Murder, She Wrote" and so you say you’ll get to it on the weekend. And you will. Slowly, piece by piece. Page by page.

I’ve got this novel to whip into shape and some zombie projects that I really do truly want to put stakes in and finish. I’ve got plans and plans for doing "electronic literature" again. I’ve decided, for whatever reason, to do more blogging for the time being. Alia said, when I was complaining about feeling a little overwhelmed by the number of projects I’ve got spinning on plates, that at least there are so many things I’m excited about: and it’s true. It is very nice to be excited about things. And.

What they say is that you’ve got to "trust the process." I surprise myself constantly^[2] that I’m making sports metaphors for creative work but there it is: it’s the long, slow, druggy miles that seem to get the work done in the end. Put in the time now so as to fly later. And so on. What was it I heard the other night? "It takes 30 years to become an overnight success?" Cheesy, but maybe not entirely untrue.

I put together (hosted? organized?) a gathering for writers and poets earlier this week, a sort of stepping-stone into starting some kind of community, some kind of reading series, some kind of local literary citizenship effort. It was mostly folks I went to grad school with, sure, but also some newer faces (to that group, anyway), and it was all very good. And, too, it was interesting to see different kinds of writers talking about the work they are or are not doing. Interesting, always, to learn a bit more about how everyone else is working (not in a competitive way, I mean,^[3] but just in a curious, how is the work being done kind of way). Part of my "work," my "practice," my "winter miles" is getting these kinds of things together. The trick is to get energy from it, grow from it, without letting it overgrow so much that the work suffers for it.^[4]

But then: that’s a lot like winter miles, too. Keep the legs turning, just not so hard that you slip and eat shit on ice.^[5]