The next 30 days

I signed up for the 30 Day "Screw Work, Let's Play Challenge" last month -- run by John Williams and Selina Barker.  It started promptly at the beginning of April, when I was still in France, snowboarding and breaking bones.  I missed the first couple of days as a result, but I'd already committed myself upfront to my chellenge: I was going to write the first chapter of my zombie novel.

At first, I was just going to "write my novel", but from what I have learned in life is that you have to know what you want to achieve in order to be able to recognise if you have achieved it.  The "acceptance criteria", as we call this sort of thing in my line of work, was too vague -- either you wrote an entire novel, or you wrote some of the novel, but both could be taken to mean you had achieved what you meant to do.  Even if you hadn't.  Much better to specify "write one chapter". So I did.

I went to Wordpress, dusted off an old domain I had there, changed the template, and I set to work.

Exactly 30 days after the Challenge started, I "launched" my project.  I had successfully written the first chapter of my novel -- something I would not have managed to do without being committed to the challenge, and answerable to a community.  Every week we would say what we would do, and at the end of the week we would say if we had achieved it.  Without the community and the challenge, the chapter would have languished, unwritten.  Just like it has done for years.

Feedback so far has been slow.  I have posted every single page of the first chapter to the Wordpress blog, and anyone who has read any of it has complimented me on the tone, style and content, but I don't yet know anyone who has read it cover-to-cover or given me any constructive criticism.  I need some honest feedback, I need to know if someone reads it and thinks one scene or another is too similar to another zombie story, if the characters are hard to follow, if the setting is too ambiguous.

It's set in Atlantic City, because of the Bruce Springsteen song by the same name that says "everything dies, baby that's a fact, but maybe everything that dies someday comes back".  The only trouble setting it in AC is that I know nothing about the place, and despite reading factsheets and various tourist information, it's very difficult to find random bits of factual information to drop in.  My hope so far is that this won't matter too much.

So.  The challenge is over, I achieved what I said I would.  Now what?  The community gets shut down in a few days time, and people are promising each other they will stay in touch.  Do I now spend the next 30 days working on chapter 2, and trying to be answerable to someone?  Part of me is saying "Big deal, you wrote one chapter. In a month. So what?  People write entire stories in less time than that.  People are writing entire novels.  You're a hack, and you'll be lucky to write more than a couple of chapters before you get bored."

Even if I do write the whole novel, and let's say for argument's sake it will be 10 chapters long, at the current rate of progress that would take 10 months.  What then?  I have a "novel" I've written, that nobody will ever publish.  I get the satisfaction of writing, and of achieving what I want to, but will it ever break me out of my rusty cage?

I have also spoken here, once or twice or more, about the dog sledding adventure I intend to undertake.  I put it off last year as I wanted more time to raise the required sponsorship and get in shape for the trip.  I planned to sign up in March this year, but it wasn't until April that I realised there was a trip available.  I continue to put it off as I need £500 for a deposit before I can get started, and I just don't have that spare.

The 30 Day Challenge community have inadvertently started me thinking about this.  Maybe I am thinking about it all the wrong way.  Maybe I don't need to sign up for a designated charity fundraising trip -- maybe instead I select the option where I pay the full amount, and then instead I turn the whole thing into a challenge.  Not just the training, or the fundraising, or the trip itself -- but I seek out corporate sponsors, I seek out some kind of publishing deal for my journal of the adventure, I seek out personal training...  It might sound ridiculous, but I am inclined to believe this could be possible.  Not in 30 days of course, but I could start.

Did I say in my last entry I should be committed towards adventure more as a spectator than a participant?  Perhaps.  I was recently told by my therapist (who, for financial reasons, I now am going to stop seeing) that I had troubles "connecting", to people and perhaps to life, and it wa shis opinion that the attraction of adventure sports for me was, granted, partly the endorphins but also partly because it allowed me to feel "connected".

There is no grand conclusion here.  Maybe I will get chapter 2 written next month, maybe someone will give me a book deal out of nowhere for it.  Maybe I will commit myself to make the dog sled trip a bigger adventure.  Maybe I will stay sat on the couch, drinking beer, and watching my waistline expand.

Broken

Note: This is not a picture of my own x-ray.

Yesterday, I returned from a week's snowboarding in the French Alps.  On one of the first days out, I fell and apparently cracked my collarbone -- although it was several days later before I got it checked out.  I seem to have a mental block when it comes to learning to ride properly, and I am now considering 'retiring' altogether.

I have always been clumsy and uncoordinated, and as much as we all like to describe ourselves as quick learners, I think I am probably more at the other end of the spectrum: a bit slow.  Perhaps it's just the wrong choice of sport, one day as I fell hard for about the 10th time, I considered that things like learning to surf or learning to rock climb don't hurt nearly as much.

On the other hand, it could be that my ambitions to be all-action Jay are just misplaced, that my interest in adventure sports should be limited to that of a spectator and I should just accept this.

The ten year retrospective

Yeesh. It's been way too long since I last updated -- I've had a couple of close-calls, sitting down, intending to write something, and then not quite managing to get started.  Would you believe that before my 30th birthday way back at the start of February I had every intention of writing a kind of retrospective of the last 10 years?  What happened to that, I don't know. 

I started to write this post a couple of weeks ago, but it didn't turn out the way I wanted it to.  Somehow, it all just seemed to be about work -- what meaningless career was taking up my time.  The real substance seemed to be missing.  What books did I read that year?  What authors did I read for the first time, what poetry did I rate highly?  What bands did I see that year, what albums did I buy, what artists did I listen to for the first time?  What friends did I make, what friends did I meet, what friends did I lose?  All of these things are what make our lives important -- and yet these details I can't remember.

In 2001, I turned 20 living in student dorms at the University of Utah, in Salt Lake City USA.  

In the intervening years since then I have moved back in with my parents, moved to Leicester to train as a journalist, failed to become a journalist, and moved to London.  I've seen more bands than obviously I can remember, I have started writing and performing poetry again regularly for the first time in over a decade, I have travelled to far-flung places and raised money for charity trekking the Inca Trail.

I have started trying to work my out of my depression -- which was sort of the original point of this blog's latest incarnation, and I now firmly believe that when it comes to earning a living the only solution is going to be to forge a career for myself, that I will never be truly satisfied working for someone else.  It's a matter of trying to find out what that involves.

In 2011, I turned 30 living in London's Docklands with the girl.  I took the day off work and went to Greenwich, just to wander around.  Sometimes it feels like the last 10 years belong to someone else.