My oldest son and I started heading over to the local YMCA to work out at 5 a.m. this week. It was a bit of a shock to the system, waking up at 4:45, but it’s a good time of year to do it: on clear mornings, the sun is just beginning to light up the eastern sky, and we drive right towards it, that blossoming hope. There’s something awe-inspiring about an early sunrise.
There’s also something special about having those mornings with him—in a few months, he’ll be off to college, and so every moment with him seems precious. I feel the same way about our oldest daughter, who will be a senior in high school next year. How quickly these years have gone! I cannot even begin to comprehend the passing of time, so slow when you wish it would speed by, and so fast when the things you love are passing by.
The way the world is these days, it feels especially important to grab onto these moments whenever we can, and (as cliche as it sounds) to be present, in this moment, with the ones we love. So, even though my eyes and body protest, I roll out of bed and put on my sneakers and drive into the sunrise.
Keeping all of that in mind, here are a few things for your weekend. I hope you’re present in whatever these days are bringing.
From Maile this week, over at the blog: “I pulled open my desk drawer and spied a pile of yellow wide-ruled paper buried at the bottom. My sister-in-law who teaches elementary had given us reams of the stuff last year when her school was purging its supply closets. I’d used it for grocery lists and excuse notes for school and chore lists for the kids. But today, that paper would be the key to my freedom.”
“In Doerr we see a writer who only a few books ago wondered if anything would become of his writing career, someone who still has a childlike giddiness about story-telling. And we wonder...is it enough to write for the fun of it? Could it be the complexity of his novels arises from his commitment to fun and whimsy?”
This year, 45 years after its initial launch, Voyager 1 entered interstellar space.
And now for Video of a Novel: Day 76:
There comes a time in every first draft where I want to go back and start over. Usually this is because I have a new understanding of who my characters are, have a new idea for the plot, or simply feel like I could do better and get exciting about revising.
So in today's video I'm talking about why I'm NOT going back to the beginning and what I'm going to focus on instead.
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