Shut up and skate.

When I was young (a long time ago) before the X Games, kids would skate pools and sidewalks and public works of art (you know steel sculptures) and there would invariably be some d.bag who owned an expensive baord and blabbed about his skills but he couldn't skate for shit. As anyone who's ever been in any sort of BS session knows there's only so much time to run your mouth and then it's time to show everyone the skills that you have (or haven't) got.

Right now I'm telling myself to shut up and skate. (& BTW I love when I get tough on myself. It's a hobby of mine.)

For a long time I've been writing here and there. But I treated my writing like a hobby. I'm also impossibly annoying in many ways but in the is way in particular, I don't really care about being published. I've written for myself.

And then something happened.

I went and farmed. And you wouldn't think that farming would lead to novel writing but in my case, it did. I went to farm because I thought that the food system in this country was broken and I wanted to do my part to fix it. Owning and operating an organic market garden seemed like the best contribution I could make. (I will not get into the entire farm experience here...that used to be a blog of its own.) Suffice to say when I was done farming -- had accumulated a lot of devoted farmer's market customers, extremely happy CSA customers, and had eaten the best effing organic vegetables in my entire life; after all that I realized there's only one thing I'm any good at -- writing.

I bring all this up because November is National Novel Writing Month. When I heard about this I thought, "I wonder what James Joyce would think if this. Didn't he need 11 years to write Ulysses?"

And as far as putting my money where my mouth is: I'm going to be putting the finishing touches on a novel in the month of November. (Nice coincidence that.) As you've probably guessed I wouldn't write a novel in a month (6 weeks maybe) but it's taken decades for me to even speak publicly about my writing and to bother finishing a book. And I've decided to apply to grad school. Whether or not I get in is another story but I'm taking a Zen approach. I'll be accepted into a program if that's right for me. I've reached a time in my life where I'm no longer interested in forcing anything.

& I kind of wish November would hurry up and get here already so I can jump into the Novel Writing Madness.

Time for a couple of Mctwists, a stale fish or two, and I'm definitely going fakey.