Is it possible to be exhilarated and frustrated at the same time???

I’m continuing to write my book, and my view of it is continuing to evolve. As I write it, the weak points become more obvious and the symphony of what I want to write becomes clearer in my mind….I’m understanding the structural flaws and figuring out how to get around them. It’s both intensely exhilarating and extremely frustrating…frustrating because it takes me two hours to write one page (if that) and exhilarating because I’m finally getting through the writer’s block and writing down enough to get a sense of what needs to be done with my material.

I’m also getting a sense for just how gargantuan this task really is. I feel roughly like I’m in the first thirty miles of AIDS Lifecycle–only 555 miles to go…

I’m seriously considering taking a week or so off work in order to write. I have the extra vacation time….I’m thinking about it. Seriously.

Met with my new personal trainer today and am MUCH more impressed with her (thank goodness). She knows at least as much as I do about cycling, and I trust her to know more about training than I do, so we’re going to start work with free weights tomorrow. We’ll see how that goes. More detail on that in my Markleeville Death Ride training diary.

Meanwhile, B. brought me roses a couple days ago to celebrate our six-month anniversary (yay!), and they are gorgeous. Big, deep red, with a real rose fragrance–I have them in a vase on my living-room dresser (so the cats don’t get at them) and I stop by and smell them whenever I’m going in and out. I love roses.

(Back to the book) The difficulty, and the temptation, of this book is that there are SO many good stories from AIDS Lifecycle that it’s tempting to write the book of nothing more than short vignettes. But that would be a mistake–it’s the human story unfolding over seven days that’s of interest, so somehow I need to find a way to find characters to follow. I need to pare my thirty or forty interviews down to just a few riders that I follow through the seven days, and show how they grow. I need to wade through this tangled mess, write a lot, and do even more pruning. I thought I was making a decent attempt, and I am, but even after the draft is written there’ll still be about 2/3 of the writing to go.

Well, better get back to it. This is intense and slow work, but it’s fascinating.