Getting going again

I finally read a book for the first time in more than a month! Last night I read the moving midgrade verse novel Hugging the Rock by Susan Taylor Brown. And I agree with one of the reviewers at Amazon that it takes a lot of courage to write a negative mother character without softening it or watering down the hurt at the end.

It occurred to me that, since much of my writing focuses more on exploring feelings than on action plots, maybe I should consider writing one of my novel projects in free verse. It wouldn't work with most of my projects, but there's one story I haven't landed on the right voice for yet, and I'd already planned to intersperse poems and lyrics throughout it, but now I'm thinking maybe it should be mainly verse. But there are so many characters, and so much exposition is needed, I'm not quite sure how it would work. It might be one of those novels that's made up of multiple things like poems, article clippings, diary entries, quotes, dialogue...I'm not sure yet, but it's something to explore.

In other news, I've decided to stop being a couch potato. You'd be hard pressed to find someone less athletic than me, and it's been that way since I was a kid. But being a kid, I still did things like riding my bike, roller skating, and taking tap dance classes. As an adult, those things fell by the wayside, and I've been quite sedentary. I've only gone to a gym once (YMCA), several years ago, and after one try on the treadmill I never went back. But after a physically taxing pregnancy and recovery, I decided that if I got my health & range of motion back, I wanted to enjoy it and not take it for granted. Also...I was taking a women's magazine survey and they asked for article ideas. I started thinking they should write about someone who went from being a complete couch potato to being moderately active, and they could call it 50 Days to Fitness or something like that. But then I thought that if anyone were to write that, it should be me, but first I would have to do it! So with that idea as a starting point, I just started walking, not with any major goal except to stop being a couch potato, and to invest at least 50 days into it before letting myself call it off. I wanted to log my daily activity in some way, and being an Internet addict, it seemed like the easiest way to keep track of it would be with a blog. So I started a blog for my "No Potato Project" at nopotato.blogspot.com. It's mainly just for me, but if other people know it's there and could theoretically check up on me, I figure that will give me more impetus not to quit! The cool thing is, I think I've walked about 11 miles in the past week that I never would have walked otherwise, and that is huge for me.