Without Rocks There Would Be No Words

Climbing and writing have been parallel journey's for me. I never set out to "be a rock climber" just as I never thought "I want to be a writer." They've just been on the edges of my entire existence.

I remember the first times my hands touched rock and pulled, just as I remember the first times my hand touched a pen and put words to paper. But it was playing. Always playing. Never a passion. Not a love. Just something I liked and always had plans to do more of someday.

Until I had my first baby. Having my son was like the earth stopped spinning and then reversed directions. Everything was the same, but then again, everything was different.

A little over a year after I had him, I went out climbing for the first time in a few years. Great Falls National Park on a steamy July afternoon. The chalk was gummy. The climb supposedly easy. My legs quivered. My hands slipped. It took me twenty minutes of hang-dogging to ascend the 5.6 on a top-rope.

And when I touched the bolts at the top, something huge shifted into place for me.

I fell in love with climbing. I committed to falling. To failing. To being a climber with no apologies for my fitness, lack of fitness, lack of technical skill, skill, time in the harness or any other component. I fell in love with what I was on the wall, what it revealed about the world around me, and the bond it built between me and my husband.

And at the same time, I realized I could do the same with writing. That it was okay to fall in love, commit and possibly fail at something.

The thing is, once I committed to the inevitable failure and accepted who I was in both climbing and writing, it became easy to learn, easy to grow and gain skill.

Oh sure, sometimes I look over my shoulder and see the gorgeous and hard-bodied ascending the 5.13d beside my 5.9 project. And it's easy to open a book and find a writer who does something so beautiful with words it crushes into my soul and erases any pride in my own work. But those are good things in their respective roles. It humbles me and inspires me to work harder, work smarter, and appreciate the road behind me.

There is still so much ahead of me. So many more words to be written. So many more climbs to be climbed.

Climb (and write) on.

A Climbing Post

I've run up on a wall in my writing. Dangling on my rope, sucking my blood and chalk covered fingers as I bitch to the belay about some stupid hold and my stupid fat-ass and why wasn't I born a better climber? A crux, if you will, on the third or fourth pitch of my epic first ascent.

Okay, bad climbing analogies aside-- I've called a time-out on my adult project to hopefully gain some more writing neuron connections. I need some time and maturity to continue pushing towards the finish.

Plus, it's that time of year, and I have a siren call:

This lovely corner and semi-roof thing going on, is calling my name so loudly, I can hear it in my basement three hundred miles away. It's the reason every time I go down the basement steps I'm swinging over to the training board to try and pinch my fingers and hang from the sloper. It's what I see when I close my eyes at night and think about West Virginia.

Four Sheets to the Wind (5.9)

Fun. So much fun. Except, I haven't finished it. There's this move here-- right here:

 I have to stub my toe into a tiny indentation in the rock, dig my torn fingernails into a sloping swell, and transfer all my weight into the traverse out of the crack, up to the roof.

The roof will be the hard part, but I couldn't get past this technical move last time.

Of course, I was twenty pounds heavier than I am now and I was only four months post-partum. At the time four months post-partum felt like a decade and clearly I was in fighting form. Until I look at photos and see what looks like a five month pregnant belly and stains on my shirt from leaking breastmilk. So no, in retrospect, four months to climbing awesomness worked out for me about as well as starting running a week after delivering (which didn't work out for me at all). Live and learn!

It haunts me. In a delicious, exciting, fun way.

*goes to hang on the sloper*

Everytime I want to eat, I go watch climbing videos on youtube. When I want to drink, I read the guidebook. I'm in training mothereffers.

Okay, let me reign the weirdness back in.

Basically, I am sitting in my basement, smelling the pine-sol scent of freshly mopped floors, with a toddler who is recently potty trained during my writing down-time and I'm dreaming of sending my projects.

All of them.

That Season

Sand in my car. Sand in my bathroom. Sand in my shoes. Sand in my shorts.

Grubby hands with cheeze-its. Grubby hands with cold grapes. Sand on the sippie cups.

Sunscreen, water and a twist of tobacco.

Sweat. Pressing fingers into flesh to check for sunburn.

The eternal walk (from parking lot to water).

The walk back.

An Update

I need to at least get in the practice of letting the world know I'm up to my ears in living and writing and this does not include blogging.

Some personal things:

1. Climbing trip for May, without children, has been scheduled.
2. The weather has been spectacular for being outside.

Writing things:

1. I'm 70% done with Black Mountain Ash. Crank. Whatever.
2. It's looking like it will end at 90-100k words. I'm thinking closer to 100k.
3. I finally found my "genre"

Okay, about genre. Plot element wise, I definitely wrote a suspense with strong romantic element. I finally buckled down and read within this genre (yeah, I know, I hadn't ever read in this genre). And I soooo did not execute this book according to genre.

No "happy" ending. Satisfying, yes.

And I kept saying "gritty" and people kept assuring me this genre has gritty-- but I don't mean violent. I mean real life depressing gritty. Gritty like the Wire is gritty. Gritty like Fight Club gritty.
Not like Hannibal Lector gritty. My reading has confirmed gritty.

I have the f-word on every page. After I edited the useless uses out. (It's not on every page, but it's there about the same number of pages)

And I've always written more literary plots, but definitely not literary execution.

So, after several waves of panic and endless searching on goodreads and amazon. I got a great idea:

1. Go to Amazon, look up "The Corner" (not fiction)
2. Look under the heading for "what other people buy who have looked at this" and scroll through until you find a novel.
3. That led me here:

I've written a suspense with a strong romantic element executed in a style and tone similar to CLOCKERS by Richard Price.

I get chills just thinking about this. I'm both afraid and excited at how much this book is coming together. It went from something I thought I'd never be able to write, a story that seemed too big, too ambitious-- and now I have 78,000 words that all mean something in Logan and Bekah's story. I know this elation will dive right back into the depths of angst in a few days (that's how the roller coaster seems to go), but for now I am grateful for every word and for every moment where I prayed for God to somehow give me the words to write the story I needed to write.

I have the first paragraph of the query nailed. The rest still needs massaged, but the bones are there.

Logan Crepeau hasn’t been on the corner since he left his reserve for the Army fourteen years ago.  Now home from the desert, the eight hours in a police uniform aren’t enough to fill the rest of his twenty-four and the inevitable re-up in the corner war. All he needs is Frank Black, the old cop flooding meth into Baltimore, in a set of substantial bracelets and he might still have a chance at staying out the game. But he’s been undercover for ten months with no end in sight, and the investigation isn’t the only thing a hit away from going hard up.

When he meets fellow rock climber, Rebekah Schultz on a weekend climbing trip out in the boonies, he sees a chance to come home from war. He thinks he’s marrying a wayward Mennonite whose greatest rebellion was the weekend with him. He knows he’s marrying a woman who’s more mountain than Mennonite. But he doesn’t have any idea how deep that mountain blood runs.

 With the city burning itself at the end of a pipe, his target showing up for his beat like he isn’t the biggest drug lord to hit Baltimore since Little Melvin, and his handler shooting hoppers in a desperate bid to save her career, bringing a wife into the mix was the last thing Logan should have done. Let alone a woman tied to his investigation by blood. And when his target takes a left turn into terrorism, trusting his traitorous, lying wife might be the only way to stop the bus packed with fertilizer heading into DC.

I still have a few things that need worked out:

1. Still unsure if I should switch to a 3rd POV. I think it could either way. The genre is all third person, but I'm already breaking the genre mold in execution, so I don't know if first goes along with that. For me, this isn't a huge deal right now because even if I change it to third, it will be a close, limited third. The story is with the people and it's deep in their heads.

2. Not sure I should go balls to the wall. I've kept things more mainstream and accessible-- my plot lends itself to this, but also, I want people to be able to read it.  So yeah, I've made decisions towards that end-- like keeping the f-word limited to good literary uses. I haven't used the n-word at all. I've written it as real as possible while bringing it out of straight reality. (a portrait of conversation, not actual conversation--- amazing advice I received).

But it will get worked out in due time.

Okay, I'll be absent again on here for awhile. Trying to get this finished and out to beta readers soon. But, I'll be back, I promise! Especially when I start querying.

A parting musical gift from my Pinterest Board for this book:

Source: youtube.com via Sarah on Pinterest